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But when you start running with dependencies etc it gets confusing. Of course, it might be the projects I've been tryin to work with (Ogre3d etc) which seem to base their documentation on the premise that it's better to start halfway through things and require that any new apps require libs from the samples...


On the other hand, if you're looking for simple web development, I've found that Quanta (KDE) works quite well, although depending on the version it can crash on ocasion.

I like their effort, but it doesn't come close to, for instance, the Quake III source (released under the GNU license).

Besides being graphically superior, Quake III also has the advantage of alot of tutorials/documents being available (mostly made by the community).

Allthough I have to give credit to Ogre (which this engine seems to be based on), which was one of the few engines which had some nice wiki's/community to help you through.

But hey, as said, I like their effort, and maybe within a few builds it will shape up.

There are several precompiled libraries (depending on compiler) for Ogre, at least for windows (since it is MUCH harder to build Ogre proper on windows than it is on linux). To be honest, I also did the source compile on windows, but mainly because I'm crazy.

Ogre3D is a very nice LGPL 3D Graphics library. It does have precompiled libraries for Windows available for download, but compiling from SVN is a snap as well. While it doesn't have the other parts of a game engine (sound, networking, physics, etc), there's always other libraries that work well with it, such as: The Open Dynamics Engine for physics, OpenAL for sound and SDL for crossplatform network and input. Ogre's visual quality can easily compete with a lot of top game engines today, as well.

• 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

Ogre has nice Python bindings, which makes it well suited for beginners. See here: http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/PyOgre. Also it's lgpl, which makes it very free to use.

Ogre3d http://www.ogre3d.org/

If you're willing to spend the time learning C++, using Ogre is very rewarding in terms of what you can accomplish with (fairly) little code. Ogre only handles (3d) graphics though and even though there are additional bindings for tying into 3rd party GUI/physics libraries, you'll be handling the bulk of integration yourself.

Of course, there's also Yake, which is more aimed at being a complete game development framework.

If you're not interested in building a game from scratch, have you looked into implementing your game as a mod for some already existing game?

Not to mention the opensource Ogre3D engine that supports parallax mapping, pixel shading, and even HDR.

Did I mention it's used in the Realmforge GDK, a cross-platform .net/mono based package that includes a sound engine, a physics engine, and an input engine?

If I wanted to start a development studio and didn't have the cash to license out Unreal3 (at over 250,000 clams) or the project offset engine, Ogre3D is where I'd go. And it's these small development houses that tend to release innovative games. Do you really think that the games developed on a scale where they can afford a quarter to a half million dollar game engine will break new ground? The publishers wouldn't spend the money on the engine if they weren't sure it would sell - and by being sure it would sell, I mean making a game that's iterative and trite.

Fortunately, there's MinGW, various IDE's, and a bunch of
Open source
libraries available online.

The days of guys building a game in their garage and then selling it to a publisher are behind us, I'm afraid

There are a few smaller companies that do such things. Certainly there are also a lot of tools for making such games, and in some areas a rather large open-source community behind them. I've always looked at OGRE as being one of my favorites from a perspective of capabilities/possibility. There are also a lot of sweet code samples.

The downside is that the organization/requirements of the libs is a bit off, and even following the forum I've only been able to get my test projects (in Quanta) to make it to the point where they segfault :-(

Still, I haven't played with it in awhile, and certainly others seem to do fairly well. The biggest problem I have is the consumer/marketing focus on flashy graphics. All the coding talent in the world won't get you far on your own unless you have skills (or help from somebody with skills) in graphics and probably sound as well.

Some of the games definately look cool/promising though, but they big money is probably still in being bought out by a larger gaming firm... sadly.

I wish some of the old devs like SM who now have 'made their way' might look at amassing groups of the smaller companies and helping them market (for a cut of the pie, but a reasonable one). Certainly it would be nicer than seeing their dreams swallowed by larger behemoths to join in the 'bargain bin' collection or and endless line of sequels.

The days of guys building a game in their garage and then selling it to a publisher are behind us, I'm afraid

There are a few smaller companies that do such things. Certainly there are also a lot of tools for making such games, and in some areas a rather large open-source community behind them. I've always looked at OGRE as being one of my favorites from a perspective of capabilities/possibility. There are also a lot of sweet code samples.

The downside is that the organization/requirements of the libs is a bit off, and even following the forum I've only been able to get my test projects (in Quanta) to make it to the point where they segfault :-(

Still, I haven't played with it in awhile, and certainly others seem to do fairly well. The biggest problem I have is the consumer/marketing focus on flashy graphics. All the coding talent in the world won't get you far on your own unless you have skills (or help from somebody with skills) in graphics and probably sound as well.

