SoftPixel Engine Logo

News history
3rd January 2014:
    Happy Birthday SoftPixel Engine! You are six years old (over 175,000 LoC).

    It's been a long time now that I was working on the engine intensely. And unfortunately this project never became a huge success in the open-source community :-(. But nevertheless I had a lot of fun and ambition by developing this game engine :-). I hope someone can make use of it in the future, even if it's used for educational purposes only ;-).
    Kind regards,
    Lukas Hermanns

13th October 2013:

4th April 2013:
    The SoftPixel Engine 3.2 has been released (over 152,000 LoC)

    After a year and a half I finally released a new version of the SoftPixel Engine. A lot of changes have been made.

    News in brief:
  • All New Animation System (Supports joint-groups, custom animation playback and animation blending)
  • All New Network System (There is a tutorial using the new network system. Try this on two different computers in a local network)
  • All New Collision System (There are new collision models such as the character controller and it's using a better tree hierarchy with kd-Trees)
  • Added Integrated Deferred Renderer (Supports relief mapping, bloom filter, real-time shadows and global illumination)
  • Added Interactive CommandLine User Interface (This new utility can be used to have an interactive command line prompt for debugging)
  • Integrated OpenCL (Now GPGPU programming is also possible for OpenGL with OpenCL compute shaders)
  • Integrated OpenAL (Finally nice real-time sound effects can be achieved with the new sound system)
  • Multi RenderContext for OpenGL (Can be used for surround-gaming)
  • New TextureMapping Architecture (More flexibility and faster)
  • Multi-Threaded LightmapGenerator (Now lightmap generation can be done in parallel. Make use of this performance boost in the SoftPixel Sandbox 1.02+)

3rd April 2013:

24th March 2013:

14th January 2013:
    MadBit has released his particle system for the SoftPixel Engine (v.3.2): Pixie. Thanks for this great project :-)

3rd January 2013:
    Happy Birthday SoftPixel Engine! You are five years old (over 142,000 LoC).

20th October 2012:
    The tutorial section has been updated and a new tutorial for building the engine via SVN and CMake has been added.

24th September 2012:

17th August 2012:
    Now there is an SVN repository for the SoftPixel Sandbox on sourceforge.net, too.

26th July 2012:
    For the SoftPixel Sandbox a separate project has been created on sourceforge.net. This has been done particular to provide a separated SVN repository for the editor.

22th July 2012:
    Finally an SVN repository has been created for the SoftPixel Engine on sourceforge.net.

13th July 2012:
    A new forum has been created for the SoftPixel Engine and SoftPixel Sandbox: SoftPixel Forum. The HLC Games Board is now declared as deprecated. You can no longer register at this old forum. So please use the new one. Among others the new forum has better countermeasures for spambots.

14th May 2012:

19th February 2012:
    The MeshViewer tool has been updated to version 1.2 and now supports an animation view. Also the SoftPixel Mesh Exporter has been updated to version 1.1 and finally supports skeletal animation.

7th February 2012:
    The MeshViewer tool has been updated to version 1.1 and finally the first version of the SoftPixel Mesh Exporter for Blender 2.5+ has been uploaded.

9th January 2012:
    The SoftPixel Engine 3.1 has been released (over 106,500 LoC)

    It's a long time ago I released the last version of the SoftPixel Engine. But the wait was worth it. There are a lot of great new features and many improvements were made.

    Finally the SoftPixel Engine got an official sandbox editor with a scene file format the engine can load easily: The SoftPixel Sandbox and its file format SPSB. This is a separate project and can also be downloaded for free. It has the zlib/libpng license as well.

    Two new platforms are supported: Android and iOS, the most popular mobile platforms. Also a project file for Mac OS X has been added but this port is unfinished. For the mobile platforms two new render systems have been added: OpenGL|ES 1.1 and 2.0. For Android the new audio device OpenSL|ES has been added, too.

    For renderer independent shader programming the Cg Toolkit by NVIDIA has also been integrated. Thanks to Cg among others now tessellation can also be performed with OpenGL.

