Xtreme3D version history

Xtreme3D 0.x to 2.x (2003-2006)

Xtreme3D project was launched in 2003. The engine was written in Delphi using GLScene, de facto standard 3D engine for Object Pascal, by German programmer known as Xception. Unfortunately, we don't know his real name.

The first stable version of Xtreme3D (0.9) was released in 2003. Its possibilities were quite modest: it supported only MD2 and MD3 animated models, 3DS, MS3D, and OBJ static models, a number of built-in primitives, sprites, 2D and 3D text, lensflare, particles and skydome. Its API resembled native GML function syntax.

The main goal of the project was creating an engine suitable for an RPG like Dungeon Master. While originally the author haven't planned any further development of Xtreme3D, in later versions its functionality quickly evolved to exceed the needs of a specific game genre.

For example, version 1.7 (2004) featured dynamic water. However, the much more serious breakthrough was version 2.0 (2006): it featured total API revision, material library and lightmaps support, dynamic cubemaps, whole lot of new models formats support, render-to-texture, loading assets from PAK archive, built-in shaders like bump mapping and cel shading, multitexturing, octrees and quadtrees, DDS support, and, importantly, an integrated physics engine - ODE.

The latest release from Xception (2.0.2.0), in addition to numerous bugfixes, featured two major innovations: terrain renderer and DCE, an engine for collision detection and responce. Functionality of the engine equaled the level of 1997-2003 commercial games. Xtreme3D 2.0 allowed to create something similar in terms of graphics to Quake 2 and 3, Half-Life, GTA 3, The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, and so on (i.e., everything from pre-shader era).

Unfortunately, Xception abandoned his project. The engine was closed source and therefore haven't been developed for a long time. Technology, meantime, moved forward.

Xtreme3D 3.0 (25.08.16)

Since 2009 Russian-speaking Xtreme3D community constantly nurtured an idea to recreate the engine from scratch, fixing bugs and adding the missing functionality. Bearing in mind that Xtreme3D is a thin wrapper of GLScene, this task seemed simple and purely technical. However, unforeseen problems arose, and the project had been delayed. Ultimately this work, begun in 2009 and experienced a long period of stagnation and a few flashes of activity, was completed only in 2016. This is how Xtreme3D 3.0 appeared.

This version of Xtreme3D, like its ancestor, is written in Delphi using popular GLScene library - in fact, the engine can be seen as almost full GLScene wrapper for Game Maker. Xtreme3D 3.0 is based on modified and extended GLScene 1.0.0.0714.

The following is a brief list of new features in Xtreme3D 3.0:

- GLSL shaders support (GLSL version 1.1 and 1.2)
- Shadow maps
- MSAA anti-aliasing 2x and 4x with NVIDIA Quincunx support
- Fast offscreen rendering using p-buffers
- Proxy objects
- LOD (LODka 3D) and B3D (Blitz3D) model formats support
- MD3 tags support
- Animation blending
- Material scripts
- TexCombine shader
- Phong shader
- Procedural textures based on Perlin noise
- Linear waves support for the water
- New geometric primitives including frustum, dodecahedron, icosahedron, and teapot
- Improved explosion effect for meshes (in particular, now it is possible to return exploded mesh into its original state)
- Rendering of grids
- Debug rendering of Dummycube objects
- Many new functions for Camera objects
- An ability to copy the transformation matrix (local and absolute) from one object to another. You can also attach objects to skeleton bones and update the local matrix of an object manually, which allows to use any transformation model without restriction to Euler angles
- An ability to apply impulses (instant velocity changes) to dynamic objects in DCE. Also DCE now supports terrain
- Improved ODE physics. Better support for Freeform objects (both for static and dynamic bodies), as well as terrain. In addition, it is now possible to set position when creating a geometry.
Xtreme3D 3.1 (30.09.16)

The first update of the new Xtreme3D branch. Most important changes include:

