#flax engine

Yeah uh, it's me! I'm Robin, the landscape architecture gal with way too much experience coding and doing game dev and stuff.

Current projects are: - CVW5: A flight sim! Maybe moving to Flax from Unity - LOKI-BMS, a radar scope for command and control in DCS - A bachelor's degree - Lesbianism

Below you'll find a selection of images representing some of these!

While Godot is and will be my engine of choice for the project, for now, I am also going to take some time to evaluate other potential engines.

The reason for this is, that i want to use specific tooling such as in-engine vertex painting and C#-Scripting if possible.

Fortunately, the list of engines that seem to fulfill all of my requirements seems to be rather short.

One engine i am specifically looking at is FlaxeEngine since its payment/royalty model is agreeable enough for me while being lightweight and easy enough to work with while also providing a lot of the features i'd like to use for prototyping. The only thing i might dearly miss is the automatic import of .blend files.

SR-71 model WIP, plus some lovely work with Flax to get Input handling written for CVW5.

The more I work with Flax, the more I fall in love with its lovely solutions for things, support for modern C#, and general ease of use. It reminds me of my first experiences with Unity, though seeing as I'm a far more experienced developer now compared to 14 years ago, it goes so much more smoothly!

Alas, code isn't particularly pretty stuff to look at at this stage, but I'm feeling better about the early stages of CVW5's Flax implementation. The workarounds I need to use to make things operate smoothly in Flax are far fewer and more sane than in Unity. Work seems to iterate faster and more cleanly, and modern language features make it comfortable to write. Pending the rest of this semester, I hope to post some content here!

SH-3 Sea King Model WIP

Also god, the more I work on Flax the more I fall in love with it.

Unity: needs a distinct file for each Monobehavior and special folders specifically for custom editors

Flax: You wanna put multiple scripts in the same file? Sure! You want a custom editor in there too? Fine by me! Organize your project how you like!

The ease and comfort with which I can do stuff in the way I want, optimal or not, is so wonderful! I feel like the engine trusts me to develop things in a sane way. Amazing!

Well, this doesn't seem quite right... Looks like I may need to revisit some of the math I did back in Unity - I'm pretty sure I had this same problem there...

But hey, progress!

Just a quick update and half-write-up on Flax now that I've ported over the bulk of my flight model from Unity...

HOLY CRAP I LOVE THIS ENGINE! Part of the ease with which the code flows is skill and maturity with regards to writing code, sure, but it helps to have a toolset that's modern and encourages good practices as well! Between Dotnet 7.0 and a new version of PhysX, Flax meets Unity with a lot of comparable features and components. The existing parity is augmented further by a very fast and responsive editor that recompiles changes nearly instantly (while Unity will sit for a minute a lot of the time), meaning I can just iterate and iterate and iterate without spending half the time waiting to compile!

While there are still some quirks, like the editor camera behaving... differently than Unity's, the Animation Graphs crashing if you use a buggy node, and general "newness" of the engine that take some getting used to, the workflow is familiar and comfortable and not at all strange. Moving from Unity to Flax is far easier and simpler than trying to pick up Godot or Unreal. There's far more transferable knowledge between Unity and Flax than either of the other two big name engines.

Bless the devs for also making the engine open source, I love being able to recompile and rebuild it with native 64-bit coordinate support! It's not perfect - you still have to work around a 32-bit graphics pipeline and physics engine, but these are small little nibbles of problems compared to wrapping or rewriting all of Unity to achieve the same behavior, as I've done in the past. I can still transfer that knowledge and add some meaningful behavioral improvements to the engine as forked for CVW5!

I still have yet to get a handle on the graphics pipeline and really refining the rendering and animation flows for our needs on the CVW5 team. Fortunately, with how speedy and familiar Flax is, I don't anticipate that knowledge will come together quickly enough! The UI tools are excellent and easy to use, and the rest of the engine's tools are just as lovely.

Anyway, that's my thoughts on the matter of game engines. If you haven't heard of Flax before and are considering leaving Unity's ecosystem, I'd recommend giving it a try! More attention is bound to make it better, so I hope this helps some indecisive devs explore new and exciting engines in 2024!