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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."

170 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Looks nice, but.... by dnaumov · · Score: 5, Informative

    Judging from the screenshots, the engine is very capable, as it can even render Quake3 maps rather well. The problem is, does the open-source community have the artists needed to take this and make it into a playable and interesting game ?

    1. Re:Looks nice, but.... by ulrhol · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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 ;-)

    2. Re:Looks nice, but.... by g4dget · · Score: 4, Insightful
      You don't need artists to make a "playable and interesting game", you need smart game designers. Nice visuals is icing on the cake. Sadly, many game design companies these days make the same mistake: they assume that great graphics makes for great game play. In some cases, I think graphics actually detracts from game play; for example, I like Nethack a lot better than the graphics-based equivalents--the monsters I can imagine in my head are a lot more interesting than the cheesy commercial graphics that kills the imagination.

      I would actually argue that many, perhaps most, great game designs originated in open source or the public domain. Those designs were then picked up by commercial gaming companies, branded, trademarked, and augmented with lots of graphics.

    3. Re:Looks nice, but.... by g4dget · · Score: 1, Redundant
      Good graphics do not automatically make for a playable and interesting game (a common mistake made by game development companies). In fact, in many cases, I find that cheesy commercial graphics detracts from good game play and imagination. Some of the most enduring and interesting battle games (e.g., chess, go, etc.) are very simple and abstract.

      So, does the open source community have good computer game designers? I would argue that it not only does, but that many, if not most, commercial games available today originated as commercial copies of software originally developed freely by students and hobbyists. In fact, the open source process works extremely well for creating games that "flow" right; just look at the history of games like Nethack and how they have gotten tuned and enhanced by generations of students.

      Good open source games take years to mature, but the end result is something that's a lot of fun and that you can play over and over again. That's not what can be said for most of the commercial stuff out there.

    4. Re:Looks nice, but.... by groomed · · Score: 1

      That's like asking whether the open-source community has the editors and the subscribers to make an interesting website.

      Good question.

    5. Re:Looks nice, but.... by krogoth · · Score: 2

      the monsters I can imagine in my head are a lot more interesting than the cheesy commercial graphics that kills the imagination.

      So in other words, bad graphics kill the game? Congratulations, you just contradicted yourself. Maybe you should change your opinion to "if you can't do it well, don't do it", which also applies to posting on slashdot.

      --

      They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
    6. Re:Looks nice, but.... by JLyle · · Score: 1

      Very clever how you reworded your previous post to double-up on moderation points ;)

    7. Re:Looks nice, but.... by Tomble · · Score: 1
      So in other words, bad graphics kill the game?
      I wouldn't say that what he said implies that. He described such commercial graphics as killing the imagination -which is true, to a certain extent. I'm currently playing "dungeon crawl", and have been fighting a red 5 (which happens to be an imp). I hate that 5. It keeps healing and teleporting away from me. But I digress....
      Congratulations, you just contradicted yourself.
      Doesn't look like it to me, his main point had been saying that you don't need artists to make a playable and interesting game which doesn't remotely contradict his observations regarding roguelikes.

      Those who live by pedantry, die by pedantry!! Or something (Hmm, suddenly realise this will come back to haunt me :( )

      --
      Be careful! New moon tonight.
    8. Re:Looks nice, but.... by krogoth · · Score: 2

      Actually he said the bad commercial graphics made the game worse. If they were high-quality graphics would he still complain?

      --

      They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
    9. Re:Looks nice, but.... by rabidcow · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You may not need good art to make a good game, but you do need them to market a popular game. Every review will feature screen shots.

    10. Re:Looks nice, but.... by layingMantis · · Score: 1

      wow, what a long and incoherent sentence with big words. You must be incredibly smart.

    11. Re: Looks nice, but.... by Black+Parrot · · Score: 2


      > You don't need artists to make a "playable and interesting game", you need smart game designers. Nice visuals is icing on the cake. Sadly, many game design companies these days make the same mistake: they assume that great graphics makes for great game play. In some cases, I think graphics actually detracts from game play; for example, I like Nethack a lot better than the graphics-based equivalents--the monsters I can imagine in my head are a lot more interesting than the cheesy commercial graphics that kills the imagination.

      I play Angband with the graphical display, but otherwise I agree with the gist of your post. I used to keep a Windows partition for the sole purpose of booting up to play a game now and then, but in the mid-late 90's I bought several games in a row that had first-rate graphics and fourth-rate play, and I simply lost interest in commercial games. (Actually, even more recently I bought Lokisoft's CivIII for Linux, and found that the trend has continued: the graphics are dazzling, but the game is boring as hell. I find myself playing crappy-graphics Freeciv instead.)

      Like so much else in IT (and as some of the other replies to your post seem to tacitly admit), marketing has taken the driver's seat in commercial game design, and products have suffered for it.

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    12. Re:Looks nice, but.... by packeteer · · Score: 1

      its actually NOT incoherant if you know a bit about 3D tehcnology but it IS long... its just using every effect possible on each pixel... if you actually DID have all that stuff not even a geforce 4 would get any frames...

      --
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    13. Re:Looks nice, but.... by John_Booty · · Score: 2

      You don't need artists to make a "playable and interesting game"

      I think you undervalue the role of artists in the creation of a successful game. At the heart of every great game is *great game design*, and if a game is lacking that, no amount of pretty graphics/sound/fluff/etc is going to make it fun. This much, I think, is incontrovertible, and I agree with you on this. I also agree that in some cases, graphics actually detract from the fun! It's entirely possible to have an excellent game without great audiovisuals... look at Angband, Nethack, Robotron (my all-time fave twitch game), Asteroids, the classic coin-ops, etc.

      But for many types of games, where character, atmosphere, and story play a more prominent role, I think artists ARE indispensible. Take a game like Metal Gear Solid, Tie Fighter, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy 6, or Soul Calibur. They have great game design at heart, but I don't think they'd be nearly as enjoyable without the art that went into them as well.

      Or, if you want another angle, look at the classic Infocom text adventures. In a sense, he interesting writing, locations, characters, and stories were fluff or "icing", as you put it. The actual "game design" of an Infocom game was a series of puzzles that often made no sense at all, at least to me. :) It was the fluff that made the experience fun though, as it definitely pulled you into the fantasy. Without the fluff it would have been merely an exercise in machocism for the player!

      --

      OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
    14. Re:Looks nice, but.... by civilizedINTENSITY · · Score: 2

      Methinks he is suggesting that any graphical representation would be less than his imagination would muster. Rather like comparing *any* movie, decent graphics or not, to an excellent book from which said movie was made. I like visual effects. Reading great books is still better than watching great movies.

    15. Re:Looks nice, but.... by g4dget · · Score: 1

      Actually, my previous post gave a bizarre error message and didn't show up for a few minutes... something odd about /.'s software.

    16. Re:Looks nice, but.... by g4dget · · Score: 2
      So in other words, bad graphics kill the game?

      No, I'm saying that any graphics can make a game less interesting because it removes an element of the imagination (I was comparing it to nethack, in which some scary monsters look like "V", "c", "&", and "h"). What is scary or interesting or beautiful to even the most skilled artist may just not be so for you or me. Symbolic representations let me use my imagination.

      That isn't to say that good graphics are automatically bad, I'm just saying that elaborate graphics are neither necessary nor sufficient for a good game.

    17. Re:Looks nice, but.... by g4dget · · Score: 2
      I think you undervalue the role of artists in the creation of a successful game.

      I was talking about what I consider "good" games, not "commercially successful" ones. Civ and Myst are commercially successful, but I don't think they are very good ones.

      But for many types of games, where character, atmosphere, and story play a more prominent role, I think artists ARE indispensible.

      Well, I didn't claim that no game ever benefits from graphics, I merely stated that I think that many excellent games can be written with no or minimal graphics. And those are the games that open source developers might concentrate on if they can't find open source artists.

    18. Re:Looks nice, but.... by jweatherley · · Score: 1

      LegoQuake would be fun - just you and hordes of evil but tiny yellow plastic people! Reminds me of BarneyDooM - now there was an enemy that deserved the rocket launcher.

      --

      --
      Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
    19. Re:Looks nice, but.... by boomer_rehfield · · Score: 1

      A perfect example of this is when you first play a game and stumble across a baddie. Your imagination of what this thing is going to do to you is usually 500 times worse than what he actually does to you.

      --
      Carpe Canem - Seize the Dog
    20. Re:Looks nice, but.... by arkanes · · Score: 2

      I think you're totally wrong. UT with good graphics is more fun than UT with bad graphics. TTY quake is a horrrid abomination, and while an amazingly cool exercise, it's no fun to actually play. Games certainly benefit from graphics. A game can be good without good graphics. But bad graphics (or sound, or whatever) can make a good game less fun, and good ones can make a good game excellent.
      And, as with all things open source, if someone WANTS to make it, they will - hence the existence of (several) open source 3d engines. Also an annoyingly huge amount of cookie-cutter crap angband mods. Open source is not immune to people making crappy fluff.

    21. Re:Looks nice, but.... by tdelaney · · Score: 1

      It's called Angband ...