    In addition to the renovation the Boost C++ Library has been integrated. You have to download this library but you don't need to compile it. The engine only uses a few templates.

    There are many further features and the engine got finally pre-compiled Debug and Release versions for VisualC++ 9 and 10. Have a look at it and explor the 3rd dimension from another point of view :-)

    News in brief:
  • Getting official Sandbox Editor (The SoftPixel Sandbox is the first offical world editor for the SoftPixel Engine)
  • Google Android port (Now mobile applications can be written in C++ with the SoftPixel Engine for Google Android)
  • Apple iOS port (Support for the Apple iOS mobile platform has been added, too)
  • OpenGL|ES 1 renderer (For Android and iOS the OpenGL|ES 1 fixed function pipeline can be used for simple games)
  • OpenGL|ES 2 renderer (For Android and iOS the OpenGL|ES 2 programmable function pipeline can be used for more complex games)
  • OpenSL|ES sound device (For Android the OpenSL|ES sound device has been added)
  • Cg Toolkit (For more shader programming flexibility the Cg Toolkit by NVIDIA has been integrated)
  • Integrating Boost (As part of the renovations the Boost C++ Library has been integrated in several sections)
  • New NetworkSystem (The NetworkSystem has been recreated completely)
  • Lots of Bugfixes and Improvements

3rd January 2012:
    Happy Birthday SoftPixel Engine! You are four years old (over 109,000 LoC).

17th December 2011:
    Some new videos have been uploaded on YouTube about the SoftPixel Engine.

7th November 2011:
    First alpha version of the SoftPixel Sandbox world editor has been released. Currently only for testing purposes. There are still some incomplete sections.

25th August 2011:
    There is a new SoftPixel Engine website hosted and administrated by Benedigt Eggers: softpixelengine.net.

14th August 2011:
    Finally Arkanodroid 3D is available on Android Market for 0.99€! I just released my first paid application :-D.

1st August 2011:
    Since there is more and more spamware in the forum you need to send a mail at if you want to join our community. Tell why you want to join and the administrator will activate your account.

4th July 2011:
    Screenshot section has been revised.

30th June 2011:
    The CASTLE BENCHMARK has been released finally! You can download the setup-wizard in the download section for free.
    The source code will follow soon which is completely compatible with the SoftPixel Engine v.3.0.

8th June 2011:

5th June 2011:
    The SoftPixel Engine 3.0 has been released (Almost 100,000 LoC - a tenth of a million)

    Meanwhile the SoftPixel Engine has become more and more into a GameEngine. Lots of integrated tools like the ModelCombiner, LightmapGenerator, PathFinder, XMLParser and ScriptLoader. Finally the SoftPixel Engine got a GUI (GraphicsUserInterface) again since the old one has been removed.
    More features for working with Shaders has been added: Multi-RenderTargets and Hardware Texture Formats. With these features DeferredShading can be implemented easily.

    For the new PathFinder tool I used the knowledge I've got from the University of Darmstadt where I'm currently studying. It was a two-week project where we had to apply our knowledge about several path finding algorithms such as Moore, Dijkstra and A*.
    In this version the engine's architecture has been changed very strong. Among others creating custom meshes will no longer handled by the scene::Mesh class but by the new video::MeshBuffer class. An advantage of the new architecture is that now the vertex- and index buffer are complete configurable. There are several default format types but you can also create your own custom vertex format to have vertex attribute support for OpenGL Vertex Shaders and/or to save VRAM.
    One feature has been removed: There is no longer a SoftwareRenderer. This is because a SoftwareRenderer are no longer used since the graphics cards everyone has a graphics card. It was just a 'Gimmick' because I wanted to learn how rasterization works. But now the OpenGL, Direct3D9 and Direct3D11 renderers are more important and I want to concentrate me on these classes.

    Also a big new feature: The NewtonGameDynamics PhysicsEngine (Copyright <2003-2008> by Julio Jerez and Alain Suero) has been integrated. Integration of physics simulations has never been so easy! This is the first used external library. The license is the same (zlib/libpng).

    Some tutorials and API documentation will be updated in the near future and a comprehensive TechDemo - The CASTLE BENCHMARK - will come soon ...

