Fitzel Fatzefü

Fitzel is a game engine with an editor: you build a world in it -- terrain, rivers, roads, towns, props, lights and scripts -- press Play to play it, and export the result as a standalone game. Gameplay is Lua; the tools stay C++.

What's new in 0.6.0

• Modelling in the editor, the Blender way. Tab opens an Edit Mode with Blender's keys. Vertices, edges and faces are shaped from one floating panel: extrude, bevel, loop cut, spin, duplicate in a row or along a spline path, a material per face. A modifier stack (subdivision, decimate, wireframe, array, solidify) works on top of a mesh without changing it. Every built-in shape becomes a mesh when you edit it and still collides the way it is drawn.
• Whole towns from a handful of numbers. A street grid that becomes real roads (graded, bridged over rivers, editable afterwards), zoned blocks, civic buildings, houses planned from a room programme with floor plans you can walk through, pavements, kerb stones, bus stops, working traffic lights, street signs in DIN lettering and street lamps that come on at dusk.
• Traffic. Cars and buses driven on the CPU that turn and steer their wheels, crash when hit hard and stop for wrecks and for your car. People walk the streets as prefabs.
• A living landscape and a tree generator. An alpine valley with distant mountain ranges, forests that grow where they would, wind, animals, fish and a herd. Trees are grown from presets in the editor, saved as .glb with bark relief and planted as a species. Haze follows the clouds.
• Characters and third person. Animation graph states play a model's own animations -- the idle and walk a rigged figure brings -- and fade between them, blended joint by joint. A clip can play backward and at a pace the game sets, so a figure backing up no longer moonwalks. A follow camera can orbit with the mouse, and walker.lua walks a figure relative to it: a third-person controller to start from.
• Prefabs travel between projects. Export packs a prefab into one .zip with everything it needs: models, materials, textures, scripts, sounds and its animation graphs. Import shows every file before anything is written and never overwrites a file the package did not bring. Prefabs carry their animation graphs into other scenes too, and Unpack Prefab turns an instance into ordinary objects.
• Faster. Twice the frame rate in a big landscape. Big scenes load much faster and need about half the memory. The path tracer now sees the whole world: forest, water, far mountains and sky.
• And more: the tools on the toolbar, Ctrl+S to save, textures on imported models the right way up, opacity maps, triggers that react to physics objects and can play a synth like a key. A German overview of all features is in docs/FEATURES.md.

Everything that changed since 0.5.0: v0.5.0...v0.6.0.

Download and install

Fitzel-0.6.0-Setup.exe, [GRÖSSE], for Windows 10/11, 64-bit.
SHA-256: [SHA-256]

• Installs for the current user, no admin rights needed, into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Fitzel. It has to be a writable folder, because the editor keeps its settings, crash recovery and (by default) your projects next to its exe.
• You choose what goes in:
  • the engine (editor, player, shaders, Lua scripts, Visual C++ runtime), about 45 MB;
  • default textures for terrain and road, about 280 MB;
  • more CC0 textures, an HDRI and two models, about 1 GB.
• Uninstalling removes only what was installed. Your projects and settings stay.
• Windows SmartScreen will probably warn you, because the installer is not code-signed. Click More info → Run anyway.
• Graphics: needs a GPU with OpenGL 3.3; OpenGL 4.3 is used when available and is required for the GPU path tracer.

Not included

• Sounds. The weather sounds and the sound effects of the Lua games are not shipped, so the games play silently. The scripts look for their sounds by file name (e.g. shot.wav, plopp.wav); put .wav files with those names into content\sounds in the installation folder.
• ffmpeg. Video import needs ffmpeg on the PATH, e.g. from ffmpeg.org.
• Runtime for exported games. A game made with Export Game needs the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable (x64) on the player's PC. The editor itself brings its own copy.

Licences

The bundled content is CC0: textures, HDRI and models from Poly Haven, bark and leaves from ambientCG. content\CONTENT-LICENSES.txt lists every file. The notices of the libraries the engine uses are in third-party-licenses.md in the installation folder.

Fitzel Dutzeldei

Fitzel is a game engine and editor for things that move through a landscape: roads and rivers derived from splines over streamed terrain, a raster renderer and a path tracer that agree with each other, and Lua for the game on top.

What's new in 0.5.0

• One way of shading, from viewport to render. The viewport and the path tracer now share the same GGX BRDF, with metalness and glass by refractive index. Around it: AgX tonemapping with an exposure meter, temporal anti-aliasing, screen-space reflections, contact shadows, sun shadows on grass and trees, light shining through leaves, terrain layers that meet by height, and a baked probe grid so a tunnel is darker than a field.
• The path tracer runs on the GPU. A compute kernel traces the whole path, and the viewport gains a Pathtraced mode. It is one of five shading modes, next to wireframe, solid, solid lit and rendered.
• Anything the Inspector shows can move. A keyframe timeline for every field, an Animator component, and state machines over clips that a script can drive. An object may carry several scripts, a level can open with a camera flythrough, and the multishot camera cuts a car advert out of a dozen camera moves.
• Roads that meet. Junctions follow from the drawing, a whole circuit comes from one seed, and bare paths carry objects placed along them. Skies are a stack of cloud layers with named presets; rain, curtains, flags and soft bodies are new too.
• An editor you can use without a steady hand. Orthographic views, a middle mouse button to slide the view, new objects placed at the 3D cursor, mesh paint, a UV panel, crash recovery, and a new theme with a toolbar sized to be hit.
• Five complete games in nothing but Lua: Sokoban, Pinball, SKYSTRIKE, Space Invaders and Arkanoid. Put one script on an empty object, press Play. They are in the scripts folder of the installation.

Everything that changed since 0.4.0: v0.4.0...v0.5.0.

Download and install

Fitzel-0.5.0-Setup.exe, 1.42 GB, for Windows 10/11, 64-bit.
SHA-256: ecdc8194b77f6a9119539a3eca77cd0c0ac5be619a305bf987ed203cb83ce2f4

• Installs for the current user, no admin rights needed, into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Fitzel. It has to be a writable folder, because the editor keeps its settings, crash recovery and (by default) your projects next to its exe.
• You choose what goes in:
  • the engine (editor, player, shaders, Lua scripts, Visual C++ runtime), about 45 MB;
  • default textures for terrain and road, about 280 MB;
  • more CC0 textures, an HDRI and two models, about 1 GB.
• Uninstalling removes only what was installed. Your projects and settings stay.
• Windows SmartScreen will probably warn you, because the installer is not code-signed. Click More info → Run anyway.
• Graphics: needs a GPU with OpenGL 3.3; OpenGL 4.3 is used when available and is required for the GPU path tracer.

Not included

• Sounds. The weather sounds and the sound effects of the Lua games are not shipped, so the games play silently. The scripts look for their sounds by file name (e.g. shot.wav, plopp.wav); put .wav files with those names into content\sounds in the installation folder.
• ffmpeg. Video import needs ffmpeg on the PATH, e.g. from ffmpeg.org.
• Runtime for exported games. A game made with Export Game needs the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable (x64) on the player's PC. The editor itself brings its own copy.

Licences

The bundled content is CC0: textures, HDRI and models from Poly Haven, bark and leaves from ambientCG. content\CONTENT-LICENSES.txt lists every file. The notices of the libraries the engine uses are in third-party-licenses.md in the installation folder.