0.12.0 - Headless, networking, fixes and improvements

[NiklasJohansen]

PulseEngine 0.12.0 Release Notes

Networking

• New network module with client and server implementations. Supports TCP and UDP for reliable and fast transport.
• Message-based API with support for custom codecs.

Headless & Timing

• Headless mode: run the engine without window, graphics, audio, input, or asset IO. Perfect for servers.
• Timing: replaced glfwGetTime() with a high-resolution timer used across both normal and headless modes; improves stability of delta and fixed updates.

Engine & Lifecycle

• onStart in PulseEngineGame: runs right after engine init/assets loading.
• Updated PulseEngine.run<Game>(headless = true)

Configuration

• saveDirectory moved to the config module makes the save path configurable from config files.

• Config file parser: now accepts comments and empty lines, making long configs readable.

• Ticks & deltas renamed/typed:

  • fixedTickRate: Float (was Int).
  • fixedDeltaTime → fixedDeltaTimeSec.
  • deltaTime → deltaTimeSec.

Rendering & Platform

• macOS: improved compatibility by lowering the required OpenGL version (below 4.1).
• Bloom: quality and tuning improvements.
• Texture tiling for lights and occluders: proper support for repeating patterns in lighting pipelines.
• Mip derivative fix when tiling: resolves blurring/aliasing artifacts on repeated textures.
• Render pass API: refined for clearer composition and easier chaining.

Camera & Scene

• Camera:

  • Smoother origin interpolation to reduce jitter.
  • Zoom behavior improved and decoupled from target tracking so following targets doesn’t fight the zoom.

• Scene:

  • New query function for finding entities at a point.
  • Scanning improvements for systems/entities; The game should be put in its own package (not default package) to reduce scanning and startup time..
  • All SceneEntity and SceneSystem implementations moved out of core into a dedicated scene module to keep responsibilities clean.

UI & Text

• UI components:

  • Buttons can be disabled.
  • Text input supports max length.
  • Labels support custom alignment.
  • Scrollbars expose fraction control.

• Text rendering: newline (\n) support for multi-line labels.

Primitives

• New lightweight vector types: Vec2f and Vec2i.

Stability & Diagnostics

• Error handling improved: writes a crash log file on fatal errors, and includes a history of recent loggs.

Build & Project

• Cleaned up build file. Now uses the shadow plugin to create fat jars.

Bug Fixes

• Correct mip-map derivative selection when tiling textures. Removes borders at tile edges.