Flax engine capabilities?

[Cedric]

Hello,
First, I’m Cedric 41 years, from France.
My job is developer 3D/C++ for a french company that develop 3D CAD softwares.
My hobby is to develop with 3D engines for fun.
After viewing a publicity on youTube about Flax engine, I have decided to come here to look what’s flax engine exactly :).

I have many questions for my personnal purpose…
1: I would like to know if this is possible to use flax engine directly in C++ (UnManaged ?) without using the editor ?

2: It’s possible to embed Flax into QT application or other GUI ?

3: How many polygons can I load without killing the framerate ? For exemple I use 3D scene about seven millions of polygons…Flax can handle this type of mesh ?

4: Flax it’s robust and stable ? If there is a bug, Flax team can help rapidly to find a solution ?

5: I have looked the particles effect sample and I would like to know if the particle engine can handle particles to simulate rain or snow with collision on a complex 3d scene ?

Thanks for your time.

[Spectrix]

Welcome to Flax Engine and the Flax Community!

While I do not have enough C++ experience to answer your first 2 questions, I can answer the other 3.

My PC Specs

I did this testing on my PC, which has the following hardware: Core i7-10750H, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q, and 16 GB of dual-channel RAM.

How many polygons can I load without killing the framerate?

I took the popular Suzanne model from Blender and subdivided it many times so that it reached a grand total of 46 million vertices and 16 million tris. Then I imported it into Flax Engine using default settings. After adding it to the scene, it ran consistently above 30fps. So, yeah, I guess that it can do pretty well with large amounts of geometry.

Is Flax robust and stable? If there is a bug, does the Flax team can help rapidly to find a solution?

Yes, Flax Engine feels like a complete package. It’s not as stable as something like, say Godot or Unity, but it also is basically a one-man project. The engine is stable enough that it won’t be crashing on you for random reasons. The UI overall feels very polished. There are some rough edges, but those are being worked on.

In terms of the responsiveness of the team, I’d say it’s probably unmatched. I discovered a pretty large bug in the engine a few weeks back, and they fixed it within a week. They are very fast at fixing the issues in the engine.

Can Flax handle complex particle effects?

I built a terrain and had a particle system spawning 500,000 particles a second. The particles had collisions and spawned over the terrain, so they interacted with it. I consistently got over 60fps. So, yes, it can handle large and complex particle systems.

I hope this helped you out!

[Cedric]

Thanks for your complete answer !
That helped me a lot to decide to try this engine more seriously ;).
I have many ideas and if this engine keep this promises that was excellent !
So, yes Godot is stable but his render pipeline is not perfect, shadows are not correct and materials with alpha are not correct too…I search a real good 3D engine for realistic rendering and maybe a commercial project…I don’t know exactly for the moment

[Spectrix]

I’m glad it was a help to you!

Flax is definately missing some features at the moment in regards to the rendering that even Godot has, such as realtime GI. But what we do have is very impressive on a performance perspective.

If you were going to make a commercial 3D game, I’d recommend another engine like Unreal Engine or Unity for the time being until Flax matures a little. However, if you are primarily doing gamedev as a hobby, Flax might just be the best option for you.

I’d say in terms of realistic rendering, the score goes to Unreal, then Unity, then Flax, then Godot. But, in terms of how easy it is to set up, I’d say Flax, then Unreal, then Godot, then Unity. So, it depends on what you want to so. I hope this helps a little more!

[Cedric]

Hi,
I’ll try to program a litle with Flax and after i’ll give my impression here ;).
Thanks

[Cedric]

I have tested Flax with a small test scene from evermotion used for my work and I’m really impressed by the quality of the render pipeline :).
This is not simple to param the shadows correctly, I have scaled my scene to 0.01 to reduce the shadows acne but the result is really correct.
I think this engine is really promising !

[Cedric]

A litle more advanced texturing and render in Flax !
I love the rendering of this engine

Thanks Flax’s team !!!

[Spectrix]

Wow, that looks amazing!

[Cedric]

I have reworked a litle the source code of Flax to have a better shadowmap quality and super sampling for best rendering and that work perfect.
I have decided to use this engine for my project, I think it’s the best and the license system is really that I need.
Now is time to work and stop playing with the editor :).
I think post my project in the right categories of the forum in the next few months.
Thanks

[eshiofe_peter]

What kind of game are you planning on making

[Cedric]

Hi, this is not a game but a 3D application.
This is complicated because Flax use a system editor and this is not practical for my purpose.
Actually, i’ll try to modify the source code to use Flax without editor (to run directly in a window )…Not simple task for loading materials, meshes, shaders…