    22. Re:Looks nice, but.... by naasking · · Score: 1

      Very clever how you reworded your previous post [slashdot.org] to double-up on moderation points ;)

      Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

      ~ Hanlon's Razor ~

    23. Re:Looks nice, but.... by scrytch · · Score: 2

      In some cases, I think graphics actually detracts from game play; for example, I like Nethack a lot better than the graphics-based equivalents

      You and about the rest of the 0.0001% of gamers that feel this way. Not suggesting you should follow the herd, but this argument has gotten really tired. Most avid nethack fans play the game with sepia-tinted glasses of nostalgia, and frankly that's not a great way to approach something new.

      I would actually argue that many, perhaps most, great game designs originated in open source or the public domain. Those designs were then picked up by commercial gaming companies, branded, trademarked, and augmented with lots of graphics.

      Your point would itself be augmented with lots of examples.

      --
      I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
    24. Re:Looks nice, but.... by Hassan79 · · Score: 1

      Maybe Lego will sue you for this!

      --

      Don't drink and su! antidisestablishmentariazationally
    25. Re:Looks nice, but.... by Hassan79 · · Score: 1

      Symbolic representations let me use my imagination.

      Yes, I would agree to this. I'm just beta testing a small text adventure game my cousin developed and I have to say that it's not less exciting than a graphics adventure. You can have immersion with text, too, like with a good book.
      --

      Don't drink and su! antidisestablishmentariazationally
    26. Re:Looks nice, but.... by billcopc · · Score: 1

      Indeed, there's no better feeling than fighting a troll in D&D and imagining JonKatz yelling "First Columbine Post".. ahh, the satisfying crunch of a +5 Damroll.

      --
      -Billco, Fnarg.com
    27. Re:Looks nice, but.... by be-fan · · Score: 2

      Actually, artists or on the other side of the visuals vs. gameplay debate. Good artistry is not the same thing as good graphics. Good artistry is about taking whatever the capabilities of the engine and hardware is and making something asthetically pleasing to the user. On the other hand, a lot of games today are just how many particles the engine can throw onscreen at 60fps.

      --
      A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
  2. Re:finally something to beat MS? by Mr+Teddy+Bear · · Score: 1

    sorry for my own ignorance... I misread what the thing was actually supposed to do. :-) Perhaps art would be an issue though.

    Seeing as though the GPL types are typically quite left-brained... I am wondering how well this thing will be utilizied.

  3. Steve Jackson's Ogre by bsartist · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
    1. Re:Steve Jackson's Ogre by esper_child · · Score: 1

      You know, I still play that game occationally. Was also the first war game I ever played. It is such a shame I lost my original set. When I first saw the headline I thought someone made a computer game based on it, and was ready to find out when beta time was. Now if only I can find a place to start an O.G.R.E. club around here I will be in business.

    2. Re:Steve Jackson's Ogre by jandrese · · Score: 2

      Scary as it sounds, someone actually did make an OGRE computer game once. Lemme dust off my old bookmarks here...

      UGU's outdated software archive. Here it is. I had to go through a lot of trouble to get it to compile and run correctly on my machine, but it does work. This is a good example of why you shoudln't call low level operating system calls.

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
  4. Windows only? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Here's the sourceforge link. Does anyone know if this works on Linux? It's listed as windows only on sourceforge.

    1. Re:Windows only? by natbudin · · Score: 1

      The bar on the right side of the front page says "Win32/Direct3D support but porting trivial." I'm assuming that's meant as an invitation :)

    2. Re:Windows only? by MisterBlister · · Score: 1

      Its all Direct3D based right now, but seems to be fairly well abstracted...Someone would need to port it to OpenGL for it to work under Linux (or force people to run it under WineX maybe).

    3. Re:Windows only? by frovingslosh · · Score: 2, Funny

      Actually, any porting is trivial for the person who doesn't have to do it.

      --
      I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
    4. Re:Windows only? by Drahca · · Score: 3, Informative

      From the site:

      Temas joined the project in April 2002 and has been working hard on Linux porting and also generally on ANSI C++ compliance. He comes from a background of open-source development, and is currently a lead contributor to the Jabber open-source server as well as working on OGRE.

      Linux port will probably be here shortly, I think.

    5. Re:Windows only? by moonbender · · Score: 2

      To quote from the news item a bit down: A full Linux port is planned, temas is doing most of the work on this

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  5. Re:finally something to beat MS? by bsartist · · Score: 1

    Could this be something to beat DirectX?

    When combined with a lot of other libraries, possibly, but DirectX has many functions beyond just 3d rendering. OGRE seems to compete with Direct3D, not with DirectX as a whole.

    --
    Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
  6. As opposed to... by MongooseCN · · Score: 5, Funny

    OGRE is a well designed, flexible and easy to use 3D engine...

    I hope this doesn't compete with my badly designed, rigid and difficult to use 3D engine I have been working on.

    1. Re:As opposed to... by Libor+Vanek · · Score: 1

      aaargh - you have seen my top secret beta version of my graduate thesis?!?!

    2. Re:As opposed to... by nEoN+nOoDlE · · Score: 2

      Nah, I think NewWorld computing is still in the market for those for their aging Might and Magic series.

      --
      Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
    3. Re:As opposed to... by Hard_Code · · Score: 2

      "I hope this doesn't compete with my badly designed, rigid and difficult to use 3D engine I have been working on."

      No, those already have tons of inertia behind them... *bash bash bash*

      --

      It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
    4. Re:As opposed to... by _xeno_ · · Score: 1
      Oh, so that's what that console SDL library was for...

      I hope this doesn't compete with my badly designed, rigid and difficult to use 3D engine I have been working on.

      Don't reinvent the wheel - we've got plenty of those already. Don't forget to strive for "poorly documented" as well, and try and make sure it only runs on development Linux kernels - or go for broke, and make it only work on some strange NetBSD port. For added fun, require Mozilla while you're at it.

      --
      You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
    5. Re:As opposed to... by geekoid · · Score: 2

      I didn't know MS was writing a 3D engine.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  7. Comparison to Crystal Space? by Hast · · Score: 3, Informative

    Judging from screen shots and feature lists it's pretty much on par with Crystal Space. Although the latter doesn't have built in support for Q3A levels. (Would have been a nice way to compare them otherwise.)

    I do know that some game engine courses at my uni use Crystal Space as the engine of choice. (But I haven't taken that course yet.) Seems like lot's of fun in any case.

    1. Re:Comparison to Crystal Space? by MisterBlister · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually Crystal Space has tons more features, but it loses out in the screenshot wars as all the demos and screenies of CS are HORRIBLE. But that's due to shitty artists, not lack of features.

    2. Re:Comparison to Crystal Space? by Jorrit · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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,

      --
      Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
  8. Re:finally something to beat MS? by Hast · · Score: 1

    It uses Direct3D (and OpenGL) to display graphics. This is something you would use in case you didn't want to build your own game engine. (Which is quite a lot of work, or so I've been told. ;-)

    It can use a veriety of different other libraries as well.

  9. Universal 3D Acceleration by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 2

    What I would really like to see is hardware 3D acceleration actually _working_. What I mean is that , these days, virtually every videocard supports accelarated 3D graphics. So far, however, I have not been able to take advantage of this, because either the card supports only Dircet3D (may it burn forever), or there is no OpenGL driver for Linux. Now you can blame me for buying the wrong hardware or even using the wrong OS, and rub it in my face that a UNIX-like OS is not for playing games, and I fully agree with that, but there is another option. How about a standard implemented in hardware, like VESA did for 2D graphics? OpenGL 2.0 seems to come a long way, but isn't out yet. Besides, I think OpenGL is extremely hard to implement efficiently in software. Any 3D engine just fails to interest me as long as my 256 MB RAM Duron 900 with `3D card' running Linux performs worse than my 486 DX2/66 with 16 MB running DOS with no such thing as 3D-acceleration. Now that comparison is slightly exaggerated, but sometimes I really feel that way.

    ---
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    -- Taken from http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/freebe/

    --
    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
    1. Re:Universal 3D Acceleration by WasterDave · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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

      --
      I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
    2. Re:Universal 3D Acceleration by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 1

      I see your point here. But as far as I can see most of the evolution consists of adding new features. Older features could have been implemented in a hardware-independent fashion by now, so that things like texture-mapped triangles would just work on any videocard, without first needing to write a driver to go with it. Mechanisms could be provided for detecting what features are provided by a given videocard. Software wouldn't necessarily use this facility because of the added complexity, but it would allow developers to both make their programs work with older cards and take advantage of the latest and greatest features available to a card.

      --
      Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
    3. Re:Universal 3D Acceleration by Trevelyan · · Score: 1

      I play Tribes2 w/ the gfx settings turned right up (bar gamma for u pedantic ppl ;-)
      Thats under linux w/ AMD Athlon 1GHz 640MB PC100 and a ATI AIW Radeon 32MB.*
      My bros PII 400MHz 256MB and ATI Rage 16MB (since u compared to a 486 MSDOS being better) cant get near that in Widnows or Linux, although he too plays tribes2 in linux =P

      I think that either:
      1) you not configured your DRI correct?
      a) not compiled/loaded correct kernel modules for ur X
      b) not setup X config (eg do you have DRI mode 666?)
      2) you have an unsupported gfx card, from a open source unfriendly company?

      And I disagree with Unix or Linux being bad for 3D. I did a Java3D honours project for my uni course, all in linux (and Solaris). Java! you cant get more universal then that? (Linux J3D @ blackdown.org).

      While I admit to still having a windows partition for my games addiction, I have barely ever used in a year. One of the best advantage linux has over windows IMHO is the gamecon kernel module (excelent when used with console emulators) it let you plug upto 5 console pads to ur PC (NES SNES N64 PSX....etc)

      *you must know if u post ur pc stats on /. you'll start a mine is bigger then urs contest ;-)
      (resubmitted since I got an error page, soz if a repeat)

    4. Re:Universal 3D Acceleration by Phil+Wilkins · · Score: 4, Offtopic

      JC writes to OpenGL, he does not implement it, that's the job of the driver writers. Writing to OpenGL is piss easy. Writing an OpenGL driver, or worse, a complete software implementation of OpenGL, is a fucking nightmare.

    5. Re:Universal 3D Acceleration by WasterDave · · Score: 2

      Java! you cant get more universal then that?

      C. Or C++. Blows Java out of the water in terms of both being portable (universal), and performance.

      Java's good if you're in school though.

      Dave

      --
      I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
    6. Re:Universal 3D Acceleration by Tomble · · Score: 5, Informative
      JC writes to OpenGL, he does not implement it, that's the job of the driver writers
      Well generally, yes. Except that he helped develop the Utah-GLX Open-GL drivers for Xfree86 3.3.

      Unfortunately, Utah-GLX was crappy and crashed a lot. Well, it did on my machine. I got a MGA G400 on the strength that their HW specs had been opened and a driver was being developed. Oh well, it's not like many other choices are well supported on Linux today. (I'm not too bitter now, tho, as Xfree 4's DRI version seems to work good)

      Writing an OpenGL driver, or worse, a complete software implementation of OpenGL, is a fucking nightmare
      I'd imagine so, OpenGL is pretty big. Of course, Brian Paul has already done the complete software implementation with Mesa (I guess everyone knows that nowadays, right?) but I doubt that any commonly available PC graphics cards support a full OpenGL state machine. It has too many features that are of little interest to the average games programmer for most companies to care that much to do it properly.

      Well, IMHO, y'know.

      --
      Be careful! New moon tonight.
    7. Re:Universal 3D Acceleration by Jerf · · Score: 2

      Actually, your argument provides a nice counter-example. How much nicer was QuakeGL then Quake? And QuakeGL still didn't use all of OpenGL, even for the time. Transparency was so hard to do in software that Quake II still used stippling instead in software.

      Even the geniuses at iD didn't get software OpenGL-class software renderers. It would have been too slow.

    8. Re:Universal 3D Acceleration by abdulla · · Score: 1

      The way you guys talk about John Carmack, I'd be fooled to think you were talking about Jesus Christ.

  10. Love the name! by distributed.karma · · Score: 1

    This will no doubt do wonders to the speed and usage of GNOME.

    --

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    If you moderate this, then your children will be next.

  11. The docs make 3D graphics sound easy by damieng · · Score: 2

    Having never had the math skills to handle 3D graphics, just looking through the documentation for Ogre and it all sounds... well, easy.

    Setup a scene, add some objects, add a camera object and point it round with a few simple methods!

    --
    [)amien
    1. Re:The docs make 3D graphics sound easy by zome · · Score: 1

      Actually, math to handle 3D is not that hard. All you need are 4x4 matrix (or 3x4 if you want) and vectors, then you just compute cross product, matrix multiply, etc. What's hard is to make it fast.

    2. Re:The docs make 3D graphics sound easy by cr0sh · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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)...

      --
      Reason is the Path to God - Anon
  12. Pardon me, but what is your problem? by g4dget · · Score: 2
    If you keep repeating that it's hard to get accelerated OpenGL under Linux, someone might start believing you.

    In the real world, the great majority of installed cards have accelerated OpenGL working for them under Linux. Even all my laptops just came with graphics cards that give me accelerated OpenGL, and I wasn't even looking for that.

    If you really have some very old or obscure graphics card that either lacks drivers or is software-only, you can buy a usable, supported card for under $50.

    As for software implementations being inefficient, that depends on what you mean by "OpenGL". Today, you can implement OpenGL features in software that required high-end hardware a decade ago. Of course, if you want today's high-end OpenGL features, you do need today's high-end hardware.

    1. Re:Pardon me, but what is your problem? by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 1

      Well, the only OpenGL implementation I've ever gotten to work on my Linux boxen is mesa, and at it's awfully slow. For exmaple, I've never gotten it to render CrystalSpace's walktest at more than 1 frame per second. I currently have two machines that supposedly support OpenGL, one with a savage2000-based card (I believe a Diamond Viper II), and one laptop with a Trident Cyber/BladeXP. Maybe it's just me, but I have not been able to find drivers for either one. Now I haven't searched for Viper II drivers for about a year now, and the Trident card seems pretty new, but with hardware-independent support, things would work straight out of the box.

      --
      Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
    2. Re:Pardon me, but what is your problem? by g4dget · · Score: 2

      Well, again, just look around for another card. There are many boards with nVidia and ATI chips that give excellent performance and are very cheap. Quake3 on Linux with one of those cards runs as well as it does on Windows, for example.

    3. Re:Pardon me, but what is your problem? by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 1

      I already mentioned in my original post that part of the problem is that I just bought the rong hardware. However, my point is not that I am a luser stuck with a card that isn't supported and that I am too cheap to buy a supported one (especially for my laptop). My point is that if there were some standard that manufacturers adhered to, there wouldn't be a need to scan hardware compatibility lists before buying, there wouldn't be a need to reinvent the wheel and write a new driver every time a new piece of hardware is released, and there would be no need to reverse-engineer hardware to see how it works.
      I maintain that standards are what made the web great. I remember the times that I had to wait for the xfree86 folks to write a driver for my card because they didn't have a VESA driver and the card wasn't compatible with any other, even for 2D. If everybody followed standards (or established them), things would Just Work and some excellent programmers could be working on other stuff.

      --
      Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
    4. Re:Pardon me, but what is your problem? by moonbender · · Score: 2

      If there had been a standard, neither of the cards you bought would have adhered to it. Just read a god-damned review before buying hardware next time, those pieces you got there are abominations from hell.

      --
      Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
    5. Re:Pardon me, but what is your problem? by Fnord · · Score: 2

      The problem with defining a standard for how 3d hardware works is that we haven't really decided how much 3d hardware is supposed to do. Even with opengl as a standard interface, cards implemented drastically different amounts of it. Even rediculously complex cards like the Geforce 4 implement large portions in software. The key is to just implement the parts that will enhance speed in hardware. And with opengl extensions and new directX versions, they're implementing new features that existing apis didn't even have, instead of implementing more of the api, because these new features help games more.
      If you remember, 2d cards weren't always VESA compliant. You used to have to configure every game for each individual card, and each game implememted its own drivers. But at some point people realized that there wasn't too much more that 2d cards could do, so they standardized them.
      You'll have to wait awhile before 3d matures to that point.

    6. Re:Pardon me, but what is your problem? by timeOday · · Score: 1
      Actually, this is the great thing about OpenGL. It was already implemented on widely varying platforms, from software only to SGI stuff that implemented more in hardware 10 years ago than Geforce 4 cards do today.

      (Well, they implemented alot in hardware, anyways. Some stuff wasn't invented yet, of course. Do Geforce 4's finally have a real accumulation buffer?)

    7. Re:Pardon me, but what is your problem? by g4dget · · Score: 2
      My point is that if there were some standard that manufacturers adhered to, there wouldn't be a need to scan hardware compatibility lists before buying, there wouldn't be a need to reinvent the wheel and write a new driver every time a new piece of hardware is released

      Well, it's the market that decides these things in America. If you want cards for which it is easy to write Linux support, you have to check the compatibility lists and buy the cards with Linux support. Every incompatible card you buy encourages manufacturers to build more incompatible cards. So, we might say, that you yourself are responsible for all that incompatible hardware out there. I know it sucks sometimes, but that's the way a market economy works, and it beats the alternatives.

  13. Open-Source "Artists" by Thenomain · · Score: 1

    I can imagine so. Not only because you can probably consider all individual map- and texture-makers working in an "almost open-source" environment already. Sure, there might have been some debate recently over who owns mods created for a specific game, but on the whole game designers seem to encourage this kind of behavior by not restricting mod creation too unreasonably. We can only hope Verant doesn't become a big player in moddable games.

    Some might say some open-source games to be fairly pretty already. Admittedly, there aren't many open-source 3-D games out there, but the more people can use a 3-D engine the better they get -- like pretty much anything -- so we have only good things to look forward to.

    Well, we also have bad things to look forward to until then, but we've always had to deal with this anyway.

    --
    This now concludes our broadcast day.
    1. Re:Open-Source "Artists" by boomer_rehfield · · Score: 1

      "there aren't many open-source 3-D game out there" You are right, but as with Ogre and Crystalspace, both are just coming around and getting to their version one. I think once these get around a little bit and more engines start popping up that people don't have to pay a license for, or code their own whole engine, we'll start seeing more open source games.