    News in brief:
  • BoxGUI 2.0 (A completely new GUI has been created)
  • Multi-RenderTargets (In the pixel shader colors can be written to several render-targets simultaneously)
  • Hardware Texture Formats (The hardware texture format is now choosable: ubyte, float16 and float32 which is helpful for DeferredShading)
  • New SceneGraph System (The scene graph system has been redesigned completely)
  • Universal Mesh Buffer (The vertex- and index buffer is universal to save memory and optimize the rendering process)
  • PathFinder (The new tool::PathFinder class can be used for efficient and easy path finding using the A* Algorithm)
  • PhysicsEngine (The NewtonGameDynamics physics engine has been integrated as the first external library for precise and fast physics simulations)
  • Software Renderer goodbye (The SoftwareRenderer has been removed because of irrelevance and waste of code)
  • Lots of Bugfixes and Improvements

26th May 2011:
    Code::Blocks IDE startup video tutorial created by soulcon. You can find it on YouTube.

1st May 2011:
    Download page has been updated and some further demos and tools are available for free download.

25th April 2011:

17th April 2011:
    An interview with me about the SoftPixel Engine has been published on gamekritiker.iblogger.org today (interview is in German).

12th March 2011:
    Droid's Home has been added to context menu. The SoftPixel Engine is coming on Android!

22th February 2011:
    SoftPixel Engine logo has been updated. It was created with Inkscape for vector graphics.

21th February 2011:

3rd January 2011:
    Happy Birthday SoftPixel Engine! You are three years old (over 100,100 LoC).

6th December 2010:

24th November 2010:
    Today I looked again how many lines the SoftPixel Engine project has. I have finally reached 100,000 lines! A tenth of a million :-D
    Thanks to the new GUI (v.2.0 alpha) which will be available for the next release version (2.2).

4th October 2010:
    Now several groups have been created were you can follow us: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace will be added soon ...

28th September 2010:

18th September 2010:
    A SoftPixel Engine Users group has been created on Facebook to get information about news, changes and other things all around the SoftPixel Engine quickly.

17th September 2010:
    The SoftPixel Engine 2.1 has been released (over 93,000 LoC)
    The most important new in this version is of course the new renderer Direct3D11 including its new Shader Model 5.0.
    New shader types are: Geometry-, Hull-, Domain- and Compute shader. This opens up whole new possibilities. One of these is tessellation and GPGPU for massively parallel computing.
    Also for OpenGL a new shader type has been added: Geometry shader available with OpenGL 3.2+ as extension.
    To made it possible to use such a lot of different shader types the API needed to be changed in the shader part. In the new SDK several new tutorials has been added using shader. With this tutorials you can learn how to use and write shader using the new SoftPixel Engine version.
    That the engine also runs on a PC where Direct3D11 is not installed there are several DLL files where one or more renderer are not compiled with.
    More over the ScriptLoader has a complete new syntax. Now whole scenes can be created also node-animations are included.
    For effects like BumpMapping or any other normal-mapping based effect there are now tangent and binormal vectors for each vertex.
    Amongst others a new image loader has been created. DirectDrawSurface (DDS) image loader has been implemented which can load uncompressed and several compressed formats which are DXT1, DXT2 and DXT3.
    An other very useful new feature is that the SceneManager can be choosen and can be extended relatively easy.
    Additionally VisualStudio 2010 project files has been added. One for the whole engine and for each tutorial.
    Finally please note that there are some new features which are currently not complete. e.g. the new scene manager which can be used optionally.

