Paradox renamed. Welcome Xenko Game Engine!

Paradox is nearing the official release and the Japanese developers are starting to get ready for this big event in the company’s life. They decided to change the name of Paradox to Xenko (xenko.com). This will help to “fully encompass what we think is great about our game engine and what direction we want to move toward”.

Xenko is a special name. It shows the roots of this technology and of the company that made it.

Xenko was inspired by the Japanese word, Zenko 善光. The Japanese characters signify perfection and light. Sticking with the Xenko theme, we will strive to improve your experience with the Xenko engine. We know this is a big change, and we truly appreciate your patience as we have been honing in on this transition.

Xenko Dev Team

The biggest news here is that the support and download access to any previous Paradox releases will seize on December, 25th, 2015. Do not be alarmed though, we’re sure Silicon will help you to push your games to the next version of Xenko. You can download the new version of the engine here.

New Features With This Release

Users Can Now Edit Documentation!

We’re so glad to have added this feature that allows users to share information about how to best use Xenko. We know our documentation is not entirely complete yet, so we are really looking forward to hearing and sharing information through the community.

The process for adding to Xenko documentation is real simple. ‘Edit on Github’ in the top right hand corner and you will be able to edit our documentation. If the user-submitted information passes the verification process, we will add it to the documentation.

Automatic Symbols and Source Code Download

Being open source is great, but only if you can find the sources matching the binary version you are using. From now on, Xenko will download the right sources and symbols for an optimal debug and programming experience so you don’t have to worry about doing it yourself.

The process is simple. All you need to do is open Visual Studio options, go to Debugging > General, and check “Enable Source Server Support”:

Coming Later December

We currently are planning to release updates for the following features later this December:

New Animation System

We’ve added a new animation system that allows you to animate any game property throughout the engine. Animating models is great but why limit animation only to the models? With the newest version of the engine, you will be able to animate material color, UI transparency, and generally any property of your game!

Simple, In-Game Profiler

As good as a game engine can get, at some point, you’re always going to be limited by the hardware’s performance. To help with this, we’ve added a built-in profiler so that you will easily be able to identify problems and bottlenecks in your game. Even better, you will be able to turn on the built-in profiler at any point during the process of making your game.

Debug Physics Collision Shapes At Run-Time

Debugging physics is never easy. To streamline this, you will be able to display all the physics collision shapes at any time in your game.

Built-In Scripts

Writing scripts takes time and is not necessarily accessible to everyone. To improve on this, we added some built-in scripts to the engine so that users will be able to do basic operations with ease. Things like animating the camera, displaying physics debug shapes, and adding profiling information can be done in just a few clicks.

Be sure to check out Xenko if you really want to try some new game developing technologies.

Source: xenko.com