Today I released the first Beta of the next version of Axiom. Axiom is a C# 3D rendering engine. This year marks the 6th year of it’s existence. I have been maintaining it for the past 3 years. I am particularly excited about this release because for the first time we are shipping some brand new features.
XNA Renderer
The largest feature that was added for 0.7.5.0 was the XNA Renderer. It has been in development for the past year. A large hurdle for the XNA renderer was the absence of any fixed function pipeline support. Only vertex and pixel shaders can be used. Since Axiom is old enough to still support the fixed function pipeline, it needed a way to provide that functionality using a shader. The result of this is the FixedFunctionEmulation layer. It will take the fixed function state of the engine aand generate a set of shaders on the fly. This will unfortunately only work with XNA on the windows platform as the XBox does not allow compilation of shaders at runtime. In this release the only Axiom functionality not supported is shadows. The plan is to have shader based shadows by the time this version is final.
The windows support of XNA in this release is much richer than the XBox. Axiom includes a custom pipeline component to load textures instead of using the native library DevIL. DevIL works wonderfully on the Windows platform, however native code cannot be used in XNA projects on the XBox. Rather than port the library over, I leveraged the XNA Content Pipeline to load the textures into the standard resource system. Additionally, the XNA Content Pipeline was used to precompile HLSL files into VertexShaders and PixelShaders for the XBox. Version 3 of XNA only supports FX files by default. Since Axiom has it’s own Material System, I don’t need FX files. I plan to add FX file support in a future release.
Once the final is released I am really hoping to see someone create a game using Axiom and publish it on the Community Games for XBox Live. That would be just awesome.
Project Files
Another big change for this release is in the build system. Previously I did not keep the project files in source control or ship them. Instead Prebuild was used to generate them specifically for your environment. This worked generally, and was necessary because SharpDevelop, Monodevelop and Visual Studio all supported different project file formats. As of MonoDevelop 1.0, SharpDevelop 2.2 and Visual Studio 2008, they now all support the 2008 version of the project file format. This means that now all project files are in the source control repository and shipped as part of the distribution. This should make it easier for newer users to get started with Axiom.
Additionally this will mean adoption of metabuild as the project build system, replacing the custom nAnt build scripts currently in use. The only roadblock for metabuild is Mono’s support for MSBuild scripts. Mono’s implementation of MSBuild, called xbuild, is still fairly immature, however I am testing it out with the Axiom projects to see how well it works.
The obligatory screenshots
Below you will find a few of my favorite demo screenshots. These are all running on windows using the XNA Renderer. Not bad for a managed engine.
What’s next?
After this version is complete and final, I already have another set of features hot on it’s tail. There is a post processing framework ( Blur, HDR ), better material handling, better window management, background loading of resources, an overhaul of the OpenGL Renderer and much much more.
call to action
Please, in order for Axiom to be the best it can be, I need some assistance in making sure the new features do what they are supposed to. More importantly, do what you need them to do. So go download Axiom today and kick it’s tires, file bug reports, and send me feedback.
