XenEngine

Xengine (also known as XenEngine) is a third-party Source Engine branch using licenced code, created by the Crowbar Collective for Black Mesa. It is a modified version of Source 2013 Multiplayer with additions from Team Fortress 2, whose development was influenced by the limitations of Source. Although initially only Cascade Shadow Mapping was planned, 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's engine version as a base, this engine version is also a hybrid of the Portal 2 engine branch and Left 4 Dead engine branch.

Features

• Engine
  • Entity and Displacement Limit upgraded from 4k to 8k.
  • Backported a lot of optimizations and some entities 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).
  • Temp lights were swapped with new deferred lights.
  • Gbuffer that allows the addition of some modern, difficult-to-make effects.
  • Made from scratch Qt UI with the ability to be customized and add new stuff without limitations (VGUI can be reenabled with -oldgameui launch parameter).
  • Using  Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA) instead of  MultiSample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) for anti-aliasing
    • MSAA does not work correctly on Xengine's deferred lighting, and is worse for performance.
  • New and extended Post Processor.
  • Native Linux support.
  • Improved DirectX 9.0c shaders
  • Enhanced multiplayer with fixes for the client and server.
  • Dynamic music system.
  • Shader Model 3.

• 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.
  • Procedural Moss.
  • 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.
  • Swaying trees (in all games since ) (also in )
  • 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.
• Tools
  • In-game new lights and xog editors.
  • Multiple VRAD upgrades, such as support for Alpha-Tested textures, 4-way blends, baked Ambient Occlusion, Real Sky Ambient Light, and more.
  • 64-bit shader compiler.

Removed

• DirectX compatibility levels support lower than 9.0 (dxlevel 90).

Support for DirectX 8.1 GPUs has been dropped.

• Projected textures.

The entity was removed because it renders scene twice, making it very expensive.

• Reflections from func_reflective_glass.

The entity is still available, but the shader is not ported, it shows wireframe instead of reflection.

• WorldVertexTransition.

The shader is not ported. All the features is available in LightmappedGeneric.

System Requirements

Windows
	Minimum	Recommended
Operating system (OS)	10
Processor (CPU)	2.6GHz Dual Core Processor or Greater	3.2GHz Quad Core Processor or Greater
System memory (RAM)	6 GB RAM	8 GB
Hard disk drive (HDD/SSD)	30 GB
Video card (GPU)	DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3 capable 2 GB VRAM	DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3 capable 4 GB VRAM or greater

Linux
	Minimum	Recommended
Operating system (OS)	Ubuntu 14.0+ or other Linux distros
Processor (CPU)	2.6GHz Dual Core Processor or Greater	3.2GHz Quad Core Processor or Greater
System memory (RAM)	4 GB RAM	6 GB
Hard disk drive (HDD/SSD)	30 GB
Video card (GPU)	Vulkan 1.2 capable 2 GB VRAM	Vulkan 1.2 capable 4 GB VRAM or greater
Other	NVIDIA - Does not support the  Nouveau display driver	NVIDIA - Does not support the  Nouveau display driver

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 code 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.