Thoughts and impressions

#1

After i first saw the “Xenko Overview Video” on YouTube I was very excited. Finally a C# engine - and it even looks great! Looking into some examples and the community however i come to realize that just a handful of people actually use it - or they try to use it.

The project itself seems to be well developed, but when it comes to usability i can see alot of routine-blinded corners. The forums are obviously very … exotic, confusing and disconcerting to handle. The lack of activity doesnt improve this feeling at all.

There are no real tutorials (2 very generic ones on YT). The best starting kick I’ve found was a code fragment in the forums. The example projects are way too overloaded to find something useful, specially if you want to start at zero, creating your first test project from scratch.

The IDE lives in the shadows. You need it to create a project, then you just use it to preview your code. It is nowhere near UE or Unity. What i would really love is that it would get closer to them. Specially with features like landscapes, which hopefully will be added sooner then later. It would be a dream to find a way for a seamless switching between custom code and the IDE by breaking down basic elements (and properties of elements, in a way of resource management) for the IDE (landscapes, materials, material instances [important!], models, player controllers, game modes, animations, effects, etc.), and do the rest with personal code.

So a little personal conclusion for anyone who still reads this:

  • It’s too hard to get started
  • Confusing forums (please consider wbb/phpbb/vb)
  • No real tutorials or generic state-of-the-art implementations available
  • Missing basic features (lord landscapes the third)
  • Unclear concept of seperation between IDE and custom code
  • Unclear actual performance (big question mark)

Thank you for reading my impression!

1 Like
#2

Hi @Tymax,

While I do not work at Silicon Studios or on the Xenko project, I thought I would reply.

It is true that there is lack of learning materials at the moment and you pretty much have to teach yourself. But you can always ask questions in the Forums, on the Q&A site or even over in the Gitter Chat Room. And even though the community is quiet the development team is quite approachable and answer questions reasonably quickly if no one else does.

It should be noted that the project has not left beta yet and the development team are hard at work getting stuff built. Hopefully by the time they get close to releasing the first production version the lack of documentation/tutorials will be rectified.

I have never used UE or Unity so I can’t really comment on there similarities. But I have watched Unity tutorials on YT and managed to replicate them in Xenko for the most part.

It is unfortunate that the community is so quiet. I have been hanging around almost from the start. Every now and then someone discovers the engine asks a bunch of questions then seemingly disappear. It’s kind of disappointing that the “community” is struggling to grow. But unless people stick around and contribute this is not going to improve. So I would like to encourage you to stick around a bit or at least keep an eye on the progress of the engine and maybe come back when it’s fully baked.

Cheers,
dfkeenan

#3

Thanks for your reply!
I hope that some of the points from my conclusion will be handled in the future.
As i saw they are searching for a marketing manager. That guy will fix at least 4 of the listed points :slight_smile:
Maybe i will come back in a year or so and check how it has matured. And hopefully the obstacles for fresh starters are gone by that time!

Because more happy starters equals more tutorials, more examples, more content, more help and a fast growing community in general.

Cheers,
Mark