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Torchlight was made with Ogre3d.

Well, as the FOSS community would say: "shut the fuck up and fix the problem yourself".
Here's a link to get you started OGRE. Here's another Blender. And another learncpp.com
When you're done with your masterpiece, feel free to give it away and support it forever.

Not a lot of offerings in Linux game engines so far, so this would be a nice addition. Afaik, the only real options are various derivative of older open-sourced Id Software engines, and Ogre3d. Plus Unity recently added the ability to export builds to Linux, but not to develop on Linux.

I suppose Cube counts.

Not a lot of offerings in Linux game engines so far, so this would be a nice addition. Afaik, the only real options are various derivative of older open-sourced Id Software engines, and Ogre3d. Plus Unity recently added the ability to export builds to Linux, but not to develop on Linux.

Actually, their windows drivers have been pretty good.
Linux drivers are better than they used to be, but still buggy. For example, I've been recently coding with Ogre3d, and was ready to pull my hair out when terrain textures would not render.
Then I tested the built-in Ogre demos, and ... the textures didn't render. So it appears to be an issue with my laptop's ATI GPU+driver, and not my code at all. Frustrating!

Apparently this was also a similar ">issue with textures on some Catalyst drivers in windows running back quite a bit.

I would just like to point out the OGRE - Open Source 3D Graphics Engine which is MIT licensed and has been around since 2001. OGRE is a better built system and the games in the gallery show this off.

the world doesn't need a single game engine more that isn't coupled to a game. there's way too many of them already.

I'm still looking for one that's Open Source and really usable. I had hopes about NeoAxis, but it turned out to be commercial as well.

I'm aware that building a game engine is hard and thus needs a lot of money, but somehow it worked out greatly for a certain graphics engine, even though it's the same problem in the same industry.

and imaginative games tend to need the engines customized to the moon anyways.

That's why you can get the source to nearly every engine (if you can pay for the super premium license).

there really aren't that many engines that support planets in solar systems in galaxies like frontier first encounter..

I don't know that game, but generally, with a bit of smoke & mirrors (clever LoD, static cubemaps, etc.) most engines can be used for space shooters.

While not requiring modified source to be released might initially seem like giving up an important motivator to contribute code back to the community, we’ve noticed something in recent years: 99% of useful code contributions come from people who are motivated to participate in the project regardless of what the license tells them they have to do. It’s our experience that a certain percentage of the user community will always participate and contribute back, and therefore encouraging adoption via simpler licensing is likely to result in more contributions overall than coersion via complex and restrictive licensing does. In addition, people who are internally motivated to participate tend to provide much higher quality and more usable contributions than those who only do it because they are forced to.

http://www.ogre3d.org/

Ogre is a 3D rendering engine with a very large community based around it. We used it for a proof of concept for a real-time simulator, and there were few limitations we faced in using it. It might not be as clean as unity, but it has more flexibility in licensing, as long as you don't might copy left, which in your situation you shouldn't. Actually, I just looked and it seems they made the switch to the MIT licence.

The proof of concept was actually a major improvement over the production simulator, but of course business politics always wins in the end.

OGRE switched away from the GPL a couple years ago, and they had this to say about it. This, in my opinion, is the strongest argument for BSD-style licenses, and totally changed my mind about open source licenses. I'd probably still use GPL for end user products, but for libraries or frameworks or what have you, I like the simplicity of BSD or MIT.

In a sequential processing system, polling cannot begin until the last event has been fully processed. Which means that if you have a button that does something really complicated, NO other button can work until that process is complete.

None of the buttons do anything even slightly complicated. They just update some state data that will be used by the game loop. I explained this already, but you were too arrogant to pay attention.

In a threaded system, with CORRECT design, one event produces one interrupt produces one thread. That thread lasts the lifetime of that process, then dies. Thus, there isn't a thread per button, there's a thread per active event.

So more like a thread per button press, which lives until the action performed by the button press is done? As I said, all you need to do is update some state. That task can be completed in less time than it would take to create a thread to do the work. So I assume you must mean, for example, that if I press a button to throw a grenade, the game should spawn a thread to move the grenade through its trajectory, calculating collisions, exploding, and then the thread should terminate. That wouldn't be efficient, and it's not how games are programmed.

