Alpha 8 is our new release, and we are very excited to share it with you! This release includes a lot of new features and improvements that will make your game development experience even better. We have been working hard to bring you the best possible experience, and we can't wait for you to try out all the new features in Alpha 8! This is not the release that has taken a lot of time to develop, but it is important for what's coming next.
Graphite UI
This is probably the flagship feature of this release. Graphite is our new UI system that will allow you to create powerful and flexible user interfaces for your games. With Graphite, you can easily create complex UI layouts and interactions, which will make it easier to create immersive and engaging user interfaces for your games. We are very excited about the possibilities that Graphite opens up for game developers, and we can't wait to see what you create with it!
Graphite now has:
- Layout support with support for flexbox and grid layouts, which will allow you to easily create complex UI layouts for your games.
- A powerful styling system that allows you to easily customize the look and feel of your UI components.
- Support for text, buttons, images and other common UI components, which will allow you to easily create a wide variety of user interfaces for your games.
Controller Input
We also added support for controller input in this release, which will allow you to easily add support for gamepads and other controllers in your games. With controller input support, you can now create games that can be played with a controller, which will make your games more accessible and enjoyable for a wider audience. We are very excited about the possibilities that controller input support opens up for game developers, and we can't wait to see what you create with it!
Moved to SDL
We also moved our input system to SDL, which is a powerful and widely used library for handling input in games. This will allow us to have better support for a wider variety of input devices, including gamepads, keyboards, mice, and more. With SDL, we can also have better support for multiple platforms, which will make it easier to create games that can be played on a wide variety of devices. We are very excited about the possibilities that SDL opens up for game developers, and we can't wait to see what you create with it!
We basically made the change because GLFW limited our capabilities with controllers.
A CLI that actually works
We've been doing CLI for a long time now, but now it really works! We have added a lot of new features and improvements to our CLI, which will make it easier to use and more powerful than ever before. With the new CLI, you can easily create new projects, build your games, and manage your assets, all from the command line. We are very excited about the possibilities that the new CLI opens up for game developers, and we can't wait to see what you create with it!
What now?
We encourage you to download Alpha 8 and try it out, and let us know what you think! We are always looking for feedback and suggestions from our users, so don't hesitate to reach out to us on our Github Repository. But not just that - we also want to hear your thoughts on the new features and improvements in Alpha 8, and what you would like to see in future releases. We are committed to making Atlas Engine the best game engine it can be, and we can't do that without your feedback and support! So please, download Alpha 8, try it out, and let us know what you think! We can't wait to see what you create with it!
Now talking about what's coming next, we have a lot of exciting features planned for future releases. But primarily, we are going to tease Alpha 9:
- Our own runtime and scene packing systems that allows to never care about compiling your game again. Now it's just a matter of using the runtime and a file to run it.
- Finally, we are going to have a UI editor for Atlas. This will be, firstly, implemented in SwiftUI for macOS since we want to offer a different experience for each platform, but we don't want to leave other platforms out, so we will consider moving to Tauri later, but now we want to focus on making the best possible experience for macOS users, and then we will see how to bring it to other platforms.
- Then, our own script system, so now you can write your game logic in a scripting language and then have it run in our runtime without having to worry about compiling your game. This will make it much easier to iterate on your game logic and make changes on the fly, which will make your game development experience much more enjoyable and efficient. We are using Typescript for our scripting language, since it's a powerful and widely used language that is easy to learn and use, and it will allow us to have a lot of features and improvements in our scripting system.
This is all for now. Stay tuned for more updates and announcements as we continue to develop Atlas Engine and push the boundaries of game development! We can't wait to see what you create with it!
Check the release in Github! Download Atlas Engine Alpha 8 Join our Discord Server
Max Van den Eynde, Lead Developer of Atlas Engine
