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Modern game engine development is an enormous task requiring millions of man hours of programming effort, no argument there.

Take the square root of that.
I bet most of the work is really spent on design, graphics, testing, and marketing.

My point is that as soon as one of the big boys releases a high-powered game engine for Linux ... you will see an explosion in free games for Linux.

Just what I could remember offhand:
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/
http://www.ogre3d.org/
http://crystal.sourceforge.net/
http://wouter.fov120.com/cube/
http://www.genesis3d.com/

There's plenty of free game engines out there, some are open source. An example is Genesis3D, an engine I've dabbled with. Lots of the 3D engines are in various stages of development, and some of the ones I've tried do not seem quite powerful or flexible enough for the game concepts I'm trying to implement, but depending on what you're looking for, there are plenty of resources avaiable.

Don't forget to check out useful websites like NeHe's OpenGL page (here) or GameDev.net. There are literally tons of resources out there for someone looking to get into indie game development.

Theres dozens, theres a few that are pretty good, no they arent as good as Doom3(until ID releases the source) or Turbines engine, but they dont have to be, they just have to be good enough to make PS2 quality games.

Most of these games would look better than anything on the PS2. There is an open source game repository but are you willing to donate money to make these games good? Or will you complain about quality when you dont pay?

Well here are some engines.

Genesis3d
Nooface
WorldForge

Reality FactoryM

Ogre

Obsidian

More at LinuxGames

Software development is one hundred percent design

There are other engines like Genesis3D which is open source and free.

Destiny3D is in development (suppose to be going to beta in the next few months) but is only $40 and is being written to compete with things like Quake 3 and Doom 3. Of course I'm a bit one sided due to being on the development team.

You may want to check out the Genesis3D engine. It's an open source 3d engine for windows. (closed source license is available for the small sum of $10,000).

Ethnic Cleansing, made by Resistance Records (owned by the National Alliance neo-nazi group) using the Genesis3D open-source rendering software. In the game, you control a white KKK member who runs around beating up on other races. And you thought people were upset about violence in video games after Columbine...

On the other hand, on this topic someone asked "why is beating up on other races bad, but beating up cops and prostitutes (in Grand Theft Auto 3) OK?"

I'm one of the developers of next version of the Genesis3D game engine. We ran into this problem of what do we support on an engine that is to push the latest cards to the limits.

The simple answer was to write the common code in the main part of the engine then write multiple drivers for the engine that would use different features on different cards. This way we could push both cards and optimize the code for each card to get the best performance. Of course this is no easy task either.

This is a pain but if you wish to push what each card can do, you have to write code for each individual card or maker of the cards (IE a nVidia driver and an ATI driver then a 3rd driver for everything else that the other 2 don't optimize and run on).

I've always wanted to do game programming. I found a school in Washington called DigiPen. It is across the street from Nintendo and is backed by Nintendo. It is a great place. What is nice about it is that the teachers are actual game programmers using the current stuff. You don't learn old then have to catch up once you are out of there. I was going to goto DigiPen but things fell differently here. Instead I found that I prefered working on game engines than writing actual games. There is a great game engine called Genesis3D. After being in the community for alittle while and people seeing what I could do, I was able to join the small team (about 10 people) that actually write the game engine (the engine hasn't been worked on for a year so we are doing a major overhaul). You don't have to have a CS degree. You don't even have to have high skills in math (unless you are writing complex physics and certain areas of a game engine). What people don't realize is that most games out there use some game engine off the shelf so all the complex work is removed. Barbie: Gotta Groove was written with the Genesis3D game engine (as an example). Even games written on consoles have alot of the hard work already removed as game engines for the consoles have already been written. Some development houses do modify or write their own engine to have different effects but the main game programmers never see this level of detail in their coding. This is why I went for working on the game engine itself instead of writing games as there is more detail in what you have to do and know. Bottom line is that you have to know what area of game programming you want to do. There are alot of areas and everyone specializes in just a few. AI, multiplayer coding, graphic display, sound just to name a few (and the game engine usually takes care of all but the AI so there isn't alot for the game programmer to do other than tell the engine "here's a map. I'm here. Display it").

I hope the engine engine is capable of rendering something other than the dark, boring environments seen in the screenshots on the site.

Game designers could really learn a thing or two by playing Serious Sam. Look at all those bright environments and colorful characters! Yowza!

