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Use Crystal Spaces and forget about it.

On the other hand, if you're going to publish your work on XBox Live! or PSN Network, the 3D engine cost is the lesser of your problems.

Don't forget about Crystal Space 3D.

We have done this for years here in Europe. Typically they are called hacklabs. Often they may be squatted houses converted into social centres, or a funded space (like a hackerspace) with people living on site.

Here's a photo of one from 2004:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/genjix/2169785087/in/photostream

A large factory with ~20 hackers living and working on projects. People would come and go as they please, and we held several hackathons there like the 2007 Crystal Space hackfest:

http://crystalspace3d.org/main/La_Fibra_hackfest_report

This has been going on for decades throughout major cities in Europe such as London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Spain, Italy, Austria and Prague.

Examples for ioquake3
Examples for XreaL
Examples for Cube 2
Examples for Irrlicht
Examples for Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine
Examples for Crystal Space
Examples for Blender Game Engine
Examples for Panda3D

It's quite obvious that all of these engines are much more advanced than Darkplaces. Darkplaces doesn't even do basic stuff like HDR lighting, DOF or parallax mapping. You could reproduce most effects in Darkplaces with shaders in ioquake3, which is basically just a cleaned up id Tech 3 engine. Then there is the issue of poor performance in Darkplaces...

When I read the headline I thought "why would anyone care?" There are plenty of good, free engines out there already.

ioquake3
XreaL
Cube 2
Irrlicht
OGRE
Crystal Space
Blender
Panda3D

And if John Carmack doesn't go back on his word, id Tech 4 will soon be free.

Yes I'm also looking forward to that. I'm curious to why they choose cristalspace over ogre3d though. They probably found that using crystalspace would be easier as ogre3d doesn't implement a full game engine, despite its popularity.

WorldForge, Delta3D, and CrystalSpace are all viable choices. Delta3D in particular has good physics, though I understand it currently has limited scalability.

The bottom line is that no engine is perfect. Some are better than others for certain tasks, and they all have shortcomings. You shouldn't tie yourself too closely to any one engine, because you may want to switch at some point down the road.

BuildaWorld is a project to create an abstraction layer which will make it easy to switch between engines, and to allow different versions of your game with different engines. Ultimately they plan to create tools to enable non-programmers to design their own game or game world. It's still in the early stages, but then, anyone wanting to design a game or build a world has to think long-term.

I know of Ogre, which is very, very pretty;
http://www.ogre3d.org/

And Crystal Space, which is very pretty, and also includes a game engine;
http://www.crystalspace3d.org/

If someone however knows of an OSS physics engine for games which does a bit of aerodynamics, please let me know. :)

A few really competent developers could clean up by grabbing one of the open source gaming engines out there, getting some venture capital and building it out into an open source gaming virtual console. Here's the basic idea. You build an open source, cross-platform gaming engine that takes modules, just like neverwinter nights, but a bit more versatile.

Not saying this is the case with you, but time and time again, I see "artists" steal software. After all, we know that theft is wrong only if it's a picture...but if it's software, the company, programmers, and/or engineers all deserve it. It's really, really odd how there exists such a warped view of reality.
[on soap box]
To get a good dose of such moronic thinking, feel free to check out the Plane Shift http://www.crystalspace3d.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index. php?page=PlaneShift project. In their eyes, the software (90+% of the entire project) is worthless and the art must never be released else it will somehow damage the artist. What a double standard. Feel free to stop by to remind the "artists" that they are double-standard idiots without a clue. And to be clear...this retarded thinking is hardly unique to Plane Shift.
[off soap box]

It might not be as simple as what you need, but Crystal Space 3D might work.

(Disclaimer: I don't work in the games industry. This is speculation.)

So what is the solution, besides scaling back the size of games?

Doing games reminds me of doing graphic artwork. A lot of people want to be involved, because they can try out their ideas and the end result is entertaining. However, in graphics, one guy can try out his own ideas. If you want to make a full-blown game, you need more than one person to perform all the implementation work to try out the set of that one person's ideas. That means that there's no way for that one person to be as creative as he wants.

The solution is better game-building tools and toolkits. Game development companies all seem to reimplement their own graphics engines, for example. That may be cool if you're a programmer with an interest in seeing new, pretty things, but frankly...writing code to cleverly do level-of-detail -- the same thing that's been done four hundred times before -- drives up the cost in human labor to produce a game.

So my first guess would be to use existing libraries as much as possible. If you want to do game design, see if you can avoid doing low-level work as much as possible. Use Crystal Space or some other pre-existing graphics engine. There are *plenty* of libre and gratis graphics engines out there, and frankly, the player's experience is simply not improved that much more by a 10% improvement in how many polygons you can put on the screen with a given number of CPU cycles. Sure, if you're making a content-laden game, you want your game to look unique -- but you can do that by writing a small amount of high-level code to spit out particles flying out along a differently-shaped path, rather than building yet another particle engine.

Same thing goes for sound. I doubt that OpenAL in and of itself can be used as a full-blown game sound engine, but it's probably a pretty worthwhile foundation at least. I would assume that there are some gratis and libre game sound engines built on OpenAL, but a quick search of freshmeat didn't seem to turn anything up.

If your game fits into one of a certain set of games, there is already a game framework with all this done for you already. If you're writing a shooter, there are scads of Quake-type engines available (and game developers *have* been using these). I'm unaware of any major adventure game or RPG engines that are freely available and support all the features that current games are being released with.

