Apps/Engine

An island at 1920×1080, with every rendering feature switched on and every knob exposed. This is the application the screenshots come from and the application most of these guides were written by reading.

How it configures itself

The entire initialization is a constructor. Two quality defaults are overridden and the camera is set; everything else is engine default.

internal App()
{
    Title = "SeasonEngine";
    StorageService.DirectoryBase = "SeasonEngine";
    BackgroundColor = Season.Basic.Colors.White;
    BasicResolution = new Vector2(1920, 1080);

    RenderQuality.DefaultGlobalIllumination = GiMode.Ddgi;
    RenderQuality.DefaultAerialIntensity = 12f;

    ResetCamera();
}

Both overrides carry a paragraph of reasoning in the source. The aerial intensity of 12 is the one worth reading: it is a lerp weight rather than a multiplier, the physical value is 1, and at 1 the distant mountains gain about two units of blue out of 255 in a world only a few hundred metres across. There is a measurement in the comment, taken with the day-night phase frozen.

Four modes

An enum Mode { Show, Play, Edit, Debug } decides which panels are visible. It defaults to Play, and the update loop reads it every frame rather than rebuilding anything.

Edit

Debug

The scene, panel by panel

Create() adds panels in load order. Each one is a self-contained class in Apps/Engine/Panels, and each is a worked example of one engine feature.

Apps/Engine/Management holds the two behaviours that are not panels: PlayerCollider and OcclusionFade, which fades geometry that comes between the camera and the player. Rocks and Mountains load through the engine's RequestLoad queue rather than blocking the first frame.

Ten compute effects, in order

RegisterEffects() runs first in Create(). Registration order is execution order within a phase, so this list is also the frame.

PlasmaEffect          // FrameStart  - compute baseline smoke test
SceneColorCopyEffect  // AfterScene  - downsampled scene colour
TaaEffect             // AfterScene  - must precede bloom
BloomEffect           // AfterScene
DepthViewEffect       // AfterScene  - debug view
GtaoEffect            // AfterScene  - publishes FrameSchedule.AoTexture
VelocityViewEffect    // AfterScene  - debug view
Sdf3DViewEffect       // FrameStart  - slices a 3D volume for display
DdgiEffect            // AfterScene  - probe and SDF volumes
SkyAtmosphereEffect   // FrameStart  - sky, cloud noise and aerial LUTs

Every one of these is registered with an if around the return value, and the debug control that would display its output is only added when registration succeeded. That is the pattern to copy: on a backend without the shader source, the effect is simply absent and nothing else changes. See Compute effects.

The settings screen

SettingPanel is the largest class in the application and the most useful one to read if you are building your own settings UI. It binds directly to RenderQuality.Current and WorldSettings.Current and writes on change.

Exposed at runtime: mode, movement mode, field of view, day-night speed and start hour, movement step, anti-aliasing mode, DDGI on and off, cascaded shadow parameters, GTAO, and the shadow normal offset. Values that cannot change after startup are not given sliders — which is the rule worth copying, since a control that silently does nothing until next launch is worse than an absent one.

Because RenderQuality.Current lives inside persisted settings, everything changed here survives a restart. See Render quality.

Picking and editing

The ObjectPicker panel is configured with two lists — Targets for individual controls and InstancedTargets for instanced ones — and handles the ray cast, the outline and the transform readout itself. Combined with Painting, that is the whole in-app editing loop: click to select, read the numbers, place a new asset where the cursor is.

This is the answer to not having an editor. It is not an editor — but it turns "guess a coordinate, rebuild, look" into "click the thing, read its coordinate". See Picking, highlighting and editing.

Building it, honestly

To run something today: Samples/Creator builds from a fresh clone with no external dependency, or take the packaged Windows build from Download. To build this one, restore the Season.csproj reference and delete the AI reference along with the AIButton and AIPanel usage in Create() — the panels themselves are already excluded from compilation by a Compile Remove.

Packaging on Windows is MSIX with SelfContained and WindowsAppSDKSelfContained both true, which is why the Store build is large and why it does not need a runtime installed. Target frameworks are net10.0, net10.0-android, net10.0-ios, net10.0-maccatalyst and, on a Windows host, net10.0-windows10.0.19041.0.