Xenko 3.0 game engine is here, now free and open-source

Xenko, a game engine owned by Silicon Studios has officially released its third version on August 2. The major change in Xenko 3.0 is the transition to being open-source. It also comes with changes made to the project system and added support for videos as well as hair, and skin rendering.

Open-source and support

Although Xenko won’t be supported officially anymore by Silicon Studios, the members of the Xenko development team will continue contributing to it. Virgile Bello, Lead Developer at Xenko Game Engine stated that he will personally work on it fulltime for the next couple of months in the official blog.

The new version is released under the MIT License on Github. It is well received by the open source community. The Xenko repository has already gained almost 700 stars and a couple of issues showing active involvement.

Changes in the Xenko 3.0 game engine

Other than the open-source transition, there are a few other changes in the engine itself. Xenko 3.0 has made the switch to the new C# project system, which makes your game csproj as simple as a PackageReference to Xenko. This makes package management more convenient.

It is now also possible to add video to your games with the latest release. This feature is not completely tested on all platforms so you may run into issues while implementing it. Hair and skin rendering support are also added, but like videos, this feature may need some improvements and tuning.

The package names have also been changed since the move to open-source. The SiliconStudio.Xenko package is now Xenko. Also the SiliconStudio.Core and SiliconStudio.* packages are now Xenko.Core. Your earlier projects should automatically be updated but a backup before the upgrade is recommended.

Virgile has set up a Patreon page if you’d like to support the project financially.

The release notes state that the future plan is to split Xenko further into separate packages such as Xenko.Graphics, Xenko.Physics and Xenko.Editor.

These are only the major changes. For the complete changelog and other minor updates in Xenko 3.0, you can see the Release Notes.

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