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.
  • Improved AI, whose behavior depends on the current difficulty level (some NPCs also support Main and Assault Behavior Trees).
  • Temp lights were swapped with new deferred lights.
  • Gbuffer that allowed to add some modern difficult effects.
  • Made from scratch Qt UI with ability to be customized and add some new stuff (old VGUI can be enabled with -oldgameui launch parameter).
  • Using Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA for short) instead of  MultiSample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) which take performance, which reduces performance (unlike FXAA).
  • New and extended Post Processor.
  • Native Linux support and OS based on it.
• 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.)
  • Godrays with disk for both sun and local lights, the last also can use Fancy godrays type.
  • Volumetric Xen Fog, that can be applied globally or locally using cuboid/ellipsoid volumes.
  • Soft particles.
  • Cinematic lens flares.
  • Upgraded tonemapping with bloom which use a modified version of the Reinhard filter.
  • Optimized shaders for faster compilation and better runtime performance.
  • Baked in lightmaps Ambient Occlusion.
• 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 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