Some of the games definately look cool/promising though, but they big money is probably still in being bought out by a larger gaming firm... sadly.

I wish some of the old devs like SM who now have 'made their way' might look at amassing groups of the smaller companies and helping them market (for a cut of the pie, but a reasonable one). Certainly it would be nicer than seeing their dreams swallowed by larger behemoths to join in the 'bargain bin' collection or and endless line of sequels.

Last weekend I pulled in the latest Python (2.4.1) for Winblows, the Ogre 3D engine binary , and PyOgre (http://www.ogre3d.org/index.php?option=com_remosi tory&Itemid=57&func=selectcat&cat=1).

This combo rocks fairly hard.

Run a 27 line Python script, and boom, you're looking at a working 3d engine. It's fast, too, probably because the heavy lifting is being done in the Ogre runtime binaries.

For developing and prototyping, there's no time wasted (re)compiling changes; tweak some Python and away you go. And there's no reason the code or scene objects can't be tweaked while the engine is running, perhaps by means of a some sort of IPC, whether it's via a telnet/socket-type connection, or an XML-RPC daemon process, or whatever. Some people have even worked up demo on-screen overlays akin to the Quake console.

I'm looking forward to the day I can interact with a 3D environment and manipulate 3D objects with the same immediacy I'm accustomed to manipulating data in the Python interactive prompt. Heck, I'd even learn Smalltalk if they plugged Ogre directly into something like Squeak. But for now, Python + Ogre (PyOgre) seems to show a lot of promise.

FTA:

"but in gaming, we have no indie aesthetic, no group of people (of any size at least) who prize independent vision and creativity over production values."

Umm, yeah we do.

I think there is a lot more than this author admits to. Why do you think there exists open source 3D engines like Ogre3D as well as a ton of websites devoted to game design techniques , etc? Yes, the indie scene could be bigger, but it is by no means non-existant.

The easiest way to get a game that is portable across OS's is to use a cross-OS toolkit. That being said, the game is already developed, but perhaps anyone else looking at cross-platform could use something like OGRE for 3d-type stuff.

I've been playing with this. So far I'm getting a nasty segfault that I need to debug, but there are lots of demos etc that are quite nice (just wish they'd fix the directory/hierarchy structure on the samples).

Oh, and it works in both linux, windows, and Mac OSX....

• Torque2D - GarageGame's upcoming 2D tiling engine SDK. This looks promising, but is in its early-adopter release. Not yet ready for primetime, according to GarageGames.
• Pygame - Python-based 2D engine. My feeling is that Python is a great language to start game development in.
• Orbforms Designer - Why limit yourself to the PC? PDA games can give you a greater return on your time than Windows games do. (Per man-hour, our PDA titles bring us more revenue than our PC titles do.)
• Game Editor - For those who want to go even higher-level than an SDK.

• 3D Gamestudio - The engine of choice for our latest games. I love it, and hope they'll extend to the Xbox 360 platform when it comes out.
• Torque - Maybe the single most popular 3D engine among indies and hobbyists. Focuses, in part, on cross-platform compatibility (Windows/Linux/Mac).
• OGRE - An open-source package. Frequently updated. Some nice projects using the engine.
• DarkBASIC - A popular package among new developers and independents.

• Game Tunnel - Previews, articles, and reviews of indie games.
• DIY Games - Covering the latest independent/shareware titles.

• Torque2D - GarageGame's upcoming 2D tiling engine SDK. This looks promising, but is in its early-adopter release. Not yet ready for primetime, according to GarageGames.
• Pygame - Python-based 2D engine. My feeling is that Python is a great language to start game development in.
• Orbforms Designer - Why limit yourself to the PC? PDA games can give you a greater return on your time than Windows games do. (Per man-hour, our PDA titles bring us more revenue than our PC titles do.)
• Game Editor - For those who want to go even higher-level than an SDK.

• 3D Gamestudio - The engine of choice for our latest games. I love it, and hope they'll extend to the Xbox 360 platform when it comes out.
• Torque - Maybe the single most popular 3D engine among indies and hobbyists. Focuses, in part, on cross-platform compatibility (Windows/Linux/Mac).
• OGRE - An open-source package. Frequently updated. Some nice projects using the engine.
• DarkBASIC - A popular package among new developers and independents.

• Game Tunnel - Previews, articles, and reviews of indie games.
• DIY Games - Covering the latest independent/shareware titles.

