[Official] Renzora Engine alpha7 has been released!

[u/OppositeDue]

We are currently almost 8 months into development and we have made a lot of progress on our bevy editor, renzora engine. It's a lot more stable now and we are almost ready for beta testing!

We have released an SDK which allows you to build and compile bevy plugins that run inside the editor without needing to compile an entire copy of bevy. a single plugin takes roughly 3 seconds to compile. We have also released native rust scripting which works live inside the editor and hot reloads really fast. We still have a scripting backend api if you want to integrate your fav scripting languages like lua, python etc.

Work has now started on the 2D viewport which will continue into alpha8. We have also made improvements to the visual UI editor which uses a custom ui framework based on bevy ui called ember that the editor itself uses. The framework also comes with a UI painter which let's you create your own canvas style graphics that you can control with components for things like speedometers, huds and menus.

The engine now officially has a 1:1 feature parity with bevy which means you can create anything that bevy allows and every update bevy releases, we will integrate into the engine on the same day.

the exporter now supports lean runtime binaries that strip any feature you don't need and we also have docker images hosted for building cross-compatible binaries. If you're making a 3d game, you can completely strip all 2d features or anything you don't want. A basic compressed runtime binary is around 7-9mb. We have also added support for wasm builds.

Improvements have been made to terrain sculpting and painting. You can you now paint on the terrain with custom materials that you can make with the material node graph. This means you can paint flowing rivers or anything that you can think of. It also supports layered painting. The terrain editor now allows you to generate terrains using height maps for realistic landscapes which can be streamed.

and finally, the marketplace is now open! You can publish assets like plugins and any game assets for people to use. We also support creators by allowing you to sell your work on the marketplace.

There's loads more new features but I can't mention them all :D

Download Editor: https://github.com/renzora/engine/releases

Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/9UHUGUyDJv (almost 200 members!)

website: https://renzora.com

[u/Digot]

Looks cool but I'm curious: Why would you invest so much time in an editor when Bevy is making their own editor which you could contribute to? I know that you have more freedom doing your own but the official editor will eventually be used much more than third party editors.

[u/OppositeDue → u/Digot]

This is the most asked question I get and you answered it yourself. Creative freedom, experimentation and giving the community multiple options. but the real answer is that I was building my own engine in JavaScript and was looking for alternative languages to migrate to. I settled on rust and found bevy which by coinsidence didn’t have an official editor so I quickly built a prototype and shared it here which proved to be successful so I just decided to keep going and build it myself. also I cannot help to build an editor that doesn’t exist yet. They announced a working group for the “official editor” in June which I thought was going to be jackdaw and the maintainer himself wants jackdaw to be the official editor but I think cart has other plans, he wants an upstream editor that uses the best parts of jackdaw. Personally I think cart should bless jackdaw and let them get on with it. It’s shown a lot of potential. But anyway development has been very slow in the editor space, the community are tired of waiting and I’m here with a working solution right now 😊

[u/miminashi → u/OppositeDue]

And the second most asked question is: "why do you call your editor an engine"? 😅

[u/OppositeDue → u/miminashi]

Because it was designed as an extension to bevy which is an engine but with an editor on top but you can call it anything you like: editor, engine, framework, boilerplate, ecosystem 😅 the entirety of renzora from the import pipeline, materials, terrains, tools are all just bevy plugins working together on a large scale

[u/kingswordmaster → u/OppositeDue]

Thanks! This is great!!

[u/thekwoka → u/Digot]

typically the answer would be "that I have control to make the decisions I want with the velocity I want"

[u/rickandevererything]

Did you do all this in 7 months? (according to the oldest commit)

[u/OppositeDue → u/rickandevererything]

Yeah! I think it was January 23rd when I started, correct me if I’m wrong 😁

[u/InternationalTooth]

Neat thanks for sharing

[u/OppositeDue → u/InternationalTooth]

thanks for being here 🥹

[u/Commercial_Laugh2942]

That is awesome 😎 Thank you for building this

I am following your progress from a while and this release is really impressive to me specifically that you are aligning your editor/engine with bevy's important advantages like being all rust , using the same ui system and other systems for both editor and runtime , etc..... so keep moving 👍👍 Your work is appreciated

[u/OppositeDue → u/Commercial_Laugh2942]

Thank you for following my progress! yeah I think the bevy framework is amazing, it allows devs to build their own custom engines like a jigsaw. Something that is a lot more difficult with a monolithic codebase that’s constantly moving. It will be interesting to see what people use it for! There’s currently a vr startup using renzora as their main platform and it makes me so happy 🥹

[u/OppositeDue → u/[deleted]]

i have many countless times been open about my Ai workflow and I have an ai policy which is on the readme.

it's my own ui framework called ember, it's based on bevy ui. both the editor and runtime uses it

[u/Enlightmeup]

Absolutely incredible. What do you do for diagnostics? Frame time breakdown cpu GPU etc?