GameFromScratch took a deeper look into one of the best free engines available for game developers all over the world.
Silicon Studios is a company from Japan, that did a lot of game related work in the past, but now is more focused on technology and creation of high-quality tools for companies working with game production. It has an extensive portfolio of products, including Yebis 3 (optical effects), Mizuchi (realtime rendering engine with incredible visuals) and Paradox.
Paradox is a free beta product with an abundance of features. This technology recently was highlighted by GameFromScratch – a very useful blog for all the game developers out there. Specialists made a very detailed review of the Paradox engine and showed its features:
- Target Windows, Windows 10, Windows Phone, Android, iOS and coming soon PlayStation 4, Linux and MacOS
- Tight integration with Visual Studio
- Broad 2D and 3D file support, asset management
- 2D and 3D engines
- Pre-generated and dynamic font support
- 2D frame based and 3D bone/blended animation
- Full customizable rendering pipeline
- Physics via the Bullet Physics Library
- Shader support via composition with inheritance and mixin support
- Target both HLSL and GLSL
- Complete UI system with text, images, scrolling, modals, 9patch, scrolling, etc
- Layout system including canvas, grid, panel, stack panel and uniform grid controls
- music (mp3) and sound effect support with positional support
- mouse, keyboard, touch (with gestures) and gamepad input support
Although GameFromScratch was pretty critical about Paradox, the reviewer did notice a lot of positive sighs, which really show that this technology has a lot of potential and there’s a high chance it may develop in a really good product. It’s very easy to start with and the programming model is good. The technology is powerful, but not finished. There are a lot of samples to figure out the details. The biggest setback for newcomers is that the documentation provided for the developers is out of date or simply wrong.
image
The biggest advantage is that it’s totally free. Basically you get a free piece of technology ready for game-making with no strings attached and you can actually work on your own game here. You don’t have to share revenue or buy a license. It’s completely free and that’s what makes it so cool.
Source: gamefromscratch.com