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Another engine option is the Delta3D game engine, which is open source software. The Delta3D project is run by the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), and maintained just for this sort of thing. I hoped they examined that alternative before spending big bucks for an Unreal Engine license (if not, shame on them, and they need to look next time).

In addition to using externally developed free software, various parts of the military have periodically released and continued to support some decent bits of software. BRL-CAD is from the Army Research Lab, and Delta3d is from the Naval Postgraduate School, to pick two examples off the top of my head.

Navy sponsors the open source engine delta3d.

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.

The Pyrobotics software has been out for several years. It was originally developed by Doug under a grant from NSF. That grant ran out last year and I am very glad to see MS has picked up the ball. Doug has been using Robotics to teach CS as part of the NSF grant. I got to sit in on one of his classes this spring and it was quite interesting to see sophmores, etc discussing high level AI concepts. Those who are writing to compare Pyrobot with the Lego Mindstorm or AI/engineering classes would do well to go read the papers posted on the pyrobotics.com web site. They specifically address issues with those other approaches: languages unusable outside the one robot, spending too much time getting the b#&$! hardware to work and not enough on CS issues.

The Pyrobot system is also not just for CS teaching. It makes a very nice system for working with robot control, especially when using a simulator instead of a real bot. I have been using Pyrobot in conjunction with the Delta3d OSS simulation system. Delta3d provides realistic rendering on real terrain for multiple robots while Pyrobot lets us experiment with very high level 'Brains' to control the bots (UAVs, UGVs, etc.) Python makes it very nice for the AI folks with lots of support libraries, rapid development, etc.

The downside of using Python for Intro CS, IMHO, is that it sidesteps so many basic Software Engineering and other basic software potty training issues. I look forward to seeing how Doug and his associates at GATech integrate those into their classes... and perhaps picking up an intern to work out here in Malibu some summer.

• http://www.alice.org/
• http://www.ogre3d.org/
• http://www.yake.org/
• http://www.delta3d.org/
• http://www.panda3d.org/
• http://www.idsoftware.com/business/techdownloads/
• http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/
• http://www.garagegames.com/products/1

http://www.delta3d.org/ - "If it's good enough for the Yankee Army, it's good enough for you!"

Open-source under the LGPL license, and developed at the Naval Postgradute School (former home of America's Army).

Please post on the forum if you have any questions, and I'll be glad to help you out.