You seem to think that execution of game logic for events spans multiple frames. Games don't work that way. Such a thread could waste CPU time by updating its state more than once per rendered frame, or if it didn't get CPU time it might not run at all that frame, leading to glitches (not moving, not triggering a response to something, etc). To solve those problems, you'd have to make the routine's execution block after an update to wait for a frame to render. And at the same time, your render would have to block until all tasks have run so that everything runs exactly once.

And then congratulations, you've built a list of tasks and executed them once per frame. Which is what games actually do. But your method is convoluted and inefficient. Real games implement handler functions that do one frame worth of processing and then return. They execute each handler once per frame, and then render graphics.

You generally do not let threads run freely, updating the game state while you're trying to render. You can implement concurrency between rendering and execution, where you render one frame and process physics and logic for the next at the same time, but that's still calling each handler once per frame.

The only common exception is AI. Since it both sees and directs the game world at a high level, it doesn't require as much consistency. And it also does some things that might take a while, so you might actually need to run a task in its own thread over a period that spans several frames.

Event-driven designs almost invariably use this design because you get a flat latency (ie: you're not waiting for something else to finish, which will take a non-deterministic amount of time).

You can't just create additional processor resources by spawning a thread. Whether you have a thread per task, or you put them in a task queue, you're going to share time with the other tasks in some way. Either by letting everyone ahead of you go first, or by having every active task take turns round-robin until all are done. But the policy doesn't matter here, because you have to wait for all the tasks to complete before rendering the frame. So just use one of these.

My definition of real-time is indeed correct. The "short and bounded time" description of yours is the effect of guaranteeing N amount of runtime in M amount of wall-clock time (the time has to be bounded, as N cannot exceed M, and because latency has to be extremely tiny, M is classically small making N classically small.) Real-time means Extremely And Utterly Predictable, my definition says how that is achieved in real-time systems, your j

Why purposefully exclude a section of the market when it's not necessary?

Dunno, but I'd sure like to ask the devs of Torchlight that question. Why intentionaly exclude a Linux port considering they used a cross-platform engine? It blows the mind.

Granted, it later turned out to run ok under Wine... but in the meantime I was undecided and waited until the game was up on offer for $5. If there was a native Linux port I'd have payed the full $20 from the start. That's $15 they cheated themselves out of. All this while most indy devs out there would be aghast at the thought of throwing $15 out the window like that.

Commercial games are, for the most part, dead on the Linux desktop. There are some occasional exceptions but for the most part, if you want a big-name game to appear on Linux you're gonna have to go use WINE as native builds probably won't exist.

Dilogus - The Winds of War

It's a third person High Fantasy RPG action game that immerses players deep into the awe inspiring fantasy world of Dilogus, allowing them to experience it from multiple perspectives of six unique characters in both single player and co-operative multiplayer mode on Linux and Windows platforms.

Yeah, Linux game development has to start somewhere.... You can't expect, EA, Epic, ID, etc. to just say, "We're now developing for $NEW_PLATFORM" without watching others first test the waters.

I think if you really want to avoid disappointment with regards to Linux gaming and want to continue enjoying gaming on Linux... get used to indy games, and forget the big-budget commercial stuff. Indy developers need all the audience they can get [...]

Big-name commercial studios like EPIC and iD have abandoned Linux (unlike his previous games John Carmack has expressed a certain doubt about supporting Linux with Rage).

To avoid disappointment with regards to Any Gaming I choose Indy games. As a developer myself, I'm excited about the state of Linux gaming; To me Linux gaming looks like a large, ripe, and untapped market.

Demand for Linux games does exist. John Carmack is purposefully misleading... He sells a Game engine that doesn't run on Linux & isn't going to advocate making games on any platform that his engine doesn't run on...

Cross Platform is the future. Mac is a Unix. Linux is a Unix. Macs & "PCs" have the same guts these days. Rage runs on Unix... Not supporting Linux is stupid. Start with cross platform code (or engine), and you don't ever have to "port". Thus, you get additional market presence for $0.00.

Carmack has invested tons of time into developing for Apple and Microsoft platforms instead of investing time in truly cross platform engine code. As a game developer, (NOT an Engine Designer) it just doesn't make sense to use an Engine that's not cross platform. Why purposefully exclude a section of the market when it's not necessary?

The big guys will let the little guys innovate first... Add small carp to a big empty pond, watch them grow... Where the big fish are absent, the little fish reign supreme (proof: iPhone/iPad & Android gaming markets). The big guys arn't stupid, just misleading. Steve Jobs said, "No one wants a tablet PC", and then develops an iPad... In the past Carmack has expressed "doubts" about games in the browser and on mobile platforms, yet now has both mobile and browser games.

Don't be fooled, he'll makes games for Linux after others have already blazed the trails and "built out" the market.

Examples for ioquake3
Examples for XreaL
Examples for Cube 2
Examples for Irrlicht
Examples for Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine
Examples for Crystal Space
Examples for Blender Game Engine
Examples for Panda3D

It's quite obvious that all of these engines are much more advanced than Darkplaces. Darkplaces doesn't even do basic stuff like HDR lighting, DOF or parallax mapping. You could reproduce most effects in Darkplaces with shaders in ioquake3, which is basically just a cleaned up id Tech 3 engine. Then there is the issue of poor performance in Darkplaces...

When I read the headline I thought "why would anyone care?" There are plenty of good, free engines out there already.

ioquake3
XreaL
Cube 2
Irrlicht
OGRE
Crystal Space
Blender
Panda3D

And if John Carmack doesn't go back on his word, id Tech 4 will soon be free.

I'd rather use alternatives such as Ogre3D or Irrlitch even if not technologically advanced. I think that's the best way to support Linux-based game development, the same way Blender3D has been doing with their animated short films. Otherwise I feel the community will gain nothing from this. You know, what bugs the the most is that even though Unigine is closed sourced, It has never been used in any important industry title, despite being around for years.

Is there even a market, let alone a convention, for selling game concepts?

Nope. Quite frankly, the only way its going to get made is if you do it yourself. I'd suggest using an established engine to cut development time/cost to a minimum and going with a digital distribution service like Steam to bring the product to market.

Possible engines include the Blender one mentioned, and http://www.ogre3d.org/ since they are both free and open source

Is it on par with Crytek and Unreal with post processing, shaders, motion blur, anisotropic filtering, AA etc? (Honestly curious, don't know the answer)

I suggest that you take a look at their feature list and find out. It has many features, many good tutorials, is free software and cross platform (Linux/OpenGL, Windows/Direct3D, Mac OS X/OpenGL).

If so, what's the major difference between a game and a graphics engine?

A graphics engine takes care of rendering graphics, nothing else. It could be something as simple as a 2D sprite library, to a full-featured 3D graphics engine.

But to write games, you need many other parts that are not provided by a pure graphics engine, such as input handling, AI, network access, physics, sound/music, etc, etc. If you combine a graphics engine with one or more such libraries/frameworks and/or tools, you get a game engine.

Ogre supports both on Windows and OpenGL in MacOSX and Linux. And OpenAL also supports the three OSes.

Well in that case it's TFS and TFA that are misleading - do not take this as representative of open source. E.g., check out http://www.ogre3d.org/gallery/ for some decent screenshots from an open source engine.

The technology is also more comparable to Doom 3 than Quake 2 (it's just that the screenshots on TFA mostly don't seem to show them very well - even the screenshots from version 1 4 years ago showed realtime shadows for example, but for some reason these are disabled in most of the screenshots on the latest article!)

Although it was originally Quake 1 they started with, it looks like they've made major changes to it, adding in newer technology (e.g., dynamic lighting and realistic shadows, which is more comparable to Doom 3 than Quake 1).

I must admit, I was a bit confused. A lot of the screenshots in TFA look rather crappy, no different to the Quake 1 or 2, and don't seem to show off what the engine's really capable of. There's no evidence of anything newer such as dynamic shadows (the lighting on the walls could easily be precomputed lightmaps).

But go to the older article one year ago, and there are much better graphics - e.g., here you have realtime shadows, and what looks like bloom effect, and possibly bump mapping on the walls. There is one screenshot in the latest article that shows realtime shadows from a character, but it's rather hard to see in the screenshot. It seems odd why they released this latest batch in order to show its "impressive graphics".

