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Exploding onto your screen: GPU particles in Turbulenz SDK 0.28.0

SDK 0.28.0 is the first major release of 2014. It includes new libraries (GPU particles) and upgrades to old ones (FontManager). There is also support for newly capable browsers (WebGL, IE11) and fond farewell to old way of doing things, not forgetting plenty of fixes.

GPU Particle API

We are proud to announce a brand new GPU-powered particle system API, designed to simulate and render hundreds of thousands of particles with minimal impact on the CPU. Now you can add pretty particle effects to your games without worrying about having to sacrifice performance. The comprehensive system which consists of a high-level API (for running out of the box) and a low-level API (for developers who customize the behaviour via an extensible interface) comes together with a sample showing how the pieces fit together. Go forth and fill your game with particles!

IE11 support

We're excited about Internet Explorer's arrival into the world of WebGL. Internet Explorer 11 is well on its way to supporting the WebGL 1.0 specification and while Microsoft are still implementing the spec, we've added a few work-around fixes for the features it is currently missing so you can try your Turbulenz Engine games on IE11 without a plug-in! This feature is still in beta at the moment, so please let us know how you get on and report any issue to the Turbulenz Engine Users Group.

FontManager multiple pages support and subtitles sample

Sometimes a single texture page is not enough to store all the bitmap font characters you need to render in game. This is likely the case when supporting Japanese and other large character sets. The FontManager has been upgraded to support multiple pages as well new properties such as line spacing. These new features are in use in the Subtitles sample, which demonstrates how fonts can be used to render written dialogue for in-game cut sequences.

Library upgrades

The Turbulenz Engine is comprised of many modular-libraries and we are always making improvements to performance, behaviour and robustness. Here are a selection of just a few that have benefited from upgrades in SDK 0.28.0: AssetCache, Camera, FontManager, PhysicsManager, Protolib, Scene, SoundDevice and Turbulenz Services.

Farewell old friend

SDK 0.28.0 marks the deprecation of the "plugin-debug" build mode. Moving forward, this means that apps will no longer be able to generate a debug build targeting plug-ins. Over the past few years, the debugging tools for targeting canvas have improved dramatically, while performance of plug-in targets has decreased. We now recommend all developers to use "canvas-debug" build mode to debug their applications. Release builds targeting the plug-in, Android and iOS can still be generated using "plugin-release".

In line with browser vendors and platform holders the Turbulenz SDK is winding down support for certain older browser/platform configurations. In SDK 0.28.0 we say farewell to Mac OS X 10.6, Safari 5 and the TurbulenzEngine binary installer for Mac. Previous SDKs will continue to function as normal and users wishing to play the latest Turbulenz Engine games on Mac should use Safari 6 with WebGL enabled or use the latest version of Google Chrome or Firefox.

A flood of fixes

SDK 0.28.0 also contains a large number of fixes and small changes. For the detailed release notes head here.

Download a packaged 0.28.0 installer for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux directly from hub.turbulenz.com.

Alternatively follow the latest engine SDK development via the open source turbulenz_engine github repo.

Happy Hacking