    News in brief:
  • Direct3D11 driver added (The Direct3D11 renderer has been added including its Shader Model 5.0 with backwards compatibilty until Direct3D9)
  • Tessellation support (Hull- and Domain shader has been added included in the new Direct3D11 video driver)
  • Compute Shader support (Compute Shader and the Dispatch pipeline has been added included in the new Direct3D11 video driver for GPGPU)
  • Geometry Shader support (Geometry Shader support for OpenGL and Direct3D11 has been added)
  • ScriptLoader 3.0 (Now whole scenes including node-animations can be loaded using the new Script Loader and can be written using the SoftPixel Scene Saver)
  • Mesh loader recreated (3DS and X mesh loader has been recreated completely)
  • Surface references (When multiple equal objects are rendered surface references can be used to save video memory but with different textures)
  • Tangent Space (Tangent and Binormal has been added to the 3D vertex structure for normal mapping effects)
  • Scene management flexibility (Now the scene manager can be choose and extended. You can also write your own scene manager)
  • Engine compiler options (When recompiling the whole engine a lot of compiler options can be set to customize the library)

5th September 2010:
    A tessellation tech-demo using the new renderer Direct3D11 has been uploaded on YouTube.

27th August 2010:
    The first 3D demo project (BrickCoverage) is now available as open-source (zlib/libpng).

25th August 2010:
    The SoftPixel Engine - v.2.0 API documetation is now also downloadable as ZIP file.
    This will be available on the API docu main page or on its related pages for the next release v.2.1 ...

6th August 2010:
    The SoftPixel Engine 2.1 - alpha has been released (over 88,000 LoC)
    This inofficial alpha release of the SoftPixel Engine SDK version has been uploaded for testing purposes. It supports the new Direct3D11 video driver.
    But be aware of the fact that this is just an inofficial alpha version! The official version will be released towards the end of this year.

5th August 2010:

17th July 2010:
    The screenshots section has been updated. Now including community screenshots :-D.

16th July 2010:
    Today I updated this homepage with all its media objects. The gallery will be updated in the next days ...

29th June 2010:
    The SoftPixel Engine 2.0 has been released (over 82,000 LoC)
    The new version 2 has not as many new functionalities as the previous version but there has been changed and redesigned a lot.
    One of these things is that the Texture class has been redesigned and is now more stable, flexible and has a better image buffer management. As a result the SoftPixel Engine allocates by default only half the size of memory for each texture.
    More over the Entity class name has changed to "Mesh". The vertex structure has changed completely as well. Now the Direct3D9 video driver is much more faster than before particular in combination with animations. The OpenGL and Direct3D9 video drivers have become in a status of maximal performance! Now the engine should also be able to run with only OpenGL 1.1.
    Also a nice thing is that now there is finally a support for VisualC++. Now there is a project file for Code::Blocks, DevC++ and VisualStudio 9. All these IDEs are also represented for each new tutorial.
    There are some other changes (like the "sp::UserControl" class name which changed to "sp::io::InputControl") which needs a little bit getting used to for people who already used the engine.
    Of corse a lot of bugs has been fixed particular after using the VisualC++ debugger for the first time.
    How you already saw the homepage of the SoftPixel Engine has changed, too ;-)

    News in brief:
  • VisualC++ support (Support for VisualC++ with project files for VisualStudio 9)
  • Textures redesgined (The Texture class has been redesgined and has become more stable and flexible)
  • Depth textures (Pixel depth information can be rendered directly into a depth texture)
  • Complete new tutorials (The old tutorials has been removed from the SDK and will be available as an extra package soon)

19th June 2010:
    Today I have registered on ohloh.net where the SoftPixel Engine has its own entry. Nice thing is that you can see where the people who use the engine and are registered on ohloh.net live.

27th May 2010:
    The SoftPixel Engine Wrapper for BlitzBasic and PureBasic version 2.1-beta has been released:
    Some new functions has been added, bugs has been fixed and a new demo application has been created.
    The fourth demo is a shader demonstration with a water simulation.

9th April 2010:
    Finally the SoftPixel Engine has been added to the 3D engine list on DevMaster.

28th March 2010:
    The SoftPixel Engine 1.9 has been released (over 81,000 LoC)
    Again there are many news and changes in the engine. At first you all should know that the GUI environment has been removed completly from the engine because of incompletesness, uselessness and bad code base. A very interesting part which has been added is the Toolset which includes a LightmapGenerator and a ModelCombiner.
    These Toolsets are very usefull for game development so these are 'GameEngine like' tools. These are not external programs but integrated classes which are very easy to use.
    Also positive is that the OpenGL and Direct3D9 renderers became nearly complete. Now the engine also uses IndexBuffers with OpenGL and the HardwareMeshBuffers work fine with Direct3D9. Some has been added for optimization. One of that is the Level of Detail (LOD) mesh management. The others are the FrustumCulling and the MeshReferences (more detail in the 'news in brief').

