EZGameBuilder Devlog: June 2025

EDIT: The first pre-alpha is out now!    

TLDR: Tons of work. The first early pre-alpha build will be out within the next 48 hours.  

This month had a lot of new features, changes and fixes:  

- Lighting is now supported. All lights are imported from efpse maps and baked into vertex colours. This lighting technique essentially allows you to place an infinite number of lights with zero impact on game performance.  
- There's now optional 'tile merging' in the editor, so if you place any tiles next to eachother, any sides that are touching will be removed to improve performance. EFPSE does this too, but this method works a bit better with custom tiles.  
- I ported the editor to work with windows, instead of just linux.  
- Tweaked the 'power saving' mode (limits fps when the editor is in the background, so it doesn't slow your pc down).  
- Started testing a 3d menu for custom tile selection.  
- Added a PC+PSP exporter to the editor, allowing you export the current level into a format the pc/psp runtime can read.  

This month I also got a basic PC and PSP runtime working, which currently just renders all the tiles and 2d entities in a level, and lets you noclip around.  
The PC runtime is for 32-bit windows XP and newer, and should work on any gpu that supports opengl 1.1.  
There'll probably be multiple windows versions in the future with support for more modern rendering apis, but right now I'm focused on this minimum-spec 'runs anywhere' version of the engine.  
Performance on the PSP has been pretty decent so far. It's still too early to say for sure how well a game will run, because this is essentially just a model viewer right now, but the majority of levels I've tested so far have rendered well above 60fps.  
Considering I'm barely using the CPU and there's still many ways to optimise rendering performance, I'm reasonably confident that most current efpse games will be able to run at or near 60fps on the psp when ezgb is out of alpha (no promises, just a goal).  

The editor and runtimes are almost ready for the first pre-alpha release, but I'm going to spend the next couple of days polishing things up a bit, fixing some bugs, and getting the source code into a more readable state. 
Once that's done, I'll be releasing all the builds and source code for anyone who wants to try it out.  
Just keep in mind that this is nowhere near complete yet. There'll be lots of bugs and missing features, and you can't make or play any games yet.  
This is just a way to get the engine into people's hands, so it'll be easier to track changes between each month, and so I can get some feedback on what people like/dislike about the editor, how well everything performs, etc...   

Oh also, I'm looking for a demo level to be included with the pre-alpha builds.  
Ideally a large level with complex geometry/modifiers, lighting, and a lot of entities.  
There's currently no efpse script processing, so any levels that depend on a map script to place/move entities won't work properly yet.  
This will be used as a demo for the runtime, so people can test how well it performs on their hardware without needing to create their own efpse game first.  
If anyone is cool with me bundling a level from their efpse game in with the pre-alpha builds, send me a link to your game in the comments here, and let me know which level/s to include. It doesn't matter if your game is packed or unpacked.  
I'll make sure there's a link to your game and itch.io page, so people know where to find the full game.  
And if a few people send me games/levels to include, I'll probably cycle between them for each pre-alpha build.  

For now, here's a pic of StarGazer running in the editor, the PSP (~74 fps) and a PC from ~2006 running XP (~63 fps on a q33 express igpu). You might need to open it in a new tab to actually see anything: