Towards the end of last year the developers of the NeoAxis Game Engine (which uses Ogre3D for the rendering part) released their version v1.1 which introduced quite some new features, like:
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- Depth buffer access — the long-expected option to use depth buffer as usual texture has been added. This feature allows to integrate numerous modern rendering features such as Soft Particles, Depth of Field, SSAO, etc.
- Soft Particles — built-in Soft Particles technology support based on the new depth buffer access feature. Soft Particles is intended to eliminate graphic artifacts that can appear when particle intersects with scene geometry.
- Animation Tree System — a new Animation Tree system has been added. With this major feature you can configure animations much easier. You don’t need to write that much code for animation support anymore — now you can do this by means of an animation tree file, which is a scheme with operations and connections. A visual editor will also be added in later versions..
- Navigation mesh pathfinding — new navigation mesh pathfinding has been added. In addition to grid based and way point navigation systems NeoAxis SDK now includes powerful pathfinding system based on navigation mesh technology. The engine uses the open-source Recast pathfinding system internally.
- Vegetation material — advanced Vegetation Material has been added. With this material it is now possible to make high quality trees, shrubs and grass.
- FXAA anti-aliasing — new anti-aliasing post-effect allows to achieve better image quality with less resources and higher performance, rather than when using FSAA or MSAA algorythms.
- Awesomium — the Awesomium library has been integrated into NeoAxis 3D Game Engine. The Awesomium library enables embedding full-fledged web browser functionality into applications and games. The library is provided as an additional engine plug-in.
- Localization — the toolset supports localization now and can be easily translated to another language. Russian localization has been added.
They also added a really nice looking, new demo:
While all of those features sound great on paper, the real value of such an engine has always to be proven in real projects…and the guys from NeoAxis proofed again that their engine is indeed production-ready and can be used for real world applications with their latest Success Story: A training simulator for chemical facility employees. You can read more about this “fully-fledged training suite” on their blog entry.
For more details and additional images as well as a video about this simulation project, have a look at their reference customer entry.