I would also suggest using OPAL (based off ODE) if you ever need physics. SDL will handle pretty much everything else. There are also some pretty nice pre-built engines like Ogre and Crystal Space. There are alot of 2D ones... Whatever you code in, make sure it's multiplatform. C/C++ is good because you can compile it on just about any OS/machine and it's fast. Python's also pretty nice, but it's not quite as fast as C. For a simple card game or something it should be fine though.

This is precisely why I wish more pc developers would take open-source engines more seriously. A key goal of many open source libraries is to maintain cross-platform portability. Just take OGRE for instance. This 3D Rendering engine is fully cross-platform and supports the latest wizbang features (it even implemented parallax mapping before Unreal3 Demoed that technology). There are libraries for every area: Sound? OpenAL. Physics? ODE. Networking? RakNet.

There are already numerous projects that are trying to create a wrapper-engine to integrate several components.. My favorite is Yake which is trying to take a plugin-based approach. The idea is to create a cross-platform API which would allow the change of one subsystem (for example graphics) to be switched as easily as a DLL is swapped.

Of course many Open Source libraries are already seeing limited use - but if game developers would put more faith into the engine (and effort into bringing them up to professional level if they aren't already) then they can have a low-cost solution that is cross platform at no extra investment. I have no idea what the installed gamer base for Macs or Linux is, but I would imagine it is worth the (near nothing) investment.

Don't forget OGRE (http://www.ogre3d.org/)

Overdrive is a futuristic, team-based, multiplayer bike combat game, set in a post-apocalyptic Paris. It was developed over the last year by 7 computer science students from Paris, France, at EPITECH (an IT school), and artwork is by students and professors of Creapole.

The Featured Projects area has a new addition in the form of '9th Life' from Divide By Zero, a 10-student team from the Quantm multimedia institute in Brisbane, Australia. Incredibly, they too built this in a very short time - just 13 weeks - clearly it's been a busy quarter for the Aussies!

OGRE and already mentioned Crystal Space are two most popular open sourced 3d engines, but OGRE community seems more active lately. Here is a summary of OGRE vs Crystal Space

Quake2 is GPL'ed
Quake3 will probably be in the near future, and has a very active community of modders/tools/information/...

Cube (and nextgen Sauerbraten) are zlib licensed:
http://wouter.fov120.com/cube/
fun for its realtime ingame editor iirc

Ogre is LGPL'ed and also very active community
http://www.ogre3d.org/ ... well you get the idea. With a bit of searching
I think you must be able to find some decent open source stuff.

It depends what you want.

If you want to make it easy I'd recommend Torque from GarageGames. It has greate documentation, lots of premade widgets, it's also finished and being used for a number of games. Mainly it has the polish that makes working with it enjoyable. (Tutorials, prebuild samples, etc) Not open source but has a similar community
Someone else has already recommened Crystal Space. If your looking for an example of an MMORG check out PlaneShift.

Another engine that I've been impressed with is ORGE

Anyway as I stated at the begining if you are trying to get something done ASAP go with Torque it has a lot more support. On the other hand if you want something free try Crystal Space or ORGE. One last project you might find interesting is WorldForge they have been building MMORG for a while now. They still haven't finished anything but it's more like a backend and might be useful.

What about OGRE? Not used it but it looks like a competitor to CrystalSpace.

I've never used it, but Ogre3d looks promising.

http://www.ogre3d.org/

People still make innovative games in their garage. With Open Source tools and engines growing up, you should start to see alot more too.

There are already many free graphics engines out there. The music, art, and game design are the sticky situations. Also, it seems every 12 year old programmer (or maybe they all just seem to be 12 year olds) want to make their own MMORPG... and yet nothing gets accomplished.

Anyway, free engine props:
Ogre: http://www.ogre3d.org/

Have you tried OGRE?

Ogre Projects
List of projects that use Ogre, including quite a few games, some being OSS, some being commericial.

Just fyi, there are also Python bindings for Ogre. Here is the current thread in the forums that pretains to the Python version. The Python bindings for Ogre are getting more mature with every release. Pretty soon there will be a serious alternative to PyGame and PyOpenGL. Since Ogre is a 3D engine (as opposed to PyGame's 2D), and operates on a much higher level than PyOpenGL, creating 3D games in Python are now much easier to do. Especially considering Ogre is VERY fast, and the Python bindings push all of the 3D work onto C++.

You're correct, it's quite possible to write very portable code. For example, I compile our games (follow link at sig) for Linux, Mac and Windows from a single codebase.

The trick is to use portable libraries (in our case, SDL, ZLIB, and a few others), as few OS-specific APIs as possible, and in the occasions when you must use OS-specific code, encapsulate it in a library for which you have multiple implementations.