      --
      Carpe Canem - Seize the Dog
  14. Now I can build her. by Martin+Marvinski · · Score: 1

    Now I can build a virtual 3D woman on my linux system. THANK YOU. I have had sex only once in my life, and that was when I was in mid 20's (No Joke). I LOVE technology! I almost had to buy ALIAS|Wavefront or Softimage[god forbid]!

    1. Re:Now I can build her. by BitHive · · Score: 1

      *cough* TOO MUCH INFORMATION!

    2. Re:Now I can build her. by Screaming+Lunatic · · Score: 2

      Dude! I think you need to keep your ogre in your pants when posting on slashdot.

    3. Re:Now I can build her. by Martin+Marvinski · · Score: 1

      Nothing out of the ordinary... I myself... wait! Do you mean in 1920-1929?!?

      No I actually miss-typed. I meant I haven't had sex since my mid 20's and I didn't even get to climax because she thew me out.

    4. Re:Now I can build her. by Per+Wigren · · Score: 2

      Nah, it's much easier just to be good-looking! :)

      --
      My other account has a 3-digit UID.
  15. Re-Inventing the wheel..again ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful


    Good to see people are still trying to re-invent the wheel again

    there are over 600 3d engines out there in various stages of completion, yet none of them are " really good(TM) "

    3d engines have been done to death
    so why can't developers focus and colaborate on making 1 really good engine and make it "perfect" instead of fragmenting into their own little GPL projects that are nothing more IMO than a waste of time ?.

    I guess time is what programmers waste best

    1. Re:Re-Inventing the wheel..again ! by delta407 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      600 3d engines ... yet none of them are "really good"

      Uh, you did notice the part saying "last modified on 23.6.2000", didn't you? Two years is a long time; Crystal Space and others have come a very long time since then.

      so why can't developers focus and colaborate on making 1 really good engine and make it "perfect" instead of fragmenting into their own little GPL projects that are nothing more IMO than a waste of time ?

      3d engines have become a much larger project since two years ago, what with people wanting platform independence, 3d acceleration, and lots of other technically demanding features. The only 3d engines that are getting anywhere have lots of developers coordinating.

      I guess time is what programmers waste best

      He says smugly, as he pushes the Submit button and millions (if not billions) of lines of code are executed for his message to be posted.

    2. Re:Re-Inventing the wheel..again ! by beef3k · · Score: 1

      3D graphics has unlimited areas of application, and different libraries are made for different purposes. For instance, the Visaulization Toolkit (VTK) is for designed and implemented for scientific data visualization, while CrystalSpace is designed for games. Except for this I'm not going to add more fuel to the "why not merge KDE and Gnome" etc. discussions. Do your research, and you'll most likely end up with a bit more nuanced opinion yourself.

    3. Re:Re-Inventing the wheel..again ! by jtdubs · · Score: 2

      Man, you are so right. Same thing with those damned stamp collectors.

      I mean, why the hell do they do it by themselves. It's not like they are going to have the best one in the world with so many people competing against them.

      Instead, everyone in the world should join ONE BIG stamp collecting group. Then they'd have the BEST collection of stamps in the WORLD!

      Whoooo!!!

      Oh, wait. What do you mean they do it for fun? They program because the like learning? Enjoy it? Not for the purpose of taking over the world or pleasing others?

      Oh god. So confused.

      Justin Dubs

    4. Re:Re-Inventing the wheel..again ! by jtdubs · · Score: 2

      Hehe. I'm a programmer. Here's another part of the problem:

      Programming is, to a good extent, a lot like art. There is a LOT of design work involved. There is no right or wrong, good or bad. Just opinion.

      Can you imagine getting together 1000 world-class artists, asking them for a portrait, and then trying to get them to agree in what style to paint and what colors to use?

      Good god no.

      Everyone has there opinion on how things should be done. Some people agree to a good extent, or atleast to enough of an extent that they can work together happily. Hence Crystal Space and Linux. But, it's not always that pretty. A lot of people just have conflicting styles and shouldn't be allowed in the same room when discussing proramming.

      Justin Dubs

  16. artists need tools. by Steveftoth · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  17. Re:Licensing annoyances by dnaumov · · Score: 2

    Err...no ? Trolltech has been dual-licensing QT since forever.

  18. all-genre graphics engine? by Stalcair · · Score: 1
    without gutting the system, can a developer use different modules for AI, physics, rulesets, etc as to adapt this engine for whatever use it was needed for? Is this really the graphics portion only, and are there any physics and AI modules or plugins for this?

    I can't read it now because I think it is slashdotted... or my ISP sucks, one of the two. I have started looking recently for a graphics engine to create a demo world for things ranging from physics programing experiments, to an 'object fitting room', to a world to display some architecture and landscape files I am working on. Will this be a good place to start? I have looked a bit (but not much yet) at the CrystalSpace engine, and it is very nice indeed. But I am not really into the graphics myself. Graphics is just another tool for me as I focus on the physics, AI, economy (for some 'games'). So is there a good API for this and perhaps already a component based object library in place? I would love to use something like this as the cornerstone of a rendering suite to test my little evil contraptions :)


    Also, assuming anyone actually reads this and understands it... if anyone knows of a good programming and resource referrence for what I am describing I would appreciate any leads. Thanks

    --

    I seek not only to follow in the footsteps of the men of old, I seek the things they sought.

    1. Re:all-genre graphics engine? by DFossmeister · · Score: 1
      O'Reilly has such a book out on this called Physics for Game Developers that goes into much details on this sort of thing. There is an article on O'Reilly's site by the author of the book talking about it.

      To quote from the book description:
      Colliding billiard balls. Missile trajectories. Cornering dynamics in speeding cars. By applying the laws of physics, you can realistically model nearly everything in games that bounces around, flies, rolls, slides, or isn't sitting still, to create compelling, believable content for computer games, simulations, and animation. Physics for Game Developers serves as the starting point for enriching games with physics-based realism.


      Now, I have a copy of the book, and even cracked the cover on it once, but I don't recall if it had any real code in it or what language the code was in, assuming that said code exists. The concepts were really cool though.

      DFossMeister
      --
      No Not Again! Its whats for dinner.
    2. Re:all-genre graphics engine? by Stalcair · · Score: 1
      I bought the book recently and have only gone through the first 2 chapters. It is interesting to say the least.

      However, I wonder if those (or any other) fundamentals can be applied in a relatively painless manner with CrystalSpace and OGRE. I would love to have one graphics engine that I can use for ultra high resolution rendering of stills, or lower resolution for physics rendering and toying around with odd things, and still another for walkthroughs of homes and yards.

      By setting the level of detail, rendering api used (opengl, directx, whatever) along with plugging in the right modules to serve as AI, resources, scripting, physics, etc. I could then save a lot of time between experiments. Basically the engine would serve as the basis for a 'proving ground' for ideas... at least to someone like me.

      --

      I seek not only to follow in the footsteps of the men of old, I seek the things they sought.

  19. good graphics do not make a game... by Steveftoth · · Score: 1

    but they sell it rather well.

    When people see a game box with bad graphics on it they assume it to be old and dated. Not so with shiny new 256-bit blast processed graphics (who remembers blast processing)!

    Anyway, the point is that graphics are not supposed to do anything for the game except sell it. For an independent style game, it is more important to have good gameplay rather then have picture perfect graphics. Unless of course you plan on selling a million copies, then it had better have good graphics.

    Remember a little game named Doom? The reason that it sold more copies then any other game before it was the fact that it had the best graphics combined with all the features other games had..

    Other games had networking , other games had shoot em up action, other games had good AI. Doom just had it all and then some. for the time, this is 1993 we are talking about.

    1. Re:good graphics do not make a game... by Tomble · · Score: 1
      (who remembers blast processing)!
      I don't! Please tell, or did you make it up (as hilarious fictional rendering algorithm?)

      But anyhoo, whilst I agree that people are far more likely to pay money for games that look good, we are of course talking about free software developers, so selling millions of copies is not an issue, all that is important to most (all??) free software developers, is:
      -Making something that is great
      -Creating
      -Demonstrating coding ability??
      -Scratching an itch (as ESR would put it)
      And so on.Prolly various other reasons I've not thought of.

      Of course, there do exist a good few examples of good free games that have very strong followings, such as Nethack, Angband, and other roguelikes (which of course have little or no graphics), XPilot, BZFlag, and others (I'd say XKobo, but I'm not certain how popular that is...)

      So no, I don't think it's too much of an issue. OTOH, a really pretty game written specifically for Linux could bring in a lot of people, which would be neat... But then, if it was that good, someone would prolly just port or clone it to windows.

      Anyways... Hmm, nice to be able to post on a day I've got summat to say! My ISP seems to get blocked most of the time :P

      --
      Be careful! New moon tonight.
    2. Re:good graphics do not make a game... by Joe+Tie. · · Score: 1

      who remembers blast processing

      Who could forget the ultimate buzzword, which enabled Sonic to blast through the levels at super sonic speeds! Not that it existed as anything but propaganda in comercials, but as a dedicated mega drive owner I love it nonetheless!

