Hi

As many of you may know, i'm the developer of GLXTreem and a huge fan of DelphiX. Even through i havn't been that visible either here or on my own page of late due to alot of things happening in real life i still have been lurking on these forums and done some thinking

My engine started out as a 2D rendering engine that worked similar to DelphiX but it has evolved to be more or less a 3D only engine, even if it support some 2D stuff, but thats mostly to be used as gui stuff and so forth.

There's been alot of talk latly about 2D and opengl rendering, both here and on the GLXTreem site, and DelphiX is, frankly outdated, with poor hardware support and not as fast as it could be.

This combined with that i have for a time been considering writing a 2D only, highly optimized engine using OpenGL with all the new hardware features (VBO's Multitexturing, Pixeshalders and 32 textures) has made me considering starting this project up.

So, i thought, what about posting a public wish-list on theese forums, to see what features the coders here likes about, for example DelphiX and whats their shortcommings.

I have a few idea's myself, mostly conserning how the engine will work and some features
  • Thread based timer, (or standard app.idle depending on further testing)
    Higly optimized image list using VBO's (fallback to simple glBegin / end), support for tiles and automatic animations. (Freeimage probably)
    Tile engine. Using view port optimizations. Possibly lightmaps, isometric etc
    Sprite engine, quite straightforward. Per-pixel colisions etc.
    Per pixel lighting via GLSL for 2D light effects.
    Font renderer, with support for styled text, wordwrap etc.
    Xml based gui engine (probably a clone of the GLXTreem one)
    Scripting engine using lua ( to interact with the spriteengine + tileengine + gui engine)
    Package support for all components, for single file distributions.


That is what i have thought of so far. But i really would like to hear what you people would want from an engine like this.