There is also a lot more in the way of open source graphics engines - e.g., projects like OGRE (check out the Gallery).

Although it was originally Quake 1 they started with, it looks like they've made major changes to it, adding in newer technology (e.g., dynamic lighting and realistic shadows, which is more comparable to Doom 3 than Quake 1).

I must admit, I was a bit confused. A lot of the screenshots in TFA look rather crappy, no different to the Quake 1 or 2, and don't seem to show off what the engine's really capable of. There's no evidence of anything newer such as dynamic shadows (the lighting on the walls could easily be precomputed lightmaps).

But go to the older article one year ago, and there are much better graphics - e.g., here you have realtime shadows, and what looks like bloom effect, and possibly bump mapping on the walls. There is one screenshot in the latest article that shows realtime shadows from a character, but it's rather hard to see in the screenshot. It seems odd why they released this latest batch in order to show its "impressive graphics".

There is also a lot more in the way of open source graphics engines - e.g., projects like OGRE (check out the Gallery).

I really don't understand why anyone who isn't developing AAA games is using Direct3D or OpenGL.

Sane people working on more modest 3D projects should be using OGRE. It's a joy to work with, it's fast, and it's written by really smart people who know OpenGL, Direct3D, and graphics hardware in and out.

And if you *are* developing AAA games, aren't there high-quality, cutting-edge, cross-platform engines you can buy? You still need to know how the 3D software and hardware work. And you still have to write shaders yourself. But let someone else take care of the details.

Somebody using Ogre3D has been working on a portal like project for nearly a year and has made pretty damn good progress for somebody who was new to game programming:
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=37376

He also has a blog which seems quite lacking though.

But you do see that. :) Everything casts shadows on everything (unless it's been specifically disabled by the artist).

If that's true, then where are they? I have yet to see a gameplay example where a soldier casts a shadow on himself. You can see a soldier's shadows on the ground, plants, buildings, and in other areas, but never on the soldier himself.

Crysis has completely uniform shadow mapping.

I don't think that means what you think it means. A uniform shadow map is a shadow map that's effectively fixed regardless of perspective. This is inferior to raytraced results.

This is exactly the same as ray traced shadows, the only difference is quality and power requirement.

You keep repeating that, but it's simply not true. Shadow maps only compete with raytracing if you spend the computational power to project a shadow for every polygon in the scene for nearly every frame. Game don't do that. It's far too expensive.

There's a good discussion on the Crysis shadowing technique over on the OGRE3D forums.

I have a feeling you may be thinking of projected shadows which do indeed have a few of those attributes (they suck).

Shadow maps ARE a form of projected shadows. That's why they're also referred to as projective shadowing.

"We don't really know how to accelerate all sorts of rendering operations (glyph rendering is proving to be particularly difficult at the moment, for example)"

Linux needs font help

Use the GPU to do font rendering.

Yes I'm also looking forward to that. I'm curious to why they choose cristalspace over ogre3d though. They probably found that using crystalspace would be easier as ogre3d doesn't implement a full game engine, despite its popularity.

No, I wasn't. There are a lot of projects that aim to make it easier to use external libraries for sound, input, etc with OGRE3D, but it does not include any of that stuff (by design) as part of the package. Those features are provided as optional modules that are part of CrystalSpace in that they (I believe they call it CEL from looking at their front page, and I'm assuming this is what the Blender guys were talking about) provide these as an official add-on. OGRE3D is a rendering engine only.

Also, OGRE3D is LGPL and has been for quite some time. There's no reason someone can't release a commercial game using it. By the way, this is the exact same license as CrystalSpace. The Irrlicht license is based on the zlib/libpng license, which is basically BSD with a different name. I've never heard of Lightfeather so I didn't even bother to look at the license there, but I'll assume it's either LGPL or some BSD-like, too.

No, I wasn't. There are a lot of projects that aim to make it easier to use external libraries for sound, input, etc with OGRE3D, but it does not include any of that stuff (by design) as part of the package. Those features are provided as optional modules that are part of CrystalSpace in that they (I believe they call it CEL from looking at their front page, and I'm assuming this is what the Blender guys were talking about) provide these as an official add-on. OGRE3D is a rendering engine only.

Also, OGRE3D is LGPL and has been for quite some time. There's no reason someone can't release a commercial game using it. By the way, this is the exact same license as CrystalSpace. The Irrlicht license is based on the zlib/libpng license, which is basically BSD with a different name. I've never heard of Lightfeather so I didn't even bother to look at the license there, but I'll assume it's either LGPL or some BSD-like, too.

Panda3D
Irrlicht
Ogre3D

Also, CitySimulation makes a free web-only version of their 3D engine.

As others pointed out, it's the issue of not having enough 2D/3D artists and music/sound folk. OSS developers certainly have a whole bunch of good coders - and writers, in a pinch.

For example, take a look at the Irrlicht or OGRE screenie galleries - you see the technology is definitely getting there. You can get ye trimesh to ye rendering device, and by golly does it ever look shiny and, with a bit of work, not that bad. (More bloom! More! More!) But we'd definitely need folks creating those models for the display first! The tech is there, but the art lags a bit.

If you want to see a project where the art and tech goes well hand in hand, try Battle for Wesnoth - top notch graphics (albeit in 2D pixel-art), sound effects and music. We can do this.

Check out Scorched3D. *VERY* fun game, and the latest version looks just great.
Armagetron Advanced is also a great free game, even though the grafics may not be your cup of vodka.

Additionally, you might find some very fun and good looking games by checking open source game- or 3D- engines. The showcase forum at ogre3D is a good start.

The point is: there are some great looking, fun Open Source games out there they don't get reviewed or advertised in such a way that you'll hear about them often.

I'd also recommend OGRE for graphics, which now includes OIS for I/O. It's great stuff, even if you only care about a single platform. There's really very little reason for most people to use DirectX or OpenGL directly. Steve Streeting and co. have packaged all that rendery goodness into one damn good engine.

Your link is bad, you meant this http://www.ogre3d.org/

I know of Ogre, which is very, very pretty;
http://www.ogre3d.org/

And Crystal Space, which is very pretty, and also includes a game engine;
http://www.crystalspace3d.org/

If someone however knows of an OSS physics engine for games which does a bit of aerodynamics, please let me know. :)

There are also a bunch of other Open Source Game projects you can work on, here is a short list.

• ScummVM - For all you adventure freaks.
• bzflag - that age old tank game.
• Ogre3d - one of the best OSS 3d engines out there.
• Thousand Parsec - Go conqure the universe!

If you are interested in game programming you should give them a look.

There are also a bunch of other Open Source Game projects you can work on, here is a short list.

• ScummVM - For all you adventure freaks.
• bzflag - that age old tank game.
• Ogre3d - one of the best OSS 3d engines out there.
• Thousand Parsec - Go conqure the universe!

OGRE > Crystal Space :p

Okay, so I don't know enough about Crystal Space to make a valid comparison (though I think OGRE is more widely used?), but I just started learning OGRE, and it's also on the list.

Either way, it's amazing to me that game engines of this caliber are available as open-source.

His response was basically: "Why cant we make something like 'Grand theft auto'; This is boring"

That's a valid response. You could try showing him OGRE, so he could make a simple 3d game. Or, if he just wants to mess around with an existing game, you could show him how to make a Quake mod. Either way, I think the most interesting way to learn something new is to be able to see results fast. Once he knows the basics, he can always learn about what happens under the hood later.

I've looked at the blender environment for making games. However, it has poor network support for multiplayer games (last I checked), and is meant for smaller single person games. DirectX has had a bit better multiplayer support so far, so I imagine XNA has decent multiplayer support, or soon will. Blender is licensed under the GPL, but any scripts and artwork can be under any license you choose, and can be used commercially.

There's also OGRE3D. Although, I've had my share of tracing memory leaks and seg faults enough to know that as a development team of 1, there are much more interesting things I'd rather be doing (like adding content). Given I have been using Java a bit more lately, I've been leaning towards trying to use ogre4j, although progress with this has been relatively slow over the years. (Although their automated conversion of C++ hooks to Java seems interesting.) Also of note, OGRE3D is a graphic engine, not a game framework. However, other game related components exist based on this engine, although each has their own bit of requirements. For example, Yake will not compile without the latest and greatest Visual Studio. (The free Express version won't cut it, because it has dependencies on MFC, which the express version doesn't include.) This solution is the most attractive to me, nonetheless, because games can be made with minimal publishing/license constraints (most are licensed under LGPL).

