Hi to all,

Today is THE DAY!
We have finally updated the engine after 2 years.
We apologize for this situation, during these years we have been very busy with HELLSEED.
Starting from March 2023 we have returned back on the engine and updated it (together with EasyGamePack).

The changes are a lot, but we can list some of the most important ones:

• Fixed AMD Radeon drivers incompatibility
  
• Texture streaming has been finally implemented
  
• Many new gameMachine actions added
  
• Fixed time Stepping system + rigidbody interpolation added into physics engine for improving player synchronization (explecially for 3rd person cameras)
  
  
  
• A lot of optimizations for reducing loading times, terrain vegetation, object instancing and rendering.
  
  
• Ribbon particle systems.
  
  
• Some Artmospheric scattering artifacts have been fixed.
  
• Decal reflections have been fixed.
  
• Alpha test shader has been improved using dithering.
  
• New manual is now public and integrated into the launcher.
  

EasyGamePack also has been improved:

• A completely new demo,
  
• improved enemy characters animations and behaviours,
  
• improved death animations and ragdolls,
  
• improved blood and smoke particle systems,
  
• improved explosions,
  
• improved HUD and inventory,
  
• Game templates 1st implementation
  

IMPORTANT NOTICES:

• Since the engine has received a lot of changes we suggest to make a clean installation.

• If you note some stuttering during gameplay, try to save again every STX texture (sturreting is mainly due to old STX versions that do not support streaming).
  
• Lens distortion shader has been changed, so it requires new tuning.
  
• "Shadow bias" parameters of the lights must be set to "0.005" value to avoid artifacts because the shadowmap shader has been changed a bit.
  
• Manual is still work in progress, we'll integrate new info during next days.
  
• Currently EasyGame Pack Tutorials aren't updated.
  
• Due to texture streaming, publishing with archive (compress flag enabled) could not work well.
  

We have changed our update plans and starting from now updates will be much more frequent than during the last years :)

Do not forget to join our Discord community:
https://discord.gg/WB28gBW

You can also contribute becoming a Patron:
https://www.patreon.com/s2engine


Enjoy and stay tuned!