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[Mittaw]

WinterLeaf Entertainment's Omni Engine. Omni is our 3D Engine. It is C++ at its core but C# is used at the business layer.  We have had test servers of two AI teams with 300 characters each battling each other in an endless war - even where they were also making choices of weapons to use....and this was months ago.

We have now also upgraded the rendering pipeline and introduced a whole range of new shaders including skin, fur, hair and fire to mention a few. We have also introduced tessellation, bullet physics and made the engine 64bit. The current work is seeing Dx11 introduced also and a complete overhaul on the interface / GUI tools.

Our intention is to release an engine that offers phenomenal speed and performance as well as high quality rendering ability to Indie Teams without committing them to handing over a large amount of royalties for successful games. Why are we doing this....? Well basically we didnt want to hand over 25%+ proportion of any profit we make on our game, neither did we have $$ for licences and seats....so we decided to make our own engine and do it the way we needed to and likewise for many other Indie Teams out there. I can't release any pricing structure at the moment as its not set yet but the basics is that it will be mostly a free engine for indie developers. More details on licensing and structures will be forthcoming but our principle is that this is to make developing games on a budget VIABLE.

Anyhow I digress, we are not reaching the stage where the engine is significantly advanced we need to interface our art into the engine and we need an extra programmer who is interested in getting involved in this. We are looking for someone who can step in and work with our Art Team and our Programming Team and get our artwork working in the OMNI engine. Unfortunately, while our Art Team is highly competent on the 3D modeling etc, scripting and programming they are not. Therefore we are looking for someone who wants to get heavily into development of the game from a programming perspective from an Art side. This will involve setting up our characters in game, managing the functionality of the game and interactions of characters and the world etc. There are also opportunities to work with the development of Omni as part of this.

Ok, now the hard part... this is not funded. No one at WinterLeaf Entertainment gets paid at present. We are all doing this (and have been for a number of years) off our own backs and out of our own pockets to get to the point where we can release a Real Indie Friendly 3D Engine. We have long term agreements in place for all those involved in the projects but we cannot, nor would it be fair to those who have given so much to date offer direct payment for this. At the moment we have a heavy ongoing monthly operational costs for the engine's development and servers support etc etc that all comes from our own pockets, so we are looking for someone who really shares the same belief as us in that Indie Development needs to be more viable and wants to be part of something bigger and has the vision and capacity to share the journey with us.

I would like to show you some screenshots of Omni and our work to date but the shader work is not quite complete and we have about a month to go before we are able to release true 100% Omni rendering.

So if you are interested and would like to know more I am happy to have a conversation with anyone. Please respond to this or drop me an email at tim.watton[at]winterleafentertainment.com

If people are also interested in following Omni's development or would like to know more generally on the Engine and its availability there will be a specific website live soon and I can point people in the direction of that shortly. If anyone wants to know more also, I'm happy to provide a more formal announcement and field any questions that you may have.

If you're interesed you can find out more about WinterLeaf Entertainment here https://www.winterleafentertainment.com/default.aspx

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Tim
Art Director
WinterLeaf Entertainment


**Edit: revised post to hopefully explain a little more detail on the project**

[soryy708]

Hi

I'm mainly a C++ programmer but I also know some C#.
While I'm skeptical about your engine taking off, I wouldn't mind putting it to the test by making some games in it.

What bother me though is C#. If you worry about performance so much, why pick C# in the first place? It's horrible for two main reasons:
- Garbage Collection = overhead + bad for multithreading
- Everything is an object = you don't take advantage of cache optimization

[Mittaw]

Hi I can fully understand the scepticism of a new engine but also I appreciate the idea that you'd be interested in seeing it once it's live.  I have revised the post above to give a bit more clarity on the C ++ and C# references.

I'll be posting some screen shots and renders once we have it fully functional in the coming weeks.

Tim

[soryy708]

Is there going to be a C++ API for somebody who wishes to use the engine to write a game without compromising performance (due to C# stuffs)?

[erebusman]

So .. forgive the comparison here but it sounds like you are making Unity 3D over again essentially right? Even to the point of the C# ..

With Unity  3D free version out there what do you feel will make your product unique vs Unity 3D?

[Mittaw]

there will be a full source code version available and we plan on having a way that engine fixes by the users can possibly be pushed back into the engine so that the base code itself can be improved.

[Mittaw]

@ erebusman. We're aware of unity and it's capably but also the price tag. Our full source code version is likely to be around the $200 to $300 all in and be competitive visually and performance wise. When we get the final version out in the next month we'll be able to benchmark a few things to demonstrate Omni. On the coding side, you will be able to use Visual studio 2010 and 2013 to do your coding with and have full intellisense

I'd love to set up some renders of the visual aspects but we're just a few weeks away from full testing, but I can assure you things look good.

As for the general principle of competition.  From our perspective and while we do acknowledge the healthy reputation and unity model we equally don't believe it should be the only option and healthy competition is good both for the market place and the consumer. Why should the market be cornered and dominated by one brand/engine?

We are looking to give options and choice, particularly around price and performance.

[soryy708]

If you'd like the community to give you feedback and improve your code base, why not go open source?
Or better yet, Free Software?

[Mittaw]

Hi - i appreciate all the questions but as you'll appreciate I'm looking for some programming help with the engine/art interface at the moment. If you want to find out more about the business side of the engine etc I would need to direct you more appropriately to our CEO than within this thread.

I'm sure he would be more than happy to answer any such queries if you want a further conversation with him. At the moment I am focused on getting some additional programming assistance for the Art Team.

Let me know if you want to speak directly with our CEO.

[Mittaw]

Hi folks.  Here's some initial in game shots of our artwork.





Were working on a skin shader to improve images

[soryy708]

Okay, this looks gorgeous.
Though C# is not my forte, I'd apply to that position.

[Mittaw]

Hi, sorry for the delay in responding but we filled the position last week. Thanks for your interest