- Improved API for Freeform objects. It is now possible to assemble Freeform manually from vertices and triangles. There are functions to transform individual meshes, as well as to save Freeform to file
- New file formats support: CSM and LMTS (which where absent in 3.0), X, ASE, DXS
- Ragdoll support for ODE
- Movement object, which allows to define movement trajectories with line segments, Bezier curves, cubic splines and NURBS
- Improved BumpShader, which now supports shadow maps and automatic tangent space calculation
- Improved PhongShader, which now supports textures
- HUDShape objects - 2D shapes including rectangle, circle, line segment and polygon
- Improved API for sprites - now they support texture atlases (i.e., using only a portion of the texture - to make an animated sprite, for example), as well as user-defined origin for sprite rotation
- Transparency support for PNG
- Functions for querying texture size.

Xtreme3D 3.2 (21.10.16)

- FBO support. With FBOs you can effectively implement multipass rendering and various complex postprocessing effects
- New, shader-compatible multitexturing mechanism for materials. Now material can have up to 8 textures, and GLSL shaders can automatically accept them as parameters
- ViewerRenderObject function for rendering individual objects and their children
- MaterialLoadTexture function
- Fixed a bug in ObjectSetParent function.

Xtreme3D 3.3 (26.11.16)

- New Freeform functions that allow to read and modify geometry (vertices, normal, indices, etc.)
- Material overriding for ordinary viewers and FBOs. This allows to specify a single material which should be applied to objects when rendering, ignoring their own materials
- Different color formats support for FBO, including 16 and 32-bit floating point
- FBORenderObjectEx function
- Optional rendering shadows to user-specified FBO instead of internal one
- ViewerGetSize, ViewerGetPosition, ViewerIsOpenGLExtensionSupported.

Xtreme3D 3.4 (30.12.16)

- TTF fonts support via Freetype library and rendering UTF-8 text
- ObjectHash functions (hash table for storing any Xtreme3D objects)
- Better FBORenderObjectEx - new arguments allow you to selectively clean color buffer and depth buffer, and copy the contents of the FBO in the main framebuffer
- Passing view and inverse view matrices to GLSL shader, and a special parameter that allows the shader to know whether there is a texture in a specified texture unit
- For performance reasons the engine now doesn't automatically generate octree and tangents/binormals when loading Freeform from file. This should be done manually, if necessary, with FreeformGenTangents and FreeformBuildOctree functions
- Fixed a bug in MaterialCubeMapLoadImage. Also in GLSL shaders now support seamless cubemapping for arbitrary mip levels of a cubemap (if GL_ARB_seamless_cubemap is supported).

Xtreme3D 3.5 (04.02.17)

- ClipPlane object
- Improved PhongShader and BumpShader, they now support lsSpot type lights, fog, transparency, and shadeless rendering (if lighting is turned off in the viewer settings). Transparency is set via the alpha channel of the diffuse texture, or, alternatively, through the alpha value of material's diffuse color (only for PhongShader)
- New material functions: MaterialCullFrontFaces, MaterialSetZWrite
- New ODE functions to manually set velocity, position and rotation for dynamic bodies.

Xtreme3D 3.6 (17.12.17)

This is one of the biggest releases in 3.x branch, development of this version lasted for more than six months.

- Support for Windows encoding for TTF fonts, as well as any custom 8-bit encoding
- New material functions: MaterialSetTextureExFromLibrary, MaterialGetNameFromLibrary
- New Freeform functions: FreeformSetMaterialLibraries, FreeformMeshFaceGroupSetLightmapIndex, FreeformMeshFaceGroupGetLightmapIndex
- Special proxy object for Actors (ActorProxy)
- ActorMoveBone and ActorRotateBone are back. Also there is a function to switch visibility of Actor meshes (ActorMeshSetVisible)
- ObjectInFrustrum is back
- Functions for getting mouse and keyboard input
- Functions for window creation and management
- Functions for RGB color packing
- Experimental functions to save the scene to file and load from file
- GLSL shaders now don't show an empty error message is there are no errors
- Fixed bug with incorrect specular highlights in PhongShader and BumpShader.