First of all, sorry for the terrible pun in the subject line.
I have been busy working on the mod system, specifically making it so that every part of a spaceship can be configured in mods.
Two days ago Crytek announced the release of CryEngine V. It is free, open source, and supports programming in C#. This was very exciting news. CryEngine has a brilliant rendering engine, and getting full access to it for free is great. Also UNION is coded in C#, so this opened up the possibility of moving UNION to the CryEngine.
I spent the last two days reviewing the engine, testing out different parts of UNION in it to see how it performs.
Sadly, I found the engine lacking. It's C# implementation is modern (great) but it's C# API is very poor compared to it's C++ API. There are many things you can do in C++ which cannot be done in C#. The source is available, which would allow me to extend the C# API, but that is too much overhead for me. Coupled with that issue is an extreme lack of documentation.
These things may be improved later on, so I will check again in a few months to see what has changed.
UNION is developed in such as way as to be independent from any one game engine. It has it's own entity, physics, UI, and networking systems. These can be then plugged into any engine/framework which has robust C# support. Right now that means
Unity,
MonoGame, and
Xenko.
At the moment we are using Unity as our engine. It has a very good and easily accessible rendering engine, but it also has many issues and downsides (including an ancient implementation of C#/Mono). It is my intention to move UNION to the Xenko engine after it leaves Beta. Xenko is a very modern engine, with a much better API than Unity. It is also open source, which makes things easier for me as a developer (and that speeds up development).
Now I am back to working on spaceships in the mod system. We are holding off on the next DevLog until that is completed, with all this work on code there are no new visuals to show. In the next DevLog the basics of modding in UNION, creating a new mod and adding new spaceships to it.
Thanks for reading!
Mark