      --
      Everything will be taken away from you.
  20. Giant Bolo tanks? by kisrael · · Score: 2

    Am I the only one who sees OGRE and thinks of giant tanks?

    --
    SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
  21. Yes, yes, it's nice, but... by MattW · · Score: 2, Troll

    It looks and sounds great, but I'm not too fond of Free Software that only builds under a Microsoft compiler. Let's hope that linux port comes before 1.0.

    1. Re:Yes, yes, it's nice, but... by Temas · · Score: 5, Informative

      Well be happy, it already compiles under Linux. I've been working hard on the Linux port and have the Core and Engine compiling currently, and should be in CVS now. I'm also working on the OpenGL renderer as I type this. I'm actually hoping to get some OpenGL screenshots tonight. It will just be a basic version, but it's a starting point.

    2. Re:Yes, yes, it's nice, but... by xactoguy · · Score: 1

      Yah, is there any chance that we may be able to get a C++ Builder version out? If there isn't I think that I may begin working on one, and do my best, although I expect that I will fail horrbily as I'm pretty new at C++

      --


      And so we go, on with our lives
      We know the truth, but prefer lies
      Lies are simple, simple is bliss
    3. Re:Yes, yes, it's nice, but... by fault0 · · Score: 2

      From what I've seen,

      1. Crystal Space has not been active for a while
      2. Crystal Space's internals are not as cleanly implemented as OGRE's imho.

      There are a lot of 3d engines out there, however, both Crystal Space and OGRE are excellent ones.

    4. Re:Yes, yes, it's nice, but... by Jorrit · · Score: 3, Informative

      Crystal Space not active for a while!!!??? Based on what information do you make that statement? I'm the project manager of Crystal Space and the project is extremely active now. There are updates to the source nearly every day and lots of CS related/using projects are emerging. Especially take a look at http://www.planeshift.it, a free MMORPG using Crystal Space. They have very good artists.

      Greetings,

      --
      Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
  22. Random thoughts. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Some of which have undoubtedly been covered in various posts, but hey. :p

    This is good for open source gaming.

    Ahh, the question of whether there's enough graphical talent in the open source community to pull off a game. This obviously breaks down into two points. First, graphics do not make a game. Gameplay makes a game. While I must state that I don't find that much I like being produced by Squaresoft, I have many die-hard Squaresoft fans, who more and more often are now telling me faults of Square's newer games. They're degenerating into psuedo-movies, not games, and frankly, movie studios will always do movies better. Flashy graphics do not make a game good.

    If that's not enough, I point to Contra. Everyone I know who was into gaming during the 80's and has a good grasp of computers has a NES emulator and that game. Those people I know who aren't into computers that much are amazed and start bugging me if they see me playing it. :p Gameplay, gameplay, gameplay.

    The second point.. Browse themes.org. Look around on theme creators' websites. They tend to do a lot more art than just theming. The question of whether or not the talent is there should never have been asked.
    I've also heard the 'problem' that open source games tend to take years to make it to a really playable release. I don't see the problem with this. Current day gaming companies either rush it out the door or put it off for months and years at a time.
    From that, it's logical to see the lengthy development time of open source games as a problem! But, we have a distinct advantage which nullifies that problem. Most open source games are out there in 'beta' form, being played by plenty of people. These people give input back to the developers, and often start contributing ideas, code, graphics, music and other work. These people, even if they just have the ability to spew a few ideas at the guys in charge, will have more interest in the game. (And this is indeed one of the primary benefits of all open source development - that you, the user, have easy access to developers!)

    One thing I will note is that I don't believe this will help commercial gaming on Linux. I admit, I'm not terribly competent with the finer points of the GPL, but from what I understand, a company couldn't use this while keeping the rest of the game closed source. If I'm wrong, ignore this, because damn - it'd be great for companies wanting to expand to Linux. :)

  23. Re:So you're saying John Carmack is the norm? by moonbender · · Score: 2

    AFAIK (too lazy to lock for actual references) Carmack has said quite recently that DirectX is although feature-wise the same or even beyond OpenGL still harder and more cumbersome to work with. I doubt there is a significant performance difference between both engines, OpenGL is certainly not two times as fast. I'd argue that Direct3D gets commonly used because it's backed by Microsoft, which is probably a pretty compelling reason for any larger game developer.
    Kinda guessing, though, it's not like I was some kind of insider.

    --
    Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
  24. What about the existing mod community? by SimplyCosmic · · Score: 2

    A significant amount of work has been done on mods to the Quake, Unreal and so forth engines by people who work in their spare time, which goes to show that as long as the base engine is competently done, there are more than enough people to pull off some amazing things.

    Of course, many of these mod makers haven't embraced open-source development, keeping their work to themselves mostly in pipe-dream hopes of repeating the success of CounterStrike as much as preventing other mod teams from ripping them off.

  25. Re:finally something to beat MS? by moonbender · · Score: 2

    Aye, if anything this is something to beat Id or Epic.

    --
    Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
  26. Well done! by abdulla · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  27. Help is on the way... by Xandis · · Score: 1
  28. Completely baffling. by wahay · · Score: 1

    Ok. I've read the post. I've scanned (10 seconds) the linked site. I read my normal filtered comments (4+). And I have ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE as to what the %$!# this is about. Is it cool? Does it suck? Is it going to do anything for me? Who knows. Who cares?

    Can we please get a bit of a better post, eds? I mean, this isn't even as useful as a freshmeat posting, which at least tells you what the hell is being updated.

    I'm probably interested, but I don't think a story saying click here or here or here or here is very useful.

  29. UT shoot; duck; strafe; by hgh · · Score: 1

    >> the monsters I can imagine in my head are a lot more interesting than the cheesy commercial graphics that kills the imagination.

    Does CLI based UT sound all that appealing though? I mean obviously there are times when graphics are important; they just have to be made in such a way that they _add_ to game rather than ditract from it. I game with realistic, consistent graphics is more immersive. Seem deal with the physics (maybe not realistic, but the physics should be consistent and intuitive, otherwise you'll have players getting frustrated when something doesn't work the way it's "supposed to").

    hgh

    1. Re:UT shoot; duck; strafe; by g4dget · · Score: 2
      I mean obviously there are times when graphics are important;

      Yes, there are some games like that. But if we couldn't get the open source artists, there would still be a huge world of excellent games to be written.

      Given how many free levels and total conversions there are for commercial games, I don't think this is even a problem, however.

      Does CLI based UT sound all that appealing though?

      No, but you could probably get UT-like gameplay with very simple graphics. And if you put out a UT-like engine and give users the hooks to add complex environments and landscapes, they will do it.

  30. Solves the wrong problem by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    1. Re:Solves the wrong problem by Supergrass · · Score: 1

      I disagree on this point. There are a number of companies that sell graphics engines that are centered around scene graph engines, among them NDL and Criterion, and they seem to be doing pretty well both in number of clients as well as quality of the resulting products that use their technology. What they're selling IS useful, although perhaps not in all circumstances.

      --
      Wherever there's a will, there's a motorway.
    2. Re:Solves the wrong problem by Mike+Connell · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Solves the wrong problem by SurfsUp · · Score: 2

      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 forgot Java 3D. (R.i.P)

      --
      Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
    4. Re:Solves the wrong problem by Hard_Code · · Score: 2

      "You forgot Java 3D. (R.i.P)"

      Watchoo talkin' 'bout Wills?
      http://www.javagaming.org

      --

      It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
    5. Re:Solves the wrong problem by Paolomania · · Score: 1

      OGRE + SDL = sounds close to a "full game engine" to me

    6. Re:Solves the wrong problem by be-fan · · Score: 2

      Are you on crack? You can't compare Ogre to OpenGL, or DirectX. All game engines have a scene graph in them, usually coded on top of the native 3D API (OpenGL, DirectX). What Ogre does is to allow game developers to use Ogre as the graphics engine for their game, and save themselves the trouble of actually writing it (which can be one of the most difficult portions of writing a game engine). Where do you get off claiming that "they don't do enough of the job to justify the trouble." Have you written something using Ogre?

      --
      A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
  31. Yes brother. by sinserve · · Score: 1

    > The Ogre source is made available under the GNU Public License (GPL), which basically
    > means you can use it however you like as long as you include all the source code if you
    > distribute a product using it. At a later date I may also release a commercially licensed
    > version which allows closed-source programs to use it, probably mainly targetted at shareware
    > authors. THe core version of Ogre will always be available under the GPL though. See the
    > downloads page for full licensing terms.

    Amen brother.

    I REALLY believe that everyone who writes GPLed code, should ASK for money in one way or another.
    OSS authors need to make it clear to every one that they expect their share of the pie, should
    you make money off of their efforts.

    Along with the screenshots, the manpages, and mailing list, OSS authors need to provide a big
    fat button, which links to a page with an explanation on how you should send them money, if you
    ever decide to use their code in closed source software, or even donations if you are one of
    the few out there.

    To the developer of OGRE; I am not a graphics programmer, but I will download your lib and try
    to learn something with it, should I ever decide to use your code in one way or another, I promise
    you am going to PAY for it.

    To the slashdot reader. If you have the money, and there is an OSS app the you earn your income with,
    please don't be a prick and send your financial contribution to the author(s).