-- Chris

I'm a game developer working on the Open Source Genesis3D game engine for a new version coming out.
It has always been my dream to do some type of programming that was constantly a challenge as I tend to become bored very easily. There is always some challenge to game programming as you do your best at something then have to do even better next time around. You are constantly trying to out perform the best out there and constantly pushing the computer to it's limits with the latest games.
It can be a great field to be in but getting in is the difficult part as along the way you are viewed as a game programming wannabe and most people don't even make it over the "write a simple game" hurdle. Even after getting into the area you have to prove your worth against others at or possibly above your level of knowledge. Reading a ton of tutorials doesn't always help as you have to break away from the tutorials sometime and take your own steps out in doing a game or an area of a game. Alot of people fall down at this point too and never get back up because they decide it is too hard and don't really understand what is going on so they continue on the tutorial path or just quit all together. For those that break away from tutorials and understand what is really going on to make the game run can great some good games. From there it is a matter of finding a game company to take you in. Of course you would want to get into a company that is constantly using the latest things and this isn't always easy either.
The road is long but can be very enjoyable for those that have the patience, always want a challenge, and have fun with their job.

The license restrictions have some history behind them. First there was only Eclipse (headed by David Stafford) and they made Genesis 1. Genesis 1 was released with a similar license and is still available at www.genesis3d.com. Eclipse started making Genesis 2 with the new features of real time everything (e.g. WYSIWYG map editing) and open terrain capability.

Then Eclipse ran out of money.

WildTangent (Alex St. John (former Direct X guy)) swooped down and bought the rights to Genesis 1 and 2 as well as most of the Eclipse developers. His intent was and is to take Genesis 2 and merge it with his 'real-time-3D-image-transmission-over-http' technology to form what they are calling the "GameDriver". A preview is already available but it is strictly closed source. Nevertheless the license is generous and you might want to check it out.

During the negotiations for the purchase, David Stafford won the right to take the Genesis 2 source, as it stood in its incomplete state, and release it under his particular variant of OpenSource. The catch was that the license had to be amended to prevent people from competeing in the 'presumeably-soon-to-emerge-web-game' arena that WildTangent was targeting. And so Jet3D was born.

Hope this helps. And I hope you all can help too. Jet3D needs work.

Royce

Jeez, people are tripping over themselves to give the things away. You wouldn't want be relying on this to pay the rent, would you?

Obligatory Crystal Space link.

Commentary on all this vs LithTech (USD250,000 I understand), UnrealEngine (USD Loads), and Quake 3 engine (I dread to think how much) would be appreciated.

Oh! And another. So many engines, so little time.

Dave :)

BTW, this got rejected - is Cyrix's website still broken?

Also, is there a good comparison of the 3-D engines available?
E.g., comparing Quake, Unreal, LithTech, Genesis/Jet3D, Crystal Space.

I did find one article comparing the features of Quake II, Unreal and Genesis 3D at http://www.gameznet. com/genesis/articles/enginecomparison.html.

Y.

If you actually read further on the page, you would see in the previous day post:

I'm open-sourcing the V2 codebase either today or tomorrow. What I'm going to do first however, is release the old DJGPP trees from the public work-in-progress release of V2 (or maybe it was a version or so after that, I forget). It will have a few things missing, such as the CD audio code, and perhaps the FLI code, I'm not sure yet--this is all due to the fact that the source will be released under the GPL license.

That means what was released today is an old version, and the new one - "(which actually work! *gasp*)," - will come in a few days. Well, I guess we should wait and see.

In a similar topic, Jet3D has recently released its source (its the 2.0 version of the open-source Genesis 3D engine. A CVS tree is being set up, and a linux port of this breathtaking engine would be great!

FWIW, the Genesis3D SDK is in violation of the Open Source definition. While it does indeed make its source code available, the licensing terms are fairly restrictive, so it is not free software.
A much cooler project is Crystal Space, the LGPL'd cross-platform multi-API 3D game engine. It's nowhere nearly as complete as Genesis, but shows a lot of promise. I suspect today's announcement will be a boon to CS, since any of the code in Quake can now go into CS.

Son't forget to check out the best 3D Engine nowadays, Genesis 3D. It's open source and still hasn't been ported to linux. Its new demo is simply jawdropping, but don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself.