OGRE GPL'ed 3D Engine

Steve Streeting writes "Version 0.99b of OGRE (Object-oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) has been released! OGRE is a well designed, flexible and easy to use 3D engine released under the GNU Public License. This version adds highly customisable, scriptable particle systems, generic billboard support, compatibility with VC.Net, performance improvements and various bug fixes."

Comments

Steve Jackson's Ogre

[bsartist]

Heh. The first thing I thought of when I read the headline was the Ogre wargame from Steve Jackson. Just showing my age, I guess.

Re:Looks nice, but....

[ulrhol]

What about utilizing the already existing model libraries of LEGO. LDraw has a large numbers of pieces which quite easily could be turned into a FPS Lego Game ;-)

Re:Universal 3D Acceleration

[WasterDave]

Besides, I think OpenGL is extremely hard to implement efficiently in software.

A nice man call John Carmack would probably disagree with you there.

Dave

artists need tools.

[Steveftoth]

Almost all artists hate computers because most are not as technicly skilled as the programmers that make the engines.

Which is why the real beauty behind games like Unreal, Quake , etc... are in the people who write the tools for the artists. Without good easy to use tools, it doesn't matter how good your engine is.

Well done!

[abdulla]

I've been watching this project as its been moving along, and I must say its quite the posterchild for what can be done, I hope more people support it and help with development, until recently its been steve alone, now the development team is getting a lot bigger, I hope more people join in to make this a great engine.

Oh and with linux support, its being done Thomas 'temas' Muldowney of Jabber fame, so it won't be long.

Solves the wrong problem

[Animats]

It's a nice piece of work, but it solves a problem that nobody needed solved.

Ogre is a "high-level scene graph engine". This is a level above a standard 3D rendering API, like OpenGL, but a level below a general-purpose game engine. Unfortunately, while high level scene graph engines seem plausible, they're not very useful.

There are quite a few of these things. SGI Inventor was the first major one. Apple had one in Quicktime 3D. Direct-X has one, but Direct-X is mostly used as a low-level drawing API. One was announced for OpenGL (it was called Farenheit) when SGI and Microsoft lost interest, it didn't really bother anybody.

You need a low-level graphics API to abstract different types of hardware. That's the real job of OpenGL and Direct-X. You might want a full game engine if you're building a game, and you can get those from a number of vendors. But mid-level APIs just aren't all that useful. You have to do things their way, but they don't do enough of the job to justify the trouble.

Re:Solves the wrong problem

[Mike Connell]

My 0.02 is that the parent post is 100% wrong. Nobody that has even looked at doing viz-sim work could take that comment seriously. SGI Performer - historically *the* high performance scenegraph to measure things against, is widely used, and it's widely used because it is so very *very* useful.

ATM SGI are porting Performer to windows (too little, too late perhaps), and there are a number of Open Source projects stepping up to fight it (personal recommendation www.openscenegraph.org) ;-)

The world is a big place, and there are a lot of people doing serious work that can't use OpenGL - it's far too low level for application writing these days if you want to concentrate on your app itself, and cant use a game engine because they're too expensive/too limited (typically the first problem is that they are often designed for static scene only, even if they support minor modifications with a penalty)/dont work on big iron/stereo/whatever.

The notion that scenegraphs are useless is the dumbest thing I've seen here for a while, now is the begining of the scenegraph era.

Re:The docs make 3D graphics sound easy

[cr0sh]

I would agree with this - but I would go one step further and say that what is really hard (other than making it fast, which is pretty tough) is going beyond simple polygons with shading (which isn't the easiest at first), to full texture mapping, then shading, then all the other effects.

Also, moving from a single "cube" (your standard first object, IMO) to multiple cubes, to world representation with cameras, light sources, etc - gets tough, especially in regards to speed (ie, object culling based on view, etc). Most of the time, you have to learn funky methods of object culling (bsp trees, quad trees, etc) that are almost an art/science in themselves, that to get the required speed...

Let's just say I learned a long time ago that when it comes to 3D graphics I knew I would never become the next "Carmack" and that those that can do this stuff, and provide us engines that bring the coding and knowledge down to a more managable level for us more average 3D coders - these guys are worth their weight in gold.

Not that I don't enjoy reading and trying to learn about the latest in 3D coding - but I know that such coding isn't something I excel in, and probably never will (my best project: before I got into Linux I used to do a lot of personal coding in VB - I managed to code a custom perspective correct texture mapping 3D engine in pure VB, later added a custom Visual C DLL that did raster rendering to speed the thing up - I wanted to do the actual poly rendering in the VC DLL, never got around to it - at that point, DirectX still couldn't be accessed easily in VB, so the whole thing was a complete rendering engine - learned a lot, though)...

Re:Comparison to Crystal Space?

[Jorrit]

I'm indeed not an artist :-)

But take a look at http://www.planeshift.it
This is a free MMORPG (Open Source) made using Crystal Space and CEL (Game entity layer on top of CS). They have VERY good artists and they recently released a tech demo.

Greetings,

And another free game engine, Linux-ready

[Shillo]

German company Radon Labs released their game engine under a free licence (but not GPL nor LGPL). It has very impressive feature list, check their Sourceforge site. It already works on Linux.

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