    1. Re:Yes brother. by sinserve · · Score: 1

      Actually, I got the sig 2 days before the game, and forgot to remove it
      because I have sigs disabled.

      Meet them again? So fucking what, we will do the same thing again. Don't forget
      that one of their "goals" was an own-goal.

      Just watch what happens to "ahi ahi" host "ahi ahi" nation, in a few hours.

    2. Re:Yes brother. by beef3k · · Score: 1

      Regarding your second paragraph: the GPL does NOT allow you to use GPL'ed code in a commercial application. The LGPL however does. So, if you're plaaning to use Ogre in a commercial project, you're just going to have to wait for the team to dual license it, like Qt.

  32. OGRE Troll?? I dunno. by Tomble · · Score: 1
    And I have ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE as to what the %$#!# this is about
    Er, well, if you really don't, then:

    It is a 3D engine. If you do not understand this, then that is a piece of software that renders 3D scenes in games. In this case, it is a 3D engine on its own, for other people to create games (or other 3d software) with.

    Is it cool? Does it suck?
    I've not tried it, so I can't truly say, but from looking at their site for a few more seconds than you claim to have done, the screenshots certainly look very very cool. It sounds very capable.

    OTOH, it is apparently written in C++, and as every proper Linux bod knows, C++ sucks in the extreme, as C++ is not only slow, humungously bloated, and not as portable as C, but it also is not very well supported on Linux and has a tendency to crash a fair bit. So, it's likely that I won't be using it.

    Is it going to do anything for me? Who knows. Who cares?
    Indeed.

    I'm probably interested, but I don't think a story saying click here (etc) is very useful
    Looks to me as though it gives the relevant points, the average /. reader would be expected to see how it's a neat thing.

    If it were plain old C, I'd be very enthusiastic about this and would be downloading it right now, even if I would prolly never create anything with it! Ah well, never mind.

    --
    Be careful! New moon tonight.
    1. Re:OGRE Troll?? I dunno. by wahay · · Score: 1

      Good reply. If I had some mod points today, I'd give em to you.

      I actually thought the thing was some sort of OpenGL software emulator before I gave up.

  33. Request, not requirement by Sean+Clifford · · Score: 2

    It's a request, not a requirement, and not an unreasonable request at that.

  34. Requesting splash-screen under the GPL? by N0Nick · · Score: 1
    The code is released under the GNU GPL, but the license file says:
    In addition, if you use Ogre I request that you display the Ogre logo somewhere in your application (start up or shutdown) for a minimum of 2 seconds. This splash-screen is displayed on the standard Ogre configuration dialog anyway, so if you use that you don't need to do anything extra. The logo is included in the download archive as Examples\Resources\ogrelogo.png.

    Is it even legal to request such a thing from users of a GPLed program? After all, the source is available and according to the GPL I can remove this splash screen and use it all I want.

    Besides, I think it would be more clever to releases this under the LGPL as well, the author himself states that he plans on licensing for commercial use as well.
    1. Re:Requesting splash-screen under the GPL? by fault0 · · Score: 2

      Requesting and requireing are two different things.

    2. Re:Requesting splash-screen under the GPL? by jswitte · · Score: 1

      Besides, I think it would be more clever to releases this under the LGPL as well, the author himself states that he plans on licensing for commercial use as well.

      Quesa, the open-source clone of Apple's Quickdraw 3D, is LGPL, just for this reason - to encourage people to use it who would otherise be scared off by the GPL.

    3. Re:Requesting splash-screen under the GPL? by Ded+Bob · · Score: 1

      A request in the license file looks like a requirement. He should move it outside of the license file.

  35. Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by BadmanX · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've been looking for a full-featured 3D gaming engine for a while, as I wish to write a hobby game in my spare time. But since I want to keep the option of selling my game open to me, I can't use any of the currently existing 3D engines. Nor can I use the Quake 1/2 source. Why?

    They are all GPL. While I will be the first person to admit that Free Software has its merits, it simply does not work for game software. Releasing a core component of a game under the GPL means that only GPL games can be made with it "That's great!" you may be saying. The only problem is that games are not just programming. They are programming, music, art, and level design. Musicians, artists, and level designers (even hobbyist ones) are used to making money for what they do. But since the core engine of the game is GPL, no money can be made on the game.

    (Aside: And don't give me that line about how it's perfectly legal to sell Free Software. Sure, it's legal, but that doesn't mean it works. It's like another poster in another thread said: "Sure, I't's LEGAL for me to try to sell my used car for retail price, but it doesn't mean I'll be able to." Aside over.)

    And you guys wonder why FreeCraft and FreeCiv have such lousy art. It's because there's no Free Art Foundation going around saying, "You should give your art away! It's immoral to charge for art!" Same thing for musicians. Same thing for level designers. Hell, same thing for just about any skilled work that combines technical expertise with creativity EXCEPT FOR PROGRAMMING.

    The GPL doesn't work for gaming. Please, I'm begging you, stop releasing game libraries under the GPL. Release them under the LGPL or the BSD license. If you do, it means professionals can use and maintain them, benefiting and giving somthing back to the community. And we can all stop having to start from scratch (or use crappy middleware like NetImmerse) whenever we want to make a game.

    1. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by nEoN+nOoDlE · · Score: 2

      I don't get it... I thought the GPL only made it so that you have to release all changes you make to the source under the GPL. Doesn't that mean that any music, art, and seperate level design programs you make are yours and you can distribute them under any license or no license at all? How does that affect you selling your game? It only forces you to release the source of the engine with your games - not the games themselves. If I am mistaken on any of this, please correct me since I am also intereste din creating a game in my spare time with a GPLed engine.

      --
      Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
    2. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      If you read the page you have the option to pay him to get a non gpl version of the engine. You can download it and play with it now, and if you get to a point were you want to sell something buy the engine.

    3. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by bartok · · Score: 1

      FYI, the Quake 1 & 2 engines can be licensed from Id for 10000 USD and you can keep the whole thing closed.

    4. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by VortexVertigo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why would they want you making money using their 3D engine? I don't believe the LGPL or BSD license gives them any right to seek their share of the profits from your game sales. If you want to make a saleable game then license a closed source engine. That's what everyone else does *cough* Unreal Engine *cough*.

      I always get a big laugh out of people who complain that they can't make money if they use GPLed code. That's the whole point, you aren't supposed to make money that way. If the authors of the GPLed code wanted it to be used by others for the purposes of making a profit they would SELL the code to you.

    5. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by Chatterton · · Score: 1

      Simply bold wrong,

      With GLP, you just need to open your source code of your game, but can sell what make your game what it is (texture, models, maps, scripted parts...). See Id Software with is Quake source, they say, "OK, my source is GLP, but if you whant play Quake from theses sources you need to buy the CD for the ressources who are not GPL...". An other example is Radeon Labs, who create a new game called Nomads based on The Nebula Device Game Engine who is open source.

      And just one thing don't use NetImmerse ! I am a Dark Age of Camelot addict player, and I can't play more than 3 hour in a row due to memory leaks. Actually I quit the game every 2 hours to get back some fluidity in the 3D Engine...

    6. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by BadmanX · · Score: 2

      No, I can't. He says he may make such a version available in the future. Therefore, if I build my game on OGRE and he decides not to make such a license available, I've wasted a whole lot of my time.

    7. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by Jorrit · · Score: 3, Informative

      You write:

      > I can't use any of the currently existing 3D engines

      Did you consider looking at an LGPL licensed engine? LGPL allows your program to link with such an engine without requiring your own source code to be GPL/LGPL or whatever.

      Crystal Space is such an engine. I'm the project manager of that engine. Take a look at http://crystal.sf.net
      As a bonus CS works on Linux, Windows, MacOS/X, ...

      Greetings,

      --
      Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
    8. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by jswitte · · Score: 1

      But what if I'm making a shareware game and only expect to make $1000 of it if I'm lucky (let's say I'm just getting started, okay). Then I'm screwed, if I want to keep it closed, unless I make my own version of the Quake engine that will dynamic link with my program so I can close the program source, although I'm not sure what the consensus on that is. (or court tests).

    9. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by PigleT · · Score: 2

      So either
      a) do something to justify your existence - write your own engine licensed under your own terms and quit complaining;
      or
      b) use an existing GPL engine but have a different license for the original art packs (not linked into the binary, *duh*) if they're that worthwhile.

      --
      ~Tim
      --
      .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
      Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
    10. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by prockcore · · Score: 2

      "And you guys wonder why FreeCraft and FreeCiv have such lousy art. It's because there's no Free Art Foundation going around saying, "You should give your art away! It's immoral to charge for art!" Same thing for musicians. Same thing for level designers."

      Obviously you've never played Counterstrike. Back to your bridge, troll.

    11. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by mtivey · · Score: 1

      You really ought to check out the nebula device. (nebuladevice.sourceforge.net). It is an open-source engine, and the license allows free commercial use.

    12. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by cyborch · · Score: 1

      I must second that, this is not the first library which is unusable and will loose commercial support due to it's license...

