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• The NeHe tutorials are a good place to start, if you want to start with code...
  
• From a theory perspective, books are good, like 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development, and some community sites too, like GameDev's Graphics Theory section.
  
• Realtime Rendering - the website associated with the book of the same name. I never really made it through the book, but the web page has an excellent collection of links to other sources of information....
  
• Forums like GameDev.net and Devmaster are another approach.
  

That's quite a nice link. I think what the OP is looking for is this section covering scripting.

Oh fer cryin' out loud. That site hasn't been updated in over six years. Use the 3D Engines Database instead.

Half Life 2 was incredibly well received, both in terms of reviews (metacritic, rottentomatoes and sales numbers.

It sold massively, created a new method of distribution, which other vendors have embraced and cuts out the middle men so hated on Slashdot.

It was first to feature real-time radiosity lighting, scaled from DirectX 6 to 9 and pushed the character animation and expression envelope considerably.

Do you ever look in the mirror and ask: "Maybe I am wrong this time?"

http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmo-scalable-ser ver/
http://www.erlang-consulting.com/thesis/mmog_serve r_in_erlang.html

When I was a 2nd year student we weren't this sort of stuff, makes me wish I went to Stanford.

You really don't need to go to some high-ranked CS university to do cool projects. I hear a lot of people on Slashdot griping about how they couldn't go to MIT/CMU/Stanford/CalTech/whatever. Okay, maybe you get some good lectures and have some bright people handy to work with, but that's really a drop in the bucket compared to what you choose to do yourself. If you read about the things you're interested in, work on some projects, you *will* know far more than the people that went to Ivy League U and didn't do anything themselves -- just went to class and read enough content to get their grades. You have powerful, inexpensive computers easily available. You have free high-quality development software (if you don't have Valgrind and gcc on your computer, you're really missing out). You have an Internet's worth of excellent resources available, along with research papers on every neat thing you can think of free for the downloading. You don't need a professor or a boss to say "okay, write me a Foobar" to write a Foobar -- as a matter of fact, if you're writing a Foobar for yourself, it's probably going to be a better Foobar than if you're writing it because someone else is making you do so. Same goes for reading an algorithms book or a research paper.

Plus, if you don't want to tackle a whole game, choose something that you *do* like doing -- AI, graphics, sound engine, networking -- and pick a random existing open-source project and put your ideas into it. Then you have a nice end result that you can show off to people ("That game you're playing? Yeah, I'm one of the authors"), you have encouragement to keep going (because it isn't just a lone you -- you get feedback when you do something cool), and if you want a good practical excuse, you have a resume item that shows that not only do you have the ability to work with people to produce neat things -- but you've done so simply because you like making neat things. Also, it's *fun* to add a new feature to a game and then play using said feature with the rest of the dev team.

Remember that Woz never got his college degree (well, until a few years ago, when he decided to go back and get it). He built cool things because he liked making cool things, not because someone in a suit told him to make something cool. The same's true of an awful lot of techie folks out there -- school is a convenient tool, but it's much less important than going out and actively learning about things, and the fact that your uni has "State" in its name doesn't have a heck of a lot to do with what you learn. Sure, your professor will assign a bunch of books to read, but you can write that final paper without learning all that much, and certainly with big gaps in what you know. On the other hand, you can read all you want about just about anything I can think of on that Internet-connected computer in front of you.

Universities enforce a lower bound on your knowledge at graduation. They have nothing to do with setting a ceiling.

Torque engine from Garage Games

RealmForge from www.realmforge.com is open source. They just released v0.6.1 but are not yet to a beta version, (Puts on Tinfoil Suit) and it is .NET based quickly points out runs on Mono.Net.
Very complete feature set (many yet to be implemented however).

Nevrax
Radan Labs
Reality Factory
3D Game Studio

but better, browse to
http://www.devmaster.net/engines/
and waste some time there!

Heh, that's what I thought the first time I heard about OGRE (what seems like) several years ago.

It's decent engine. It was not quite dynamic enough for what I was looking for at the time, but looked good as a game engine.

And of course the following is a good resource for people interested in 3D engines:
DevMaster

and no one should forget the great (but long dead; bring it back!) 3D engine list.

You may want to just go for the Torque engine that Tribes2 and on uses. It's not free but it's full featured and well reviewed.

You may want to just go for the Torque engine that Tribes2 and on uses. It's not free but it's full featured and well reviewed.

You may want to just go for the Torque engine that Tribes2 and on uses. It's not free but it's full featured and well reviewed.

There are quite a few 3d engines out there. The biggest I guess are Crystal Space 3D, Genesis3D, OGRE, Toque (Tribes2), Quake and Quake II. Of course there are others to fill certin niches like Yeti or ExoEngine and libraries like DevLib and G3D for those who want to write their own engine, but don't feel like they need to implement yet another file loader. I'm not sure why 0.7 of Irrlicht was worth mentioning on /. as it is isn't clear what its roll is compared to those other engines.

I was at Siggraph 2004 and attended a round table on "how will you (game developers) feed next generation games". The problem is going from a Playstation1 to Playstation2 many developers found games now took roughly 2 to 3x the man years to create. But profits didn't really go up that much to compensate. This has happened every console generation and will happen again with the up coming generation. PC games don't have clear generations, but the same concept applies.

The main ideas were to reuse content. For example if you're making a Matrix game, get the 3d models from the movie instead of making your own and start from there. Or if you're making a port try to reuse as much as possible. Future games will have a lot of computer generated stuff which is artist guided instead of artist created so that one artist creates a forest instead of creating a bunch of leafs on a single tree.

A big surprise to me was open source wasn't mentioned until somebody asked. A company like id will implement something cool like unified lighting for all objects first, but a year later everybody has their own implementation of it. Every year has something like this that gets the anual lens flare award; colour lighting, ground clutter, normal mapping, rag doll physics, etc. Yawn. Every company spends all this time re-implementing the exact same technology. All developers can read the same papers from Siggraph, Eurographics, or GDC and then discuss them on the same mailing lists so there is plenty of open sharing happening already. So I was surprised to hear none of the guys at the round table thought open source would really be useful to help save them money in the future other than for rather basic things like zlib, lua, etc.

It sure would be nice to see some engines reach commercial quality to used in some good games instead of getting more and more re-implementations of the foundation, which /. apparently is finds interesting. Once it happens there will be a huge snow ball effect where it picks up a LOT of developer attention. Maybe in five years one of the existing engines will reach a level of maturity that it can start to be really used and then in another ten we'll see it catching on like GNU/Linux is now?

Yeah, it's already there. Here's the link with more details:
http://www.devmaster.net/engines/engine_details.ph p?id=38

If it's not there, then submit it: http://www.devmaster.net/engines/submit.php

Can't you read the instructions?

what? http://www.devmaster.net/engines/list.php?start=20

I'm using it on a SF project (no sound code committed to CVS yet; hence no link) and in addition to the developer docs included with the SDK, I took a look at some DevMaster tutorials on the web. They cover the basics and also some more advanced topics. It was a good start for me, even though, depending on what you want to do with it, you might have to make up some of your own stuff on the way. At least, that's what I did.