Kex Engine
"The Kex engine is a very ambitious programming project that I’ve started around summer 2012. Kex is a simple open source FPS engine created from the ground up that will be ideally designed for a small-person team, but mostly will serve as a sandbox/teaching tool for modders or indie developers. The main motivation behind this project is to advance my knowledge outside of game design and further help understand the concepts of designing a system and of course, to advance my scripting skills even further. Though while the engine is currently lacking rendering features, the main focus is geared towards gameplay features and usability." — Samuel Villarreal
The Kex Engine (alternately capitalized as KEX) is a game engine framework and renderer created by Samuel "Kaiser" Villarreal, first started as an outgrowth and extension of the Doom64 EX renderer. It is used as the basis for the remastered version of the original Blood, entitled Blood: Fresh Supply, developed by Night Dive Studios under license from Atari. This is adapted from unofficial work Villarreal did known as Blood EX. The current version of the engine used in commercial projects is Kex 3, while its earlier hobby project incarnation was Kex 2 (with Doom64 EX being Kex 1). It had previously been used in remastered or enhanced versions of System Shock, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Turok 2: Seeds of Evil and Forsaken, plus more limitedly in The Original Strife: Veteran Edition. It has since been used for the 2020 re-release of Doom 64 for modern systems, as well as the 2021, 2023, and 2024 enhanced remasters of the original Quake, Quake II, as well as Doom and Doom II, in addition to Shadow Man Remastered, PowerSlave: Exhumed (based on the earlier unofficial Powerslave EX port), Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition, Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition, Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion, Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster, PO'ed: Definitive Edition, and Killing Time: Resurrected. Following the release of Fresh Supply on May 9, 2019, Nightdive has begun a push for Kex to other developers, using Blood footage prominently. On March 22, 2023 it was announced that Night Dive was purchased by Atari. As of 2021, KEX 4 is currently in development and exchanges the multi-threaded game loop for GPU-level parallelism.
Features[edit]
- Script-based debugging tools
- Actor-driven level format
- Javascript/Lua-driven component objects (similar to that of Unity)
- Easily execute script code in console
