Crown 0.63

What's New

After almost two months of development, The Crown Foundation is proud to present Crown 0.63 to the gamedev community!

This release adds a new LOD Group component that lets you optimize performance by dynamically choosing which mesh a Unit should render based on its distance from the camera. The LOD Group component can be fine-tuned in the Unit Editor and is automatically imported from scene files.

Speaking of scene files, Crown 0.63 introduces support for the OBJ mesh format, improves the existing FBX importer with MikkTSpace tangent-space calculation, and also brings many corrections to texture and material extraction (special thanks to Gallonigher, one of our community members, for his valuable testing efforts!).

This new version also introduces several new physics joint components. These include the Fixed Joint for simple physics-based unit parenting, the Spring Joint to simulate bouncy behavior, a Limb Joint dedicated to ragdoll simulation, the highly configurable general-purpose D6 Joint, and more!

As part of the new joints work, Crown 0.63 also brings the ability to customize more physics simulation parameters as well as a new physics command to access useful physics debugging visualizations.

Overall, the level-editing experience has been greatly improved with the introduction of numerous enhancements throughout the toolset: the flythrough camera speed can now be easily adjusted via dedicated keybinds, objects and resources have gained drag & drop support, and hide and lock controls in the Level Tree are now smoother and more fun to use thanks to the ability to toggle them in bulk with a simple click-and-drag gesture.

Roadmap Updates

An important item has been checked off the roadmap with the introduction of the new SaveGame system that provides a simple asynchronous API for persisting the game state on all supported platforms. Another significant step forward is the relaxation of cross-resource reference checks, which now trigger a warning without hard-stopping the Data Compiler unnecessarily.

Some time has also been spent on cementing the hot-reloading support, which has been expanded to almost all resource types with the addition of meshes, sounds, fonts, sprites and sprite animations.

Legacy Hardware Support

This release brings back the good old OpenGL renderer on Linux, in addition to the recently introduced one based on Vulkan. A new boot config option has been added to choose between the two. The Vulkan renderer remains the default on Linux, with automatic fallback to GL.

This release also includes 30 corrections for issues present in the previous version. Check out the latest changelog for the complete list of improvements and fixes.

Join the Development Fund

If you're enjoying Crown and want to see more, consider chipping in - it helps keep the project moving.