FreshEngine™ FAQ

Why FreshEngine™?

Many engines are built on the PC first and then converted to consoles with a top-down approach, compromising a lot of the original features due to consoles being generally more restrictive.

This often translates to poor performances and inexistant use of the strengths of the platform.

FreshEngine™ has been designed for consoles and implemented on the consoles first, with a bottom-up approach. It is not a DirectX or OpenGl wrap-up as it deals directly with the console low level libraries.

As it is built from the hardware specifications, FreshEngine™ has an almost like-for-like platform feature support. This approach provides incredible performances, extra features, added flexibility, total control and low memory footprint.

How does FreshEngine™ work?

With every version of FreshEngine™ comes a LUA scripting interface that allows you to manipulate your scene content, setup effects and interactions, react to controls, pre-process data, and more. You can even build your own real-time tools with it. It is very possible to create a complete game using the LUA interface only, provided that process intensive tasks are left to the engine built-in functions.

With the licensed PSP™ version, we provide a C++ API so you can build your own process-intensive functions on top of the many already built into FreshEngine™.

FreshEngine™ provides a flexible and symmetrical set of features that can be assembled and combined using your own methodology to create whatever effect or system you like. For example you can combine bones animation, dynamic palette update and projection texturing to create a unique and intriguing water effect. This explicit pipeline results in very distinct look according to your own methodologies and avoids the ‘specific engine look’ found with some other engines. You are not bound to a pre-defined pipeline and your game will not look like the one from the other developers.

FreshEngine™ uses Maya® as the authoring tool. Objects can be created within Maya® using a subset of Maya®’s features. We present the subset in the documentation. Scenes can be assembled within Maya® and exported using our freely available export pluggin. Using an off-the-shelf authoring tool allows us to focus on the quality and flexibility of the run time code and leave the task of building nice authoring tools to specialists. We will expand our support to more authoring tools in future versions.

A series of custom FreshEngine™ properties are added to standard Maya® objects and can be edited within Maya® and then exported along with the objects. These properties are visible on the target platform through FreshStudio our front end tool, they can be edited in real time and stored in a script file.

Most nodes can be also be created and edited in real time on the target platform in FreshStudio. You can develop your own realtime tools and methodologies using LUA and the realtime connection to the target platform provided by FreshStudio.

How do I get started?

To get an idea of what FreshEngine™ can do for you, please have a look at the many resources found on this website. You will find screenshots and videos under the Media menu, please also check FreshEngine™ documentation in the Documentation menu.

Then feel free to download the free PC version of FreshEngine™. Before proceeding to the FreshEngine™ installation, be sure you have Maya® 2010 or above properly installed on your computer. You can download a free 30 days evaluation of Maya® from the Autodesk® website.

After installation, a good start would be to have a look at all the available samples. You can start playing around by copy-pasting from these samples.

If you have any question, please ask in the public forum or contact us at Cette adresse email est protégée contre les robots des spammeurs, vous devez activer Javascript pour la voir.

I want to make a PSN Minis 2D game, do I need Maya®?

No. Maya® is used to create complex 3D assets that can be exported to FreshEngine™. If your game is going to be 2D only, you just need a program to create textures (such as Photoshop®). Using LUA scripting, you can create 2D planes (or even 3D primitives for that matters)  and assign textures to them. You can create flippbook animations, procedural animations or even animation channels in LUA so don't worry, everything is there to make a great 2D game in a snap.

Additionnaly, you can use LUA to generate geometries and save them in FreshEngine™ format. So basically you can create procedural objects, or even build your own modeler ! But that would be insane wouldn't it?

What is the price for a FreshEngine™ PSP™ license?

FreshEngine™ PSP™is not yet available for licensing to registered developers, we expect it to be available later this year, please stay tuned.

Besides, we have yet to finalize the licensing terms and conditions. Please stay tuned.

Meanwhile you can contact us at Cette adresse email est protégée contre les robots des spammeurs, vous devez activer Javascript pour la voir. for any inquiries.

I'm a registered PSP developper, how do I proceed?

FreshEngine™ PSP™is not yet available for licensing to registered developers, we expect it to be available later this year, please stay tuned.

Meanwhile you can contact us at Cette adresse email est protégée contre les robots des spammeurs, vous devez activer Javascript pour la voir. for any inquiries.

What is the price for a FreshEngine™ PlayStation®3 license?

FreshEngine™ for PlayStation®3 is still WIP and not available for licensing yet. More info soon.

Can I create a commercial product with the freely available FreshEngine™ for PC?

No. The freely available version of FreshEngine™ for PC has been created for the purpose of prototyping a project before having official console developer status.

This is not a full featured PC engine as one would expect. It can however be used for non commercial applications such as students projects or homebrew projects.