    13. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by MegaFur · · Score: 1

      Why are you so unhappy? If these people want to make a GPLed engine, I don't see how that affects you. YOu're wanting to have the option of charging money for something at a later date. There are non-GPL games programming kits out there that might serve this purpose well. (Of course most of those cost money.)

      --
      Furry cows moo and decompress.
    14. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by BadmanX · · Score: 2

      I have, in fact. And for a long time, Counterstrike didn't have very good models or artwork. But people played it because it had good gameplay and maps. Which, yes, were created by people in their spare time who, at the time, had no hope of making a financial profit off what they were doing.

      Bully for them. They are great guys who made a great game, and they got compensated for it in the end.. But saying that the entire game software industry can/should work the same way is absurd. Game software is (with a few noted exceptions) commercial software, and we all know that commercial software and the GPL mix about as well as oil and water.

    15. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by bsartist · · Score: 2

      He says he may make such a version available in the future.

      Wave a sufficiently large wad of cash under his nose, and I think you'd be surprised at how quickly the future arrives. :-)

      --
      Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
    16. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by BadmanX · · Score: 2

      I apologize. When I last looked at Crystal Space it hadn't been updated in a long time. Now that work is being done on it again, I will certainly take another look.

    17. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by Jorrit · · Score: 2

      Well actually CS has always been fairly active. But that activity didn't always reflect to the outside. But if you check our history log (docs/history.txt and docs/history.old in the source archive) you see that we rarely have gaps of more than a few days where nothing happens to the source code.

      Greetings,

      --
      Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
    18. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by high · · Score: 1

      If you include GPL code in your game source then your game will become a "derivative work" under the GPL whish means you have to follow the rules of the GPL, such as:

      1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it [..]

      which could make it hard if you want to go commercial.

    19. Re:Yet another engine ruined by the GPL... by ndogg · · Score: 1

      Have you looked at Crystal Space? It's under the LGPL, and looks nicer, I think.

      --
      // file: mice.h
      #include "frickin_lasers.h"
  36. Java3d Graphics Engine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    There is also an open source project that includes a 3d engine written in java3d (alpha stage though). It can render Never Winter Nights models. You can see it at http://xmud.sourceforge.net.

  37. Completely wrong. by Doktor+Memory · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The only problem is that games are not just programming. They are programming, music, art, and level design. Musicians, artists, and level designers (even hobbyist ones) are used to making money for what they do. But since the core engine of the game is GPL, no money can be made on the game.

    This is completely and totally wrong. (Or it's an artfully constructed troll; can't tell which.)

    You are only required by the GPL to release any changes you make to the engine itself. If you take the Q2 engine and make a game with your own models, textures, levels and game logic, you are not required to give away the models, textures, levels and game code.

    Remember, the engine and game logic are seperate codebases: Id Software releases the game logic seperately from the engine code, and usually years before, so that mod authors can play with it. And of course, the GPL does not "infect" anything but code: your textures, skins, models and levels remain your own no matter what.

    If you really need to make changes to the rendering engine itself (highly unlikely for a hobbyist game programmer) without giving away your code, consider looking at the Torque Engine, which you can license for $100 and a revenue-sharing agreement with GarageGames.

    --

    News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.

    1. Re:Completely wrong. by jswitte · · Score: 4, Informative

      Uh, no, completely right. See section 2b of the GPL: You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. I don't see any way around that. Of course, there is the possibility of dynamic linking with the library to get around the GPL, which was debated here a number of months ago, but without the library, the program would effectively be unusable, so I don't know if that would work.

      I'll probably get modded way down for this, but hell, my karma is only 14 anyway.. I generally agree with the idea of the FSF, just not all of the means. The idea that "By releasing libraries that are limited to free software only, we can help each other's free software packages outdo the proprietary alternatives. The whole free software movement will have more popularity, because free software as a whole will stack up better against the competition." [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html] is a good one, but I think it partly fails in that there will always be commerical software, or ever shareware. The GPL is basically incompatible with the idea of making money off of personal work. True, maybe programmer's should just program for the fun of it, for the joy of it, for the intellectual curiosity of it, yadda, yadda, yadda. But some also want (and need) to do it to eat.

      Requireing all GPL software to be released in source form basically nullifies the idea of making any kind of income off of software, unless either (1) your clients are very generous, or (2) the software is very good. Hell, it might be that the better the software is, the fewer people will pay for it (but the people who do pay may pay more, I don't know if that would balance - has anyone done any economic/psycholofical studies of payment and the GPL?) That statement in favor of the GPL over the LGPL also presupposes that there is a large base of easy to use, compelling free software out there already. As I see it, there isn't. Oh, there is if you want to go that way phiposophically, but not otherwise. To make a very bad real-world analogy: the combustion engine I don't believe that the internal combusion engine would have achieved the dominence it did if it were GPL'd immidiately after being invented. (bad analogy for one becasue the ICM is a physical product). Oh, it would have, someone else would have just "reinvented" it. The GPL offers a "freedom" of sorts with respect to knowledge, but it also places very severe restrictions on anyone trying to make a guaranteed income-stream of of something (the counter-argument, of course, is that the software will be pirated anyway if it's any good). The restrictions of the GPL are stict enough, that I believe it will drive away perhaps as many people as it attracts.

      One might say, well, you could always ask the person to dual-license, but (1) the author may be unwilling to do that, not becasue it doesn't make sense (economically or in a real-world sense) but on philosophical grounds alone, and (2) it's not clear how this works if the original work is itself a derived work from other GPL code. The FSF has gathered an enourmous amount of steam in the computing community ("psychohistorical inertia" as Prof. Seldon might put it ;-), and that steam will work to deflect certain economic realities from entering consideration, which, which while perhaps being "unpleasent" are nonetheless real in the world we live (just as was and is true with communism and capitalism as social systems) Paul Guyot, who has worked for over a year on a Apple Newton ATA driver (which was been mentioned on Slashdot at one point), refuses to work on GPL projects. I don't know all his reasons, but one main one is that GPL software tends to be hard to compile, hard to use, hard to configure, and generally you have to be a gear-head to get anything done with it (okay, that last reason was my little flourish, but you get the idea). There are some notable exceptions: GIMP for one, and it's offspring MacGIMP. But then, I haven't installed or used MacGIMP yet. How do I know that somewhere in it I won't get an inscrutable error having to do with the Fink under-structure? In addition to working for a year on this driver with a basically undocumented operating system, he has killed two development units. Do you think that someone who has invested that kind of time, energy, and money is going to release under a license that forces him to give up any propect of making money off of it? I don't, and neither does he.

      To the end of his objection the lack of good documentation of GPL software that he sees, he has drafted a license that seeks to address this, the Kallisys Reflexive License which requires that all modifications have documentation of source code changes, but does not require source code to be released. It is incompatible with the GPL, becasue the GPL requires strictures on the code beyond the KRL. This is the GPL's "freedom". (of course, the same could be said of communism, and some have described the FSF as neo-communist)

      One very interesting thing I note about the GPL is this: in section 3b, it states: [distirbute in executable code if you] Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy [...] This seems backward to me. The idea whould be that you can charge money for it (or "force people to pay" if you prefer) for a specified period of time, after which it must become open-source. This would prevent abandon-ware. If this sane alternative had been adopted by the major computer companies back in the seventies and eighties, Paul wouldn't have had to work for a year on his driver, becasue the Newton source would be out by now!

      I agree with the FSF's intentions, and their opposition to software patents, DRM, etc, etc. But in my mind, it goes to far. Freedom should also be about choice. People should not be forced into releasing source, and large corporations are not going to be in the near future (as one other Slashdotter said, "the GPL gives Apple layers hives"). As a way to prevent abandonware like the Newton, Quickdraw 3D (now basically, but not completely, a moot point), OpenDoc, etc, etc (I'm sure that companies other than Apple also have some very interesting stuff buried in their vaults, never again to see the light of day..)

      Putting together a "compromise" organization like this would not be easy - witness now Rosetta - the printing recognizer for the Newton - will finally see the light of day in MacOS X "Jaguar" as InkWell. If my idea of a standard "abandonware clause" had been adopted with a three year limit, this would be impossible, and Apple would be in the same trap I accuse the GPL of foisting on programmers. I think the FSF has taken the easy way out, opting for an extremem communist-style "solution". But real-life, and the real-world (even the ones we create ourselves) are messy, and not ammenable to easy but extreme solutions, like pure social communism (Soviet Union), or pure social capitalism (the US in many ways), or, I fear, the FSF.

    2. Re:Completely wrong. by abe+ferlman · · Score: 3, Informative

      What are you *talking* about? If what you're saying is true, then all of idSoftware's maps would now be free, because the q1/q2 engines have been GPL'd. As it turns out, the GPL only applies to part of that program.

      Furthermore, the copyright holders can relicense under something other than GPL so you can still play your idea-ownership games if you must.

      --
      microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
    3. Re:Completely wrong. by scrytch · · Score: 2

      You are only required by the GPL to release any changes you make to the engine itself

      You are thinking of the LGPL. Anything that touches the GPL becomes GPL'd. e.g. using the header files, or linking.

      I'm pretty sure that the art wouldn't get covered though, it should be pretty simple to give away the game and charge for the art, music, voiceovers, maps, writing ... anything that isn't source code, basically. Games might be one of the better venues for the GPL, if they're games that depend more on production quality than technical pizazz.