There are other solutions, such as Garage Games, but they take a huge cut out of any money your game makes (used to be upwards of 80%). They also have mediocre network support, placing them as a poor choice in my opinion. Their claim is that they will, however, handle all of the marketing for your game and get others to play (& pay) for your game. Alternatively, you could pay a $15,000 license per game to remove royalty restrictions. There are also several OpenGL game frameworks, but they require all game releases to be under the GPL.

Does anyone else know of a similar solution that does not require a GPL license for the game, has good multiplayer (or massively multiplayer) network support, and a decent (or active) game development framework?

It doesn't really matter how amazingly wonderful Direct3D 10 is. It's going to be years before anyone but the most "hardcore" gamers (ie, people willing to spend $400+ for a two-slot power-sucking monstrosity) have DX10-compatible cards and Vista, so any game developer that doesn't want to lock out 95% of their audience will, at least, supply a DX9 renderer. Some will stay with DX9 because it's good enough, and hopefully some will realize they don't need to be fiddling with Direct3D themselves and move to cross-platform engines like OGRE.

Fact is, many games will auto-detect your hardware and give recommended settings. The problem is that the settings either can't be adjusted low enough to achieve decent performance, or if they can, it ends up looking WORSE than the previous generation. See Oblivion vs. Morrowind on a GeForce FX card. Morrowind looks beautiful and runs smoothly. Oblivion needs to use the very lowest settings to run faster than a slideshow, at which point it looks more like Daggerfall than Morrowind. And it still doesn't run very well. So while your idea is valid, it requires game developers to create engines that can be adjusted downwards while still retaining acceptable visual quality. I don't think this is too much to ask. I know OGRE provides a number of features to make removing effects or detail quite easy.

http://www.crystalspace.org/ http://www.ogre3d.org/ http://www.openscenegraph.org/

Oh, and people who compare XNA to game engines like Ogre are missing the point. XNA is not a game engine, it's more of a development tool/platform. It does come with lots of library code, but it's not a full-fledged game engine.

I'm gonna go back to coding my own Final Fantasy VI clone

Got it posted anywhere? :-)

If you think that commercial renderers are amazing, what I've found is that the free software world is even more-so. For example, projects such as Blender and Cinelerra are amazing in their capabilities. Even with such software as the GIMP you can do rather wicked things.

Now stepping into the arena of game creation, I'm becoming increasingly impressed with projects such as OGRE 3d, which unfortunately lacks somewhat in samples/documentation (it's a little hard to get started as the documentation IMHO starts off in a little after the starting line), but otherwise is very powerful and seems to a very good building-block for big things.

I love Ogre3D, I use it myself for small game projects, but I don't think you could compare it to the Unreal 3 Engine. NASA would have to spend over $350k just to bring the Ogre3D engine upto spec with the Unreal engine, so why not just buy the Unreal engine and save a lot of time and money by not reinventing the wheel.

Ogre3D is mainly a graphics engine (Ogre stands for Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine), where as the Unreal Engine is a complete game engine with graphics, AI, networking code, physics, sound, etc..

Take a look at the list of Unreal Engine features and a look at the Ogre3D Engine features.

Unreal is a very good engine. Ogre and all the other open source engines are not.

It's $350K for heavens sake! Why not http://www.ogre3d.org/ coupled with http://www.ode.org/? Surely combining those with 2 university departments where you'll no doubt find people already familiar with the source code would be a more sensible approach to developing serious games.
Sheesh. Money to burn.

Intelligent game developers, save for the ones who are obsessed with pushing the envelope of graphical masturbation, should already be using OGRE and other cross-platform libraries. Sadly, it seems like 90% of the industry has cutting-edge graphics as its first priority. Why? As far as I'm concerned, Quake 3 and the games based on the engine still look great seven years later. At some point, they'll have to stop focusing on video candy designed so "hardcore gamers" can justify their hardware expenses.

It's called OGRE. There are few legitimate reasons for using DirectX or OpenGL directly.