XenEngine

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, they 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 ai folder).
  • New deferred lighting system.
  • 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 -oldgameui launch 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 and OS based on it.
  • Enhanced multiplayer with a tonne of fixes for both client-side and server-side.
  • 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 sun and local lights, the last also can use Fancy godrays type.
  • Screenspace Fog ("Xog"), that can be applied globally or locally using cuboid/ellipsoid volumes.
  • Soft particles.
  • 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

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 Sheep
  • TBA Black Mesa: Blue Shift
  • TBA Black Mesa: Vision
  • TBA Escape The Depths

See also

• Engine branches
• Black Mesa
• Alien Swarm Deferred
• Mapbase
• Strata Source

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.