As for content -- artwork and audio -- this I'm totally in the dark about. I would assume that there is some sort of archive of intended-for-game-use content that someone sells (and probably even good-quality gratis stuff out there somewhere), but I'm not aware of any such. I should ideally be able to, if I add a cat to my game, be able to search for "meow", get back a bunch of audio files, try them out rapidly, and then simply add the one I want into my game.

Modelling -- again, I'm not familiar with what resources are out there, though I have seen gratis archives of models. I think that rapid modelling is one of the areas that software developers could vastly improve. Right now, when I think of a "building", I need to sit down and start modelling, and even if I'm good, it takes a while to build such a thing. "Buildings" are common things to make. Really, modelling software should have vast amounts of templates such that they can easily build a stock building with nothing more than a "create templates.skycraper" command or a menu choice, and then allow high-level changes to various parameters -- window shapes, water stains, grime, etc. Terrain modellers exist -- I was quite impressed with how much Bryce sped up terrain modelling, and I'm sure that there are probably better terrain modelers available (though a search on Freshmeat was disappointing). Modellers that allow rapid modelling of an area, that can cut

Yeah, well, I know I personally did a really dark room for Doom 3 once, so I was certain about that game being supported. I kind of assumed Q4 would be supported because previous games sure were; I assume Q4 support is just in works then =)

GtkRadiant is also used by Crystal Space and Neverball, and probably some others too; I sure hope this means more OSS software adopts it in future =)

./configure; make >Log.make 2>&1;
grep warning Log.make | wc -l
            461
grep 'returned 1 exit status' Log.make | wc -l
            121

461 compile-time warnings (almost all pointer/integer size problems) and 121 fatal link errors does qualify as "disaster area" in my book.

I am *very* glad to hear that the build portability problems of 0.98 and 0.99 on x86_64 have now been addressed. I'm looking forward hugely to retrying with new sources.

Some of you may already know but we are aiming to make a new GameEngine for Blender using the Crystal Space 3D Engine (http://www.crystalspace3d.org/). This project is called CrystalBlend (more information on that project here: http://www.crystalspace3d.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index. php?page=CrystalBlend). The idea is (just like with the current game engine) to be able to make full games from inside Blender without the need to program. The current logic system for the game engine is a bit limited so you often have to resort to Python scripts to make the full game but with CrystalBlend we will make a totally new logic system that still allows for this fallback but makes it less needed.

The reason I post here is that I'm looking for developers who want to help me with this project mainly on the Blender side. As the project manager of Crystal Space I will take on the Crystal Space side of CrystalBlend (i.e. 3D engine specifics). I will also work on the logic system itself but I would like some other people to help me with both the integration of Blender and Crystal Space as the development of the new user interfaces for the new logic system.

Give me a mail (jorrit dot tyberghein at gmail dot com) if you are interested!

Greetings,

Some of you may already know but we are aiming to make a new GameEngine for Blender using the Crystal Space 3D Engine (http://www.crystalspace3d.org/). This project is called CrystalBlend (more information on that project here: http://www.crystalspace3d.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index. php?page=CrystalBlend). The idea is (just like with the current game engine) to be able to make full games from inside Blender without the need to program. The current logic system for the game engine is a bit limited so you often have to resort to Python scripts to make the full game but with CrystalBlend we will make a totally new logic system that still allows for this fallback but makes it less needed.

The reason I post here is that I'm looking for developers who want to help me with this project mainly on the Blender side. As the project manager of Crystal Space I will take on the Crystal Space side of CrystalBlend (i.e. 3D engine specifics). I will also work on the logic system itself but I would like some other people to help me with both the integration of Blender and Crystal Space as the development of the new user interfaces for the new logic system.

Give me a mail (jorrit dot tyberghein at gmail dot com) if you are interested!

Greetings,

License and engine ........

Ummm, try this ...Crystal Space 3D LGPL Engine

http://community.crystalspace3d.org/tiki-browse_im age.php?galleryId=1&sort_mode=created_desc&desp=1& offset=0&imageId=288

http://interreality.org/projects/crystalzilla

"Proof of concept" using all free software (client and server): Free 3D engine, free web browser, free networking architecture. Pending changes to Mozilla will be integrated into user applications sooner or later. Hackers wanted...

Yup. And they've been under active development ever since in projects like Quakeforge, Darkplaces and Twilight.

There's other OSS engines out there, too, such as Crystal Space.

Controller for an MRI scanner? Proprietary is OK. Microcode for an anti-lock braking system? Proprietary is OK.

Could you point to a source for RMS actually saying (or even implying this)? Taking the following quotations into into consideration, I find it hard to believe he would support any non-Free Software (as he and the FSF define the term) product.

"But we have to consider another, equally important question: will X solve the problem? Will X achieve the goal of giving users freedom? If X won't enable us to keep our freedom, then whether possible or not, it isn't useful."

"In my values, freedom is more important than "serving users" in a mere practical sense. Of course, in many cases we can achieve both, so we do not need to choose between them. But once in a while that isn't so."

And, of course, the Four Freedoms preclude any kind of closed system:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. [Emphasis mine.]
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

I would be very interested to see RMS saying that there are acceptable uses for non-Free Software. Mainly in the hopes that the context would clear up what (at face value) would appear to be a contradiction in his position. Because, as I understand it, he is against any use of non-Free Software anywhere.

Does anybody here have advice on game engines for hobbyists? I suppose the politically correct answer is Crystal Space because it is open source but I found it to be quite laggy. Torque seems nice but the demo is not very functional. Is it worth the $100?

It runs on lots of OS's, including *nixes. They just don't have binaries for other OS's yet. Just give 'em some time.

See http://www.crystalspace3d.org/