Codename Engine [Review and Thoughts] (2024)

Hello again! It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, huh? I got a bit sidetracked with mods, school and other things but that’s besides the point. I’m so happy to be doing something like this once again!

However this time I will not be reviewing a fnf mod, rather I will take an in depth look at something new that’s been getting more and more popular. As the title suggests, I’ll be reviewing none other than Codename Engine!

Note that these are only my thoughts and opinions on the engine, don’t take them as facts.

So, for those who are hearing about it for the first time, I will explain what codename engine is.

FNF: Codename Engine (or CNE for short) is a work in progress engine made for advanced modding. The engine is still in a beta state but it really shows promise. And it’s been getting a lot bigger as of late, both in terms of popularity and with its features.

So how is it?

Let’s start with the positives.

Right off the bat the engine’s performance is really good, I even ran this on my very bad laptop and I got 150mb RAM usage on week 4. It’s most definitely the best part about codename. There have been a few hiccups here and there but that aside it’s really well done.

Next up the editors

You can access these by pressing 7 on the main menu

One of the latest features of CNE was its chart editor, which is a lot different from probably other chart editor you’ve seen. I myself don’t really use any of them when charting a song, because I personally prefer Arrow Vortex, but I gotta say this chart editor is really really good. I also really like how colorful it is.

So it’s aesthetically nice to look at, but how good is it when you’re actually placing down arrows? Good! Really good! ….. well almost.

What I really like about the CNE chart editor is that you can drag the notes around the grid and they will change their positions to their strumline respectively, it also rotates when you do that, it’s so so nice to look at. You can also copy paste the arrows wherever you want with Ctrl + C/Ctrl + V, which I think is very helpful. Also moving the camera to the singer is a bit different here, unlike most engines where you move the camera by checking “Must Hit Section”, Codename does it with an event, which seemed pretty bizarre to me at first but honestly it’s much better.

You probably saw the green plus on the image above that says create new, and that’s because this editor allows you to add multiple strumline and voices! The vocal suffix option means you can add the voices as separate, so if you have Voices-dad.ogg, you write -dad in the vocal suffix

There are also autosave features and a warning when you haven’t saved your chart and you’re about to quit the game. Really using this felt so fresh and new and I really enjoyed it, for the most part. Now onto the negatives of this chart editor and some things that I think could improve.

First of all, a metronome would be a nice addition, I think it’s very helpful for determining the bpm of a song if you don’t have it already.

Next, deleting a note is a longer process than it needs to be, you right click on a note you want to delete and then select “Delete” (or you can just select a note and then press delete on your keyboard). I think it could be done much faster by pressing middle click to delete a single note.

Lastly I think there should be an option to reduce motion for all the effects on the windows and stuff, while it is nice to look at I think it would be helpful to have an option to disable them (also i got motion sick lmfao)

Next up, the character editor, it’s still not complete but it does what it’s supposed to, there’s not much to say about it as it’s not finished, but pretty cool so far 👍

I also really like the folder organization here, especially in the song folder, it’s really nice when you see something like this.

I think it’s about time I mention the modding capabilities of codename, hoo boy.

As you’ve probably heard, you can make a mod with custom states/menus just with a modpack here without having to compile the source code. I would say it’s simple but it did take me quite a while to figure out how to do it properly. Here’s my awesome edit of MainMenuState.hx it’s a very good menu if i say so myself.

As for the stages you can code them in with two methods: hscript, or xml.

Hscript is pretty self explanatory, you just code in the assets like you normally would in haxe. So what the hell is stage xml? This!

It’s a pretty interesting way of coding in stages and very simple, this is the week 5 background stage xml.

Also you can add custom settings, credits and discord rpc with xmls and jsons too, but I still haven’t fully tried that soo don’t quote me on that lol.

I think I’ve covered pretty much everything this engine has to offer, now onto some of my own thoughts on codename, what I don’t like about it and where I think it could improve a lot.

At first glance, codename engine is really overwhelming, seeing so many features and so much freedom just felt really strange to me, and this is coming from someone who’s been using psych engine for well over 2 years now. It’s been tough figuring out how most of the functions and how it works, but this is more so a me problem, not the engine itself.

I think something that could really help is having a constant scroll speed option that’s not chart dependant, like most rhythm games do.

There is also the mods menu which I think is fine for a beta stage of development.

However I think there should be an option in the future to differentiate simple mods and advanced mods. Simple mods would be small one shot mods that only add one or two levels, or maybe just a script that would run globally if selected. Advanced mods are ones that would heavily modify the game like custom menus, states, and so on. Take these ms paint doodle of my basic idea.

Lastly I’d say the official wiki needs a rewrite because I really couldn’t figure any of this out with the wiki LMFAO. Huge dubs to everyone in the cne server who helped me learn how to use the engine!

Now, the burning question that’s probably on everyone’s minds:

Psych vs Codename, which one is better?

The answer is simple. Both, and neither.

It’s just the pancakes vs waffles debate, some prefer one thing, some prefer other, some like something else entirely like cupcakes or even pizza. Same with engines, some are really used to psych lua and prefer it a lot more than codename, others like hscript and more freedom with modpacks. And there are people who like neither, and use FPS Plus or Forever Engine, or maybe even make their own engine using something else like Godot or Unity.

There’s no right engine to use no matter how good it is, at the end it’s about the user’s preference. Even myself I admit Codename is very good and fun, but I’m still more of a Psych Engine guy. But I will keep an eye out for codename, because like I said in the beginning it’s very promising. Just don’t like one engine while simultaneously hating on the other while having destructive criticism with little to no feedback.

Phew, that was a lot lmfao, thank you all for reading this review of mine, it’s been a while since I’ve made one and i thought it would be good to check this out instead of a mod. There might have been a few things I’ve missed so let me know if I have so I can also give my thoughts on that too!

If you’re interested in Codename and haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend it if you’re already well familiar with coding in source code/haxe: https://github.com/FNF-CNE-Devs/CodenameEngine

Also be sure to follow their twitter account if you want to be up to date

Once again thank you for reading, and until next time!

Ghost Bunny