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Jet3d Game Engine
Mark Komus writes: "A co-worker just pointed me to this great looking new game engine, called Jet3d. From what I gathered from the license it is available freely, source included, to anyone that wants it on the condition that you must release any source code changes you make along with any product you produce with it. You can also release a product with unmodified binaries they provide, or you can pay to license the engine and you get to keep your modified source to yourself." Wow! This looks sweet!
Look at Crystal Space. It's an LGPL'd 3D engine, which means you can use it in any software as long as you release all the changes you've made to Crystal Space under the LGPL. It's also very much cross platform, supporting Linux, general Unix, Windows, Windows NT, OS/2, BeOS, NextStep, OpenStep, MacOS/X Server, DOS, and Macintosh, using OpenGL, Direct3D, or software rendering.
If you use a highly modified version of their engine and distribute with source, you're covered until they release a new version. If your changes aren't compatible with theirs, it becomes a question of who defines what reasonable efforts are. Of course, one always has the option of actually buying a license to the code -- which, if you're selling a product that uses the library, makes sense and is even the right thing to do.
This provision gives them a pretty big stick in getting commercial users of the engine to cough up some cash, but depending on their benevolence, may allow non-commercial developers some leeway.
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"Go Metallica. Die RIAA." -- Linus Torvalds
Umm... No, it is not certifiable open source. The reason being that when you contribute to thier product, you give them special rights over you code that no one else gets, including yourself. Under the GPL, if you start a GPL'd product and someone else contributes to it, you no longer have the right to re-license it, unless you remove everything that they added. Very different. The NPL had this problem originally, and it didn't pass because of it. That is why they created the MPL.
The must update clients thing effectively allows them to end the open source version at any time. They say that future versions may be under a different license. So, they decide they have taken advantage of the community enough, they release new version without source code, you can't use old version anymore. I doubt that could pass as OSI certified.
I really hate it when people reply incorrectly to my posts and get moderated up.
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From the license:
So, they can take all your enhancements, relicense them, and sell them, but you can't. There are several other annoying conditions as well, like the "you must display our logo" condition and the "when we release new versions, you must update your clients" condition.
This is not open source. How did it get on Source Forge?
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Time for a shameless plug :-)
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:-)
Have a look at Crystal Space. This is an Open Source and portable 3D Engine that runs on Linux, Windows, BeOS, DOS, OS/2, FreeBSD, SGI, Solaris, Macintosh, OpenStep, NextStep, MacOS/X,
It supports OpenGL, Direct3D, Glide, and software rendering. Some of the features are dynamic and static colored lights with soft shadows, curved surfaces, volumetric fog, halos, ROAM landscape engine, portals, octree/BSP-tree/c-buffer rendering, hardware accelerated transform support, triangle meshes with LOD and skeletal or frame based animation,
It is written in C++. Is very modular and very Open Source. Up to 90 people have already contributed to it. You can too
By the way, we're also hosted at SourceForge and we're the second most active projec there. The main site for CS is http://crystal.linuxgames.com
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
- is a quantification of "Exceptionally fast rendering". Eye candy and advanced physics are all well and good, but if the engine pulls 20 fps with a 1000 poly scene on a decent system, forget about it.
On a slightly different tack, I'm always mystified about how many people get their panties in a wad about this or that free 3D engine. People, if having a working 3D engine was even 25% of the work of game creation, Daikatana 2 would have hit the shelves yesterday. Getting a team of designers, writers, artists, architects (i.e. mappers), and programmers of the right talent, and keeping them focused on task and happy has always been a bigger burden by far. How Epic pulled it off for what, 3, 4 years for a single game has always impressed me a lot more than Unreal ever did. As a rule, creative vision is the single most precious commodity in the developer community currently, and it's likely to stay that way. There's a lot more chaff out there than wheat.
Damn, those stills are pretty, though.
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Trade Wars Lives
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I was browsing the features list and notably, there is no OpenGL support. It says it supports Direct3D and Glide, but there's no mention of Linux.
:)
Also, there doesn't appear to be any NURBS support in the renderer. 3D sound positioning is a nice touch but once again... probably Win32 / DirectSound. If it has a software 3D sound capability then that's probably better for Linux anyhow. I'll have to take a look at the CVS repository and get a better feel for it because the features list leaves me with more questions than answers
On the bright side, considering their licensing policy, I would expect people to add in some of these features / portability sooner or later.
Best regards,
SEAL