Talos Engine
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Features

What the engine does

Every shipped feature, grouped by area, with the release it ships in. Each area page also lists what is planned in that area.

Performance

Fast where you feel it

Measured on our test machines, not promised. Each figure says what was timed and on what.

  • 0.6 s

    from launching the editor to playing your game

    Linux, warm start, median of the runs on an RTX 3080 PC. Windows: 0.8 s. The very first launch on a new machine takes longer, about 2 s, while the graphics driver compiles its shaders once.

  • 1 s

    or less to load every sample scene

    Process start to scene loaded, warm cache, median of 7 loads. The largest sample world loads in 0.64 s, the starter course in 0.31 s.

  • 4.3 ms

    a frame for a dense forest in the high-detail renderer

    GPU time, median, on an RTX 5080 at 1920x1080 (4.9 ms at the 95th percentile).

  • 0.75 ms

    a frame for the kart sample in the standard renderer

    GPU time, median, on an RTX 3080 at 1920x1080. The starter course: 0.14 ms.

  • 172 MB

    Windows installer, editor and tools included

    The size gate fails any build over 250 MB.

New since v0.6.0

Highlights merged into the engine since the last release. They ship in the next release.

  • A sky backdrop apart from its light

    A sky can show a color or gradient of its own behind the scene while it lights the scene as before, so a flat bright backdrop no longer tints everything it lights.

  • Tinted glass in the high-definition renderer

    Colored glass now tints what shows through it: green glass turns the scene behind it green, where it used to let it through untouched. Clear glass draws exactly as before.

  • Wear that follows the shape of a mesh

    A material layer can take its coverage from the mesh itself: dirt rising up the base of a wall, dust and moss on surfaces facing up, grime under overhangs. A building kit gets wear from one shared material, with no masks to paint. In the high-definition renderer.

  • Non-player characters that remember, take cover and work in groups

    Characters can remember where they last saw or heard something and tell kinds of noise apart. They find cover, flanking and search spots, move, aim and speak at once, and act in groups and factions on a daily schedule. Seven starter types, from a patrol guard to a flock, each come with a test that replays them the same way every run.

  • Instance files about 45% smaller

    Scenes with many copies of a mesh, such as forests, can be saved with 16-bit values, which makes their files about 45% smaller. Positions stay within 1.6 cm across a 2 km spread, and older files load unchanged.

  • Exported games keep their effect textures

    An exported game now carries the textures its Squall effects use, so effects look the same as in the editor. If a texture is missing, the export stops and names it.

  • Material previews show up sooner

    The material panel's high-definition preview shows a first picture much sooner, drawn without ray tracing, then swaps in the full ray-traced picture when it is ready. If full lighting cannot start, the panel says why.

  • Terrain with roads loads faster

    The ground under a terrain's roads is now shaped on every processor core, so a scene with roads loads about 60 ms faster on a 2 km terrain.

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