    News in brief:
  • Toolsets ('GameEngine like' toolsets like LightmapGenerator and ModelCombiner)
  • Direct3D9 driver finished (Now the Direct3D9 hardware buffers also work fine and fast!)
  • Frustum culling (Frustum culling for 3d models using bounding box of bounding sphere)
  • RenderTargets (RenderTargets for Direct3D9 and OpenGL are supported)
  • Level of Detail (Level of Detail (LOD) for meshes is supported)
  • Mesh references (When multiple equal objects are rendered mesh references can be used to save much memory)
  • More stability (Among others the Entity class has been updated and is now much more stable)

3rd January 2010:
    Happy Birthday SoftPixel Engine! You are two years old (over 75,700 LoC).

28th November 2009:
    First T-Shirt of the SoftPixel Engine
    I let my first SoftPixel Engine T-shirt print.

15th November 2009:
    The SoftPixel Engine Wrapper for BlitzBasic by T-Team version 1.0 has been released:
    The first version of the third party wrapper for BlitzBasic by T-Team is now available.
    Take a look at the official worklog on the forum.

22th October 2009:
    The Toolbox has been uploaded:
    The Toolbox is a small package including the ModelFusion function, a C++ class to fusion two models/ meshes.
    This function is a part of one of my current projects: a first person shooter. Because this is a very useful technique
    I want to integrate it in the SoftPixel Engine for the next releases. But it is still incomplete. And this is the reason
    to upload it. In the Toolbox is a detailed description of the idea of this algorithm.
    If anybody think he could solve the problem or fix some bugs please download it and try your best :-)

19th October 2009:
    The SoftPixel Engine 1.8 beta has been released (over 75,000 LoC)
    The following parts have been redesigned: File system, Sound device, Script loader, Animation, Network, Object transformation handling.
    There is already again a new standard model: the TorusKnot. (There is yet another new model type but currently not implemented: the IcoSphere).
    With changing the upper called parts and classes the engine became more object orientated and more flexible.
    The most interesting thing is that the engine got the status of a cross-platform project which is now running on Windows and Linux.
    Because so many parts have been redesigned and changed it is just a beta version but released to find and fix more bugs; use the community to discuss with.

    News in brief:
  • GNU/Linux support (Finally the engine is platform independet and running on Windows and Linux)
  • Sound system 3.0 (Now the sound device is choosable; current devices: WinMM and Dummy)
  • Network system 2.0 (Finally the network system works fine; using UDP protocol)
  • Direct3D9 hardware buffers (Now the engines is using the hardware vertex- and index buffers with Direct3D9)
  • More flexibility (The redesigned File-/ Animation-/ ScriptLoader- and TreeNode classes allows more flexibility)

14th October 2009:
    The Doxygen documentation has been updated to the next release version 1.8 - which is going to be relased in the next days - as a preview.
    On the HLC Games Board there is an introduction to the update from 1.7 to 1.8.

20th September 2009:
    Today I achieved the first Linux alpha-version.

18th September 2009:
    Current work report:
  • Porting the engine for the first GNU/Linux support
  • Redesigning TerrainSystem with GeoMIPMapping and QuadTrees
  • LOD (Level-of-Detail) meshes

27th August 2009:
    A new forum has been created on the HLC Games website.
    This forum is complete in english for international discussions around the projects of HLC Games such as the SoftPixel Engine.
    Finally no longer commercial popups or something else =).

28th June 2009:
    The SoftPixel Engine 1.7 has been released (over 66,000 LoC)
    Some more parts of the software-renderer and Direct3D9 video-driver were updated and developed further.
    Now the software-renderer is able to render geometries with perspective texture-mapping, depth-buffering, MIP-mapping, sphere-mapping, lighting and some more.
    The Direct3D9 video-driver renders scenes such as OpenGL with correct lighting and volumetric light sources.
    The tutorials has been updated too, so you can choose the renderer you want to use.
    With the vertex- and pixel programs for OpenGL and Direct3D9 you can use 'old' Shaders for parallax-mapping or something else.
    With the integration of HLSL a simple callback function can be set for each shader in the SoftPixel Engine.

