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• Full shader support, including normal mapping, offset normal mapping(or "virtual displacement mapping" as they call it in ue3), frame buffer distortion(refraction effects, etc...), custom lighting models, and all other shader based effects
• High Dynamic Range Lighting(HDRI), "light blooms"
• Shadows - stencil and projective
• Projective textures("stained glass" lighting)
• Skeletal Animation

(there are various Open Source projects that fit this bill, but AFAIK, none of them are official or have any sort of critical mass).

I'll take this opportunity to promote my favorite open source 3d project: OGRE. It's really a very complete rendering system with a great set of plugins for Maya and 3dStudioMax to work with it's mesh format. The tutorials and documentation are also very well written. It, of course, does not do everything, but it does a lot of what I need it to do. It was written around D3D and D3DX functionality, but it also has an OpenGL backend which implements the same functionality. I don't know what 'critical mass' is, but regardless, I definitely think OGRE can probably do what you want it to.

Another good one is Ogre. It's purely a rendering engine, which lets you choose your collision/sound/networking/whatever else libraries, but there are a few engine frameworks springing up around it. It's fast, very clean, and capable of a lot of current generation effects (well, it has full shader support, so I guess it supports most anything you can code a shader for). If C# is your flavor, Ogre has a cousin called Axiom that is just as functional. Axiom is intended to be a game engine, but is very much in its infancy, so there isn't too much besides (rock solid) rendering in place there yet. Still, though, both are very clean and excellently designed, and are both well worth a look.

Does anybody remember the old (early 90s) DOS game, Stunt Island? Essentially, the game provided an island full of a number of different sets, such as a city, an oil rig, a canyon, and so forth. The player could position cameras and props around these sets, and create event triggers for things like camera pans and object movement. The game also had an editing mode where you could splice together taped footage and insert sound effects. The game had a bias towards airplane stunts, but could be used to film virtually any sort of movie. Back in middle school my friend and I actually used it to create a short documentary about battles from World War II. Stunt Island was greatly loved by those who used it, and it still has somewhat of a cult following.

My question is, why hasn't anybody created something like this more recently? Although FPS game engines work for this, they certainly aren't designed for it, and there's quite a bit of roughness involved when one actually tries to create a movie. 3D animation modelers can also be used, but generally someone creating a movie has to focus on too many low-level details.

I'm actually considering starting up an open-source project this summer to try to create such a movie-creating tool, making heavy use of pre-existing graphics libraries like OGRE. Would anyone else be interested in helping out with such an endeavour?

to write a Scene Manager for OGRE that displays the file system including SMB stuff in 3D that can be navigated around in with 2 mice but maybe one of you do. It'd be smart to start small with something like a Konqueror modification that runs in a window before replacing the entire Window Manager. I want something that can fly me around my network pointing out security holes. It's not impossible, I just don't have enough time.

They were waiting for a new version of SOLID to be released for the physics side of things and based on the forum @ blender.org, it seems like the game engine might finally be buildable from CVS again - but very buggy.

At any rate, if you're looking for a good 3d engine, checkout OGRE. If you need everything, including the kitchen sink, then look at Crystal Space 3D.

This is closer to reality than you might think. You have OGRE for graphics. OpenDE for physics. Once there is middleware that makes it a little bit easier for the two to interoperate, we'll see more titles using them. I'm currently working on an open source driving simulator that makes use of both. These open source engines are cross platform so they have been used in commercial titles as well as for open source projects.

An interesting discussion is whether or not the middleware should be BSD, LGPL, GPL licensed or something else. The article brings up an interesting point though. In our case we could sure use a few more good C++ gurus. There is no shortage of good ideas. Check out our site and forums here if you have some time to kill and you like tough problems.