KEX Engine

The KEX Engine is a proprietary cross-platform game engine framework originally created by Samuel Villarreal (Kaiser) for Nightdive Studios. It provides special support for the remastering of older titles, providing system abstraction layers and a broad range of interfaces to various libraries and platform APIs while remaining largely agnostic with respect to how game logic should function. This is exploited within Nightdive to bring aging titles rapidly up to date.

KEX 3 was a nearly complete rewrite and redesign of the older KEX 2 code base. Its innovations included added support for a multi-threaded game loop allowing maximum GPU usage, support for the Vulkan rendering API, and portability to various console platforms. As of 2021, KEX 4 is currently in development and exchanges the multi-threaded game loop for GPU-level parallelism.

It is notable for becoming the basis for the 2020 re-release of Doom 64.

Games

 * Doom 64 (2020 version)
 * Quake (2021 version)
 * Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition
 * Doom 64 (2020 version)
 * Quake (2021 version)
 * Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition
 * Quake (2021 version)
 * Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition
 * Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition
 * Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition
 * Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition

Platforms

 * PC (Windows/Linux/macOS; Epic Games Store, GOG, Steam)
 * Nintendo Switch
 * Microsoft Xbox One, Xbox Series X | S
 * Sony PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5

Retired platforms

 * Bethesda.net
 * Google
 * Google