The excellent Flax game engine just released Flax Engine 1.11. The closest way to describe Flax IMHO is “Flax is the Indie Version of Unreal Engine”. It is very similar in a lot of ways – it’s source available, it has similar licensing terms, it supports C++ and Blueprints-like programming (as well as C#!) and more. The Flax Engine 1.11 release adds several new features to the engine.
Key Features of Flax Engine 1.11:
Graphics & Rendering
- Custom Shading Models: Developers can now add custom lighting calculation models (e.g., stylized toon shading or realistic anisotropy) without modifying the engine source code.
- Decal Layers: New per-pixel object masking allows decals (like bullet holes or puddles) to be masked, ensuring they only appear on specific objects (e.g., environments) and not others.
- GPU Particles Performance: Significant refactoring has been done to improve the speed of both GPU particle rendering and simulation, scaling better across various hardware, including fast paths for small emitters.
Performance & Profiling
- New Memory Profiler: A new low-level memory tracking tool groups allocations hierarchically (e.g., graphics, physics) for better insight, which is critical for porting to memory-limited platforms like mobile or handheld consoles.
- GPU Profiler in Tracy: Added integration for Tracy profiler to enable GPU performance timeline profiling for D3D11, D3D12, and Vulkan, allowing for correlation between CPU and GPU work.
- Threading Improvements: Many engine parts (especially physics simulation, content streaming, and particles) now use multi-threading more often, resulting in performance boosts (e.g., a sample project saw a performance increase from 47 FPS to 75 FPS).
- Async Scenes Loading: Scene loading is now time-sliced using a configurable per-frame time budget (defaulting to 30% of frame time), which eliminates hitches when opening or streaming large levels.
Editor & Workflow
- Visject Improvements: Flax’s graph editor (used for materials, particles, etc.) received new features, including additive/subtractive box select and new node formatting/alignment options, making graph asset editing easier.
- Prefab Diff Improvements: The prefab changes view now clearly shows added and removed actors, and allows changes to be applied to the prefab with a single “Apply All” button.
- UI Editor Resolution Preview: A new feature allows developers to preview the UI in the widget editor at different resolutions, which is highly beneficial for mobile and cross-platform development.
- New Keyboard Shortcuts: Added numerous shortcuts for faster workflow, including quick switching between editor windows and accessing debug view modes.
Key Links
Flax Engine Getting Started Tutorial (by Us)
You can learn more about Flax Engine and the Flax 1.11 release in the video below. If you are interested in getting started with Flax Engine, check out our Flax for Unity Developers tutorial here.