Flax Engine, described by the development team as "The most agile game engine," has recently been updated to version 1.8.
For those unfamiliar, Flax Engine is a fully featured, source-available game engine featuring a modern editor interface and a component-based architecture similar to engines such as Unity.
Some of its standout features include multiple scripting options such as C#, C++, and visual scripting, open-world tools including terrain, foliage, and fog systems, and support for large worlds with 64-bit precision coordinates.
The latest release builds upon this foundation and introduces several new features. Among them, one standout feature is the new UI Editor, which allows developers to easily view and modify user interface layouts directly within the Prefab or Game window.
Support for .NET 8 has also been added, enabling developers to use C# 12 and leverage the latest performance enhancements of the .NET framework.
The new version introduces improvements for mobile platforms with support for ASTC texture compression. This upgrade enhances rendering performance by reducing texture memory usage by up to 80% on both iOS and Android devices.
Importing model files such as .fbx into prefabs is now possible. This means that all meshes, materials, textures, and animations from the source file will be imported, resulting in the creation of a prefab that mirrors the entire structure of the source file. This enables users to work with larger assets containing multiple subobjects. Additionally, iteration times are improved thanks to the new reimport functionality.
New features for vehicle physics simulation have also been introduced. There are new options for better vehicle control, such as configurations for Steer vs Speed/Anti Roll Bars and support for tank vehicles.
The Anim Graph editor will now display the current playback position of animations and provide state machine insights for an improved debugging experience. Moreover, a new property, AnimatedModel.GetTraceEvent, enables developers to gather animation playback information through code.
Other additions include a new Root Motion feature allowing users to specify which components of the motion should be applied to the movement of an object (position XZ, position Y, rotation).
There have been multiple improvements to the main and spline editors, making for a more refined user experience.
This release also sees the introduction of fallback font rendering for in-game and editor text, aiming to assist with the localization and internalization of Flax projects.
For more information about the update, be sure to visit the official Flax 1.8 release publication.
