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.

Features

• Engine
  • Entity Limit and Displacement upgraded from 4k to 8k.
  • Temp lights were swapped with new deferred lights.
• Visuals
  • 4Way blends with support for 4 Bumpmaps.
  • Cascaded Shadow Mapping with PCF-based soft shadows.
  • Parallax Occlusion Mapping.
  •  Deferred lighting.
  • Dynamic Lighting System with PBR-based lighting, texture-projected lights with animated projection, and godrays.
  • Volumetric Xen Fog, that can be applied globally or locally using cuboid/ellipsoid volumes.
  • Soft particles, flares, upgraded tonemapping, and bloom.
  • Support for up to 2K dynamic lights per scene and all rendering features on secondary render targets (reflection/refraction, monitors, TV screens, etc.)
  • Optimized shaders for faster compilation and better runtime performance.
• Tools
  • In-game light and PostFX editors.
  • Multiple VRAD upgrades, such as support for Alpha-Tested textures, 4-way blends, and more.

Media

Availability

Tip:The authoring tools for this branch has been released and is available directly from Black Mesa's bms\bin\

• 2020 Black Mesa
  • 2017 Black Mesa: Black Ops
  • 2020 Black Mesa: Azure Sheep
  • TBA Black Mesa: Blue Shift

See also

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

External links

• Chetan Jag's Blog about XenEngine