Is Xenko fit enough for a commerical game? Does anybody use it already?

#1

I used Xenko for ~14 days now to evaluate its capabilities, and I would say that on its fundamental engineering level, it’s already way better than Unity. I hope I can use Xenko instead of Unity for a commercial project starting now.

I’m aware that Xenko got a few short comings with its feature set. But that’s fine for now. I’m having an eye on the Road Map. Even to some degree the bugs are fine. Though, there is a threshold that I may have already hit. At this point I’m wondering if it’s even worth looking further into Xenko. Or whether I should choose another game engine.

The problems I encountered so far:

  • Render effects get mixed into the GUI.
  • Breaking Prefabs links may not work cleanly. Game Studio continues to search for a deleted prefab and refuse to build.
  • Change Panel Type crashes the editor with canvas/stack panels. (Could break entire page files when on elements close to root.)
  • Stack Panel sort-order seem not to affect the depth at times.
  • One of my GUI panels now is freezing the entire editor when opened in GUI editor. I can’t tell yet if the page file is beyond saving. Or how this even happened.
  • Memory leaks when changing Tone Mapping? Well, Windows said it ran out of memory and all my monitors turned black, locking down the entire OS. Funnily, I can’t reproduce the problem anymore.

The game I’m trying to make is a 3D Isometric Survival Open World Shooter Hack-and-Slash ARPG. With exported meshes from MagicaVoxel. The two player coop mode, may or may not make it into the game.

Seems the only commercial game so far is Children of the Galaxy. But I noticed that the dev Empty Keys didn’t even use Xenko’s GUI. But made its own that is also available on GitHub under MIT license.

Does anybody beside of Empty Keys, attempt to make a commercial game with Xenko?

2 Likes
#2

There’s another game in development called Universe or Nothing by Wired Games (see blog post [here])(Universe or Nothing - A space sim being built in Xenko).

It seems fit enough, however, it’s a relatively new engine and still in beta. Being an early adopter may be risky, then again, the whole free and open source thing is very nice to have.

2 Likes
#3

Mark here, developer of Universe or Nothing.

I believe that for an experienced developer (programmer) Xenko is already a viable engine for a commercial game. The underlying engine architecture and API are fantastic, I absolutely love it. I have used Unity for a long time, and Xenko is far superior in terms of software development. Xenko has, for my use, been far more performant and stable than Unity.

However if you require the use of Game Studio then I don’t think I could recommend Xenko at this time. It is making great strides, but in terms of features and stability the editor (from my experience) is not yet ready for a production game.

If you are a programmer, as I am, you can totally ignore Game Studio and do everything in code (as I have). The base API is almost identical to XNA/MonoGame, so if you have experience of either of those you’ll feel right at home.

I have not had much experience of Xenko’s built-in UI system, as I had already been using Noesis GUI in Unity and continued to use it in Xenko (using their C# API).

Good luck!

Mark

1 Like
#4

Seems I overlooked a game in the Showcase category. Thanks for the info!

Too bad that I’m not too techy. Otherwise I may have used Xenko already. I keep using Unity with F# and Voxel Importer until next game. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#5

Thanks for checking in, and keep an eye on Xenko for your next game.

I am not affiliated with Xenko in any way, but it is a great engine and I believe it deserves some attention.

Best of luck with your game!

Mark

2 Likes
#6

I agree. The same goes for F#. I wouldn’t have considered Unity if I couldn’t use F# with it. Since Xenko is C#, and F# just like C# is based on .Net/CLR. It’s not even much of a problem to use F# with Xenko.

1 Like
#7

Please explain how Xenko is way better than Unity on its fundamental engineering level.

Is Xenko open source? If so, to me that already means it is inferior…based on the too many fingers in one pot principle.

#8

Silicon Studio develops Xenko. Just like Epic Games develops Unreal Engine 4. Both are open source. And nobody else does change the official version of the game engine.

The benefit of open source is, that you can download a copy of the source, and do your own bug fix if something is broken. Eventually, that bug fix could even find its way to the main version of future Xenko versions. If you requested a pull on GitHub. Also, some extensions may require engine source modification. So, having open source is again a plus.

1 Like
#9

Having similar issues. Also using flares post effect with an illuminated billboard or Sprite that is spawned via scripts causes major graphical bugs as if it were too bright (black squares cover the screen) where as the SAME OBJECT that already exists in a prebuilt scene is just fine.

Otherwise though, I’d say it’s pretty great

#10

howdy commandertuna,

One thing that a number of us in the community do is create a separate render stage for UI components using render groups. We then bypass the post effects for UI (or you can even create a set of post effects for UI if you do want some of the effects, but not flares or bloom or etc…).

This is all done in the compositor. I would recommending creating a new compositor and specifying that one in game settings before playing around with it.

Feel free to jump in our discord, someone can likely help you do this with a few screen shots.

-Jarmo

3 Likes
#11

Alright, I’m busy making another game at the moment and that old project is on hold but when I get back to it I will consider that