After several months, Galacean Engine v0.8 is officially released. In addition to the original Engine repository, this milestone also brings a toolkit (Engine Toolkit) repository with certain business-oriented and general-purpose functions for healthier ecosystem development.

Engine has added a character controller in the physics aspect, which can significantly reduce the development cost of character interaction business. It also introduces physics joints, allowing for quick completion of spring, hinge, and other physical simulation effects. The sprite aspect has added the slice (nine-grid) drawing mode. The text aspect has greatly reduced memory usage through internal mechanism optimization and improved performance. In terms of interaction, the Pointer Button function has been added, and the interaction functions are gradually becoming more complete.

Engine Toolkit repository includes the original Engine repository's camera controller, GPU picking, and performance data statistics functions. This milestone also adds auxiliary wireframe drawing, planar shadow material, skinned skeleton preview, Gizmo, post-processing outline, line drawing, and other functions. These functions are usually ready to use out of the box, and developers are also welcome to contribute to this repository. Additionally, some core functions of the Galacean Editor will be supported by the Engine toolkit in the future. Many insiders have already noticed that the new functions added in this milestone are all core functions required by the editor.

Engine

• Repository URL: https://github.com/galacean/engine
• Complete log of milestone 0.8: https://github.com/galacean/engine/releases/tag/v0.8.0-beta.5

Physics Updates

Added Character Controller

The new version of the engine supports the character controller component, which supports capsule or box shapes. The character controller can provide more physics-based feedback for characters, making it easy to achieve obstacle climbing, slope movement, and other functions in conjunction with the Animator animation capabilities.

Added Basic Physics Joints

Additionally, fixed joints, hinge joints, and elastic joints have been added. Joints make it easier to control the motion constraints of dynamic colliders, enriching the physical simulation interaction effects and making implementation simpler.

2D Updates

Text

The text system has undergone a major overhaul at the underlying level. The texture of the text is cached based on individual characters, significantly improving performance and memory usage for large amounts of text rendering. For example, in the official website's text barrage example, performance has improved by 20%. The left image below is before the overhaul, and the right image is after:

In terms of memory, based on character caching, the internal character textures can be reused to the maximum extent. After refactoring, the memory usage in the text barrage example has been reduced by at least 50%. The memory comparison is shown below, with the left being before refactoring and the right being after refactoring (empty canvas memory 33.6 M):

Sprites

The sprite section has undergone extensive refactoring, bringing two major updates:

• First, the renderer can choose the drawing mode Simple and Sliced. Simple is the default mode corresponding to the drawing in version 0.7, while Sliced is the newly added nine-slice drawing. Developers can set the Border of the Sprite to achieve the desired stretching effect.

• At the same time, we have placed the properties that control the rendering size in the SpriteRenderer, allowing developers to set the width and height.

Interaction Updates

InputManager has added three new capabilities, removing the dependency on H5 native events:

• Support for the scroll wheel, allowing developers to directly obtain the change in the scroll wheel in the current frame within the script system.
• Get touch button status, allowing developers to get the global touch button status through isPointerHeldDown, isPointerDown, and isPointerUp.
• Get touch cursor position, allowing developers to get the cursor's position and displacement in screen space in the current frame through pointerPosition and pointerMovingDelta.

Animation Updates

BlendShape animation capabilities have been enhanced in WebGL 1.0 mode. In previous versions, the maximum number of BlendShape animations supported in WebGL 1.0 mode was limited, and exceeding the limit would prevent playback at runtime. The new version uses a dynamic strategy to solve the maximum number limit, dynamically playing the BlendShape animations with the greatest weight impact based on the animation weights at runtime, improving the animation effect and usability in WebGL 1.0 degraded mode.

Other

• The camera supports atomic clearing capabilities for Color, Depth, and Stencil, allowing more flexible control over rendering blend effects.
• Shader.getMacroByName adds variable macro caching capabilities, and ShaderData adds the getMacros() method to get the current macro set.
• Math classes (Vector3, Vector4, Color, etc.) add the copyFrom() method to support data interaction with Object objects.
• Renderer adds the priority property, enhancing rendering sorting capabilities and resolving rendering conflicts for objects with the same depth.
• The pivot and region of Sprite are adjusted to the lower-left corner.
• Added component dependency decorator dependentComponents, making it easier to configure component dependencies.

0.9 Milestone Preview

Next, we will focus more on advanced features that users care about, helping developers improve rendering effects and development efficiency. In terms of rendering, we plan to add real-time shadows that support large scene rendering. In terms of animation, we will support arbitrary property editing, and in terms of effects, we will add trailing effects.

Easter Egg

The editor has undergone a major design iteration and code refactoring in this milestone, supporting the creation of three types of projects: 2D, 3D, and digital humans. More practical business templates, such as AR and animation effects, will be expanded in the future. In addition, the editor now supports third-party plugin capabilities, allowing business functions to be quickly supported based on the plugin mechanism. In the next few months, we will conduct further internal testing and feature improvements, looking forward to meeting you by the end of the year.

As shown in the figure below, we have created a digital human plugin to meet the needs of digital human business such as face pinching, dressing, and animation.

How to Contact Us

Galacean Engine Open Source Community Group (DingTalk):

Galacean Engine Open Source Community Group (WeChat):

If the WeChat QR code is invalid, you can add the group admin on WeChat: zengxinxin2010