You end up coding against a (usually) thin layer which is completely OS-agnostic.

About Direct3D and OpenGL, one solution is to have an abstract renderer class which then calls OpenGL or Direct3D. Good examples are the excellent Ogre3D and part of the code in the Doomsday Engine.

OGRE3D a very high quality 3d engine is reaching 1.0 this week. Open source middleware shaves years off of development time and is generally overlooked.

If you are going to do 3D game programming, I would also suggest you look at PyOgre. Ogre is a powerful open source graphics engine written in C++. You can download the python bindings for it here. Download it and check out the demos that come with it (the demos are placed in you python directory in a folder called ogredemo).

Linux bindings are not ready yet, but they shouldn't be too far off into the future. You should check the the API Reference and Manual for most starting information, and use the ogre Wiki and forums for most questions you have.

We need a high quality open source game engine first; having it be cross platform wouldn't hurt, either

We have: OGRE

It's not game engine. It's not open-source-ing games. It's main game user/developer platform = Windows.

There are very few things you can do with DX90 and can't with OpenGL extensions. And yes, OpenGL, and OpenGL extensions ARE a standard. DirectX is not.

You can actually find full-featured multi-platform 3D engines such as OGRE, that lets you choose between D3D or OpenGL at runtime. No 3D API dependence anymore.

There was an attempt to fork Bzflag and use an updated graphics engine called OGRE but it turns out that the bzflag code isn't very modular so it has stalled.

I think open source games are on the cusp of a major breakthrough because of the maturation of third party graphics and physics engines like OGRE and ODE. I'm helping with a project that has been running for a little under a year and we've released a pre-alpha already because we didn't re-invent the wheel.

I think a lot of people go into these open source game projects without an understanding of the amount of work involved. It's sad because a lot of great ideas and great code are lost when developers become overwhelmed with the details. Flight/driving simulators are much easier to create in an open source environment because of the lack of a plot requirement so you'll probably see them first. My point is that as soon as flegling OSS game devs look to open source middleware first then hand code things only when necessary, we'll see a lot of great stuff in a very short amount of time. An entertainment singularity :) Don't take my word for it though...
"Some good news from down under! Primed Games have won the Best Indie Game award at the Australian Game Developers Conference with their Mario-kart inspired title 'Scootarama', which is based on OGRE, ODE, RakNet and FMod. It's especially impressive considering they only had 12 weeks to come up with it with a 10-man team."

We can do better. I've been looking into creating a new up-to-date program capable of easily creating movies. After some initial exploration, i've decided that either NeoEngine or Ogre would be a good start for the creation of an open source movie creation program. An additional help is Matthew Casperson's program to run scripted sequences in either Ogre or NeoEngine (see the OgreScript development site).

If you're interested in helping out with this endeavour (or to flame me on my choice of game engines), send me an e-mail (in my profile).

*(The Socrates Project was subsequently bought up by Microsoft, who eventually stopped development on 3dmm.)

I think the big question is, how can we get small game studios back? Is it really not possible for a small team to make commercial games?

I believe that the problem smaller studios face can be overcome with some lateral thinking. The problem is two-fold: production costs and marketing costs are too high to allow indies to compete on equal footing with the big boys. The solution, then, is to not compete on equal footing.

Don't: Try to copy a game that took 60 people 3 years to create.
Do: Draw from an existing genre, but come up with a unique twist -- something meaty that doesn't exist elsewhere.

Don't: Compete with larger productions on the same style of graphics.
Do: Come up with a unique look; it's easier to wow people with a fresh style. (Though Monolith is not a small studio, Tron 2.0 was the opposite of the hyper-realism trend, and set itself apart on appearance, among other things.)

Don't: Try to out-advertise Activision, Microsoft, or Infogr- er- Atari. A small studio's meager advertising budget should be used towards development.
Do: Make as much use of word-of-mouth marketing as is humanly possible. It's easier to connect with your individual players because... well... there are fewer of them.

Don't: Re-invent the wheel. id Software must create its own 3D engine from scratch; you don't (necessarily) have to.
Do: Make as much use of middleware as possible. You don't need to be an artist to create skycubes. You don't need to know DirectX or OpenGL intimately to create an engine. You don't need to write your audio engine from scratch.

And I deeply believe better games would be coming out of a smaller and more laid back studio...

I like the cut of your jib. I hope you're right.

________________________
Inago Rage - A first-person shooter where you fight in arenas of your own creation.

Sorry, I don't think this should get modded up. Irrlicht is a "game engine" (Well, mostly a graphics engine). Its not the answer to the question. He would have to redo all his code to fit in the Irrlicht framework.

