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, 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.The first game that introduced this engine was 
Black Mesa in 2020.
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
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Availability
Tip:The authoring tools for this branch has been released and is available directly from Black Mesa's 
bms\bin\
See also
External links
- Chetan Jag's Blog about XenEngine