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

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

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 :-)

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 ...