I was going to say, use CEGUI but it isn't pure C. It is a very actively developed GUI system, with renderers for DirectX, OpenGL, Ogre3D and Irrlicht.

Write your own, in C++. It's easier than it sounds if you design the controls correctly. I wrote the UI for our games (see Betty's Beer Bar for an example) and it didn't take too much time. It's not OpenGL but the idea is the same, only the drawing part changes.

As for OpenGL, keep it generic - you can hook a SDL window and Direct3D (I submitted a mini howto but I think Sam never included it, check the mailing list archives), so a good idea may be to create or use an abstraction library that can use either OpenGL or Direct3D. Since Direct3D 8+ is almost a copy of OpenGL, writting one is also easier than it sounds. And if your license is compatible, there's a simple wrapper in the Doomsday Engine project.

Of course, you can always use a 3D engine which already includes a GUI (we are currently using OGRE) and which solves the OpenGL/D3D/Whatever abstraction.

Good luck!

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/

And here are the links that the parent AC was to lazy to make:

OGRE

The Nebula Device

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?

I don't understand all the excitement about Irrlicht - wile it is surely an OK 3D Engine, it lags just so much behind in terms of what's possible with current 3D Hardware. If you are looking for something more advanced, have a look at OGRE. It does decent stencil shadows, is also independent of the underlying rendering API and it is used in many commercial and open source games.

Not really. There are already several open-source 3D engines like OGRE and Crystal Space 3D.

Irrlicht is good because it's easy to use. If you want a high performance engine for use in a serious project have a look at OGRE. Sure it's harder to use but it has an active community and the performance in complex, real world scenarios is great. I looked at both when researching what to use for Motorsport and right now, OGRE is a better choice for big serious apps. We're using OGRE for our open source driving simulator and it compiles in Linux and Windows with no changes to the code. OGRE is good because it sticks to what it is good at, 3D. There are a lot of Game engines out there that try to be all things to all people but aren't good at any of them. OGRE is good at 3D.

That said, if you're new to 3D Irrlicht is a good place to start.

Definitely Steve Streeting of the OGRE.3D engine. He has an amazing dedication for the project and the engine bypasses many commercial engines out there with clean marks.

I know I would love to put together something like GTA:VC or MTA. I'm sure many others have as well. My problem is that I'm perhaps not as good a coder as I'd like to think, and I've never explored game programming before. But I have put a lot of thought into it the last year or two, and have come up with these resources:

• OGRE - an object-orientated graphics engine.
• Open Dynamics Engine - as used by the well-known stair and truck dismount games.
• DIE - a car game in the early stages of development. It uses the two previous libraries.
• Boost - C++ libraries. In particular, there is Boost.Python which allows good cooperation between C++ and Python. That could be useful for scripting the interactive behaviour of the various people, vehicles, weapons, and other devices.

As you say, the key would be in creating a flexible engine at the core. I imagine people adding new vehicles, tools, missions, and venues. I'm not sure what the "aim" of the game would be, but I'm sure people would create things to do. Here's my wishlist of improvements and other ideas:

• Climbing ability. I see lots of ladders around GTA:VC, but can't climb them. The ability to hang onto ledges like Tomb Raider would be useful as well.
• More detailed buildings. Most of the buildings in GTA:VC are just boxes. I'd like the ability to walk inside, use the stairs or elevators, find a sniping position on the balcony or window, etc.
• Focus less on violence. GTA:VC has been heavily criticised for its violence and sometimes even I find it a little too much. I'd like to see more focus on stunts and tricks, mischief, puzzle solving and just simple exploration. Perhaps make the police more likely to catch you when you do something "wrong".
• Different character classes. Perhaps not as detailed as a full-on role-playing game, but do have different types of characters with slightly different abilities. You need variety when multiple people are playing online.
• More interactive elements like light switches, garage doors, elevators, etc. Perhaps the player could obtain a garage door remote control and go around opening peoples garages.
• For the ultimate geek thrill, simulate several thousand artificial people! Get rid of the annoying "background" element of the cars and pedestrians in GTA:VC. Everyone has a house, they travel to work every morning and travel home every evening. Police and police cars actually patrol and have to travel to you instead of just appearing. Likewise with the heavier SWAT vans, police helicopter, and army trucks and tanks. Tourists travel in on planes to the airport, stay at hotels, travel around by day seeing the sights, and leave again by plane. Oh boy, lots of computation and memory and bandwidth! Perhaps a little too far-fetched for now.