    News in brief:
  • Shader (HLSL - Direct3D9 High Level Shading Language)
  • Vertex- and pixel programs (Old vertex- and pixel programs for OpenGL and Direct3D9 can be used)
  • Revised realtime shadow (Faster realtime shadow for OpenGL and now as well as Direct3D9)
  • 3D textures (Can be used as volume textures)
  • Ray 2.0 - SoftwareRenderer (Now software-rendering with perspective texture-mapping and depth-buffering is possible)

19th May 2009:
    Creation of the new HLC Games homepage for software entertainment.
    There we will offer you our complete projects such as our video games and the SoftPixel Engine too.

8th February 2009:
    The SoftPixel Engine 1.6 has been released (over 59,000 LoC)
    The first scene maps can be loaded!
    This version supports the Quake3 / Quake 1 / Half-Life 1 and Counter-Strike 1.0 to 1.6 level file format (BSP).
    Also added were the OBJ (Wavefront object) and TMF (ToxyVision) 3D file formats.
    And now the Direct3D9 renderer in the engine is able to render 3d scenes.

    News in brief:
  • BSP scene loading support (Can load Quake III Arena and Quake 1 maps which is also used in Half-Life 1 and Counter-Strike 1.0 to 1.6)
  • WAD texture loading support (The Where is All the Data texture format has been added)

4th January 2009:
    The first 2D demo project (JomBanana im Minenfeld XXL) is now available as open-source (zlib/libpng).

3rd January 2009:
    Happy Birthday SoftPixel Engine! You are one year old (over 58,000 LoC).

8th November 2008:
    The SoftPixel Engine 1.5 beta has been released (over 52,000 LoC)
    In this version very much new functions, effects and renderer has been added.
    Also some things has been changed: the DrawingManager, TextureLoader and FontManager has been integrated into the VideoDriver.
    Also new are the new standard model: the original Utha Teapot and the Fur Effect.
    Very much bugs has been fixed and new screen shots has been added to the website.
    Note that the SoftPixel Engine is now using the left handed coordinate system.

    News in brief:
  • Renderer independence (OpenGL 2.0, Direct3D9, SoftwareRenderer)
  • Skeletal Animation (Currently only for the B3D file format)

22th October 2008:
    A doxygen documentation of the SoftPixel Engine engine has been released
    and is now available under "API" in the menu bar at the top of this website.

10th October 2008:
    The SoftPixel Engine 1.4 was undisclosed (over 42,000 LoC)
    A problem to upload files on the SourceForge account avoid the release.
    Now the engine is cleaning up very much an is going to get two new renderer: Direct3D9 and an own SoftwareRenderer.
    Expact the next release (1.5) in the next month ...

2nd September 2008:
    The SoftPixel Engine 1.3 has been released (over 36,000 LoC).

    News in brief:
    Shader (GLSL - OpenGL Shading Language)

21th August 2008:
    The SoftPixel Engine 1.2 has been released (over 34,000 LoC).

21th July 2008:
    The SoftPixel Engine 1.1 has been released (over 32,000 LoC).

14th July 2008:
    The first 2D demo project of the SoftPixel Engine is available for free download.

10th June 2008:
    The SoftPixel Engine Wrapper PreBeta Version for PureBasic has been released.

1st June 2008:
    The SoftPixel Engine Wrapper PreBeta Version for BlitzBasic has been released.

16th May 2008:
    The SoftPixel Engine 1.0 beta has been released (over 29,000 LoC).

15th May 2008:
    The SoftPixel Engine homepage is available under sourceforge.

14th April 2008:
    Creation of the SoftPixel Engine Forum.

3rd January 2008:
    Beginning in the development of the SoftPixel Engine.


SoftPixel Engine and SoftPixel Engine webpage © 2008 by Lukas Hermanns