XenEngine
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Xengine (also known as XenEngine) is a third-party 
Source Engine branch using licenced code. It is a modified version of the 
Source 2013 Multiplayer engine branch with 
Team Fortress 2 additions, whose development was influenced by the limitations of the Source Engine. Although initially only CSM was planned, the Crowbar Collective gained much more knowledge while working on the engine, which allowed for more experimentation and improvements, eventually leading to the introduction of a completely new lighting system, and deferred lighting. Besides using Team Fortress 2 engine version as a base, this engine version is also a hybrid of 
Portal 2 and 
Left 4 Dead engine versions.
Features
- Engine
- Entity and Displacement Limit upgraded from 4k to 8k.
- Backported a lot of optimizations from Left 4 Dead and Portal 2 that Team Fortress 2 doesn't have.
- Improved AI, whose behavior depends on the current difficulty level (some NPCs also support Main and Assault Behavior Trees from the
aifolder). - Temp lights were swapped with new deferred lights.
- Gbuffer that allowed the addition of some modern, difficult-to-make effects.
- Made from scratch Qt UI with the ability to be customized and add new stuff with no limitations (VGUI can be reenabled with
-oldgameuilaunch parameter). - Using
Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA for short) instead of MultiSample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) for anti-aliasing, which reduces performance and does not work correctly on Xengine's deferred lighting (unlike FXAA). - New and extended Post Processor.
- Native
Linux support. - Enhanced multiplayer with fixes for the client and server.
- Dynamic music system.
- Visuals
- 4Way blends with support for 4 bumpmaps and tri-planar mapping, enabling all the options from other material shaders.
- Cascaded Shadow Mapping with PCF-based soft shadows and viewmodel self-shadowing.
- Parallax Occlusion Mapping.
- Deferred lighting.
- Dynamic lighting system with PBR-based lighting and speculars.
- Light cookies for both new point light and new spot light, the last can be animated.
- Support for up to 2K dynamic lights per scene and all rendering features on secondary render targets (reflection/refraction, monitors, TV screens, etc.)
- Upgraded flashlight using the new deferred lighting system.
- Godrays with disk for both the sun and local lights (which also support the "Fancy" godrays type).
- Screenspace Fog ("Xog"), that can be applied globally or locally using cuboid/ellipsoid volumes.
- Soft particles.
- Flowing water.
- Cinematic lens flares.
- Upgraded tonemapping with bloom which uses a modified version of the Reinhard filter.
- Optimized shaders for faster compilation and better runtime performance.
- Baked in lightmaps Ambient Occlusion.
- Real sky ambient light.
- Tools
- In-game new lights and xog editors.
- Multiple VRAD upgrades, such as support for Alpha-Tested textures, 4-way blends, and more.
- 64-bit shader compiler.
Media
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Availability
Tip:The authoring tools for this branch have been released and are available directly from 
Black Mesa\bin\.
Note:There is no Source SDK for this branch. However, you still can heavily modify the Qt UI via QML programming language.2020
Black Mesa
2017
Black Mesa: Black Ops (earlier version)2020
Black Mesa: Azure SheepTBA
Black Mesa: Blue ShiftTBA
Black Mesa: VisionTBA
Escape The Depths
See also
External links
- Chetan Jag's Blog about XenEngine
- Modules QML - half of the documentation for Qt UI. You'll need it if you want to edit Qt UI for your Black Mesa mods.