      You are way the hell off-base calling the poster a troll.

      --
      I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
  38. Just a request and LGPL has its drawbacks too. by Tord · · Score: 2

    As allready pointed out by others earlier within this topic thread, the thing about the splash-screen is just a request (and a very fair one I must say), not a requirement, and thus doesn't clash with the GPL. You can still do as you see fit with the code, but if you base a program on OGRE you really should give credit where credit is due.

    Using the LGPL would mean that also commercial game developers could use the engine royalty-free, which is a good thing in some cases and less good in other. Using dual licenses means that the author can milk any commercial projects for some money that could be put back into development, while free software developers can use the fruits of that for free.

    Dual licenses can really be a big win for program infrastructure projects like this and I'm kind of surprised not more developers are using it. Commercial users pay for the product with real money that keeps the company alive, while the free software community contribute bugreports, improvements and some free work labor in return for free use, not to mention the free advocating, exposure and wider acceptance.

  39. You are BOTH wrong! by Tord · · Score: 4, Informative

    The first poster is wrong in that he won't be able to make money from the game. Most GPL:ed 3D engines are available under dual licenses, the GPL and one commercial license that comes with a fee. That is perfect for him since he can start developing without a commercial license and then get a commercial license if/when he decides to release the game commercially. Just be sure to check the details of the license first though and possibly get some kind of guarantee that they won't change the commercial licenses during your development.

    The second poster is somewhat wrong in his interpretation of the GPL. You do have to release your entire codebase under the GPL, but not the textures, models etc.

    The GPL works on a program-wide level while the LGPL works more like the above poster described (but not entirely, you are for example required to keep the LGPL:ed codebase in a DLL, which shouldn't cause the developer any bigger troubles but gives the user the benefit of being able to modify or replace the LGPL:ed part of the program), so I guess he mixed them up a bit.

  40. And another free game engine, Linux-ready by Shillo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --

    --
    I refuse to use .sig
  41. For some real rendering by SensiMillia · · Score: 1
    1. Re:For some real rendering by beef3k · · Score: 1

      ... which has heaps of functionality for scientific visualization (which is what it was designed for), but is not fast enough (or very suitable for that matter) to create games with.

  42. Moderators, what are you smoking? by mav[LAG] · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    I'm glad you don't have a problem with calculating and drawing all visible polygons in a 50 000 poly-based world as quickly as possible. Some of us do.

    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.

    I'm not sure what you mean by plausible - since Scene Graphs are not just theoretical: they work extremely well for their purpose. They are very useful, probably the fastest general purpose method for drawing large scenes available today.

    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.

    Meanwhile in the year 2002, there are quite a few scene graphs available for many platforms. One of the best is Open Scene Graph, an LGPLed library which is used for games, demos and high-end visualisation systems. Not to mention Ogre itself which looks very sweet indeed.

    You need a low-level graphics API to abstract different types of hardware. That's the real job of OpenGL and Direct-X.

    Direct-3D I think you mean.

    You might want a full game engine if you're building a game, and you can get those from a number of vendors.

    You might also want to consider what 95% of game writers do and that is to select the best tools for the job and assemble them yourself. Graphics and rendering tends to be 10% of the typical code base for a commercial game - the bulk is AI, gameplay logic, resource management, menus, and supporting tools.

    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.

    I suppose if you're looking for a game engine which does everything for you while wiping your nose and holding your hand, then a mid-level API won't be very useful. For a game writer looking to solve the one big problem of overdraw, a mid level API like Ogre or OSG is an excellent solution. Plug it in and it does the clipping, culling and drawing work for you. I know from personal experience that OSG is superb at this job - adapting equally well to visualisation, flight simulation and terrain rendering. Ogre's screenshots tell a similar story. Want a Quake 3 level? Load it and Ogre adds it to the graph and takes care of the rest.

    --
    --- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
    1. Re:Moderators, what are you smoking? by Hard_Code · · Score: 2

      "You need a low-level graphics API to abstract different types of hardware. That's the real job of OpenGL and Direct-X."

      Direct-3D I think you mean.

      Direct-3D immediate mode at that....

      --

      It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
  43. 1-1 by EnglishTim · · Score: 2

    Well, it could have been worse.

  44. Re:Poor design by steve_streeting · · Score: 1

    Well, you're entitled to your opinion but I believe you've formed it prematurely. Just to clarify, I do design everything before writing code. The documentation generated using doxygen is the API documentation intended to help people use it, it's not a design document. I happen to believe that design documentation and API documentation are completely different animals - the former is there to explore and document the principles and overall strategy - such a design would be clouded by excessive detail. However API documentation needs to be detailed and precise. I believe doing both in one document is not the best approach. I also provide a set of tutorials to help orient the new user which include snippets of my original UML diagrams. The rest of your comments just seem to be rants - if you have any comments specifically about the actual design (if you've even looked at it), I'd be happy to hear them. I don't see how just picking quotes off the site and picking apart their grammar to vent your frustration about design practices that you've seen is of much value.

  45. so, buy a new vid card by Ender+Ryan · · Score: 2
    So why don't you stop whining and buy a 3d video card from a vendor that currently supports linux.

    I just got a GF4, and let me tell you it absolutely smokes in Linux. It actually performs slightly better in Linux than windows, only too bad that there are few native Linux games. I run a couple games in winex too, but you lose some performance doing that, but the GF4 really helps, now I can run JK2 in 1024 with all details turned on and it runs great.

    FWIW, games that run well in winex, usually run more stable than they do in windows, even win2k, but admittedly win2k is plenty stable enough for gaming.

    I really hope OpenGL 2 will attract developers away from D3D, that sure would be good for Linux in the future.

    --
    Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
  46. Artists and plot writers by Erotomek · · Score: 1

    The problem is, does the open-source community have the artists needed to take this and make it into a playable and interesting game ?

    The WorldForge Project is probably a good place to start looking for them.

    --

    Krótko: kady Erotomek
    W pimiennictwie ma swój domek.

  47. Utterly Wrong Yet Again by FreeUser · · Score: 2

    section 2b of the GPL [gnu.org]: You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof,to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. [emphesis added]

    This clearly refers to the source code, not add-on graphics, etc. Dynamic libraries are not "getting around" the GPL, the GPL is specifically designed to limit itself to the project(s) in question and its derivatives, not every usage of the project that doesn't directly incorporate its source code.

    Furthermore, your artistic work is no more a part of the GPLed code that a word document you write with Open Office is a part of that GPLed project (and thus GPLed itself). You are propogating a Microsoft myth that has been debunked by numerous third parties, and by the Free Software Foundation itself.

    If you were writing a game based on a GPLed game, then yes, your game would have to be GPLed. If, however, you are writing a game that uses a GPLed library (like Ogre or Crystal Space) the GPL does not extend beyond the boundries of the GPLed library unless you statically link it to your code, and then distribute that statically linked binary (something no one in their right mind would do in this day and age regardless of the GPL).

    The GPL foists no trap upon developers, it protects the freedom of their projects from poachers like Microsoft, and it in no way coerces your project external to it into using the GPL, your protestations and denials notwithstanding.

    --
    The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
    1. Re:Utterly Wrong Yet Again by bgat · · Score: 1


      If you were writing a game based on a GPLed game, then yes, your game would have to be GPLed. If, however, you are writing a game that uses a GPLed library (like Ogre or Crystal Space) the GPL does not extend beyond the boundries of the GPLed library unless you statically link it to your code, and then distribute that statically linked binary (something no one in their right mind would do in this day and age regardless of the GPL).


      Actually, wrong. Static linking vs. dynamic linking is all the same to the GPL. You still have to publish the source code for the users of the application, because according to the terms of the GPL, if you link (static, dynamic, whatever) a GPL article with your code, you have created a derivative work. And under the GPL, derivative works of GPL articles must be licensed under the GPL.

      If you don't like it, write your own code. Release it under any license you like, or don't release it at all.

      --
      b.g.
    2. Re:Utterly Wrong Yet Again by high · · Score: 1
      If, however, you are writing a game that uses a GPLed library (like Ogre or Crystal Space) the GPL does not extend beyond the boundries of the GPLed library [..]

      You are wrong. A case such as the one you are talking about would only work if the library was LGPL licensed.

    3. Re:Utterly Wrong Yet Again by FreeUser · · Score: 2

      Actually, wrong. Static linking vs. dynamic linking is all the same to the GPL. You still have to publish the source code for the users of the application, because according to the terms of the GPL

      I stand corrected. Nevertheless, my main point stands. The artistic work (sets, characters, etc.) for a game are not part of the GPLed code, regardless, any more than an xvid video is a part of mplayer, or a png file a part of the GIMP.

      So, while a game engine based upon OGRE or Crystal Sphere would have to be GPLed, the game itself (i.e. what is analogous to a WAD file) is not required to be GPLed, any more than Applixware is required to be GPLed simply because it runs under (the GPLed) GNU/Linux operating system.

      --
      The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
  48. Re:Completely wrong - AI programming, ViaVoice by jswitte · · Score: 1

    The original poster's passage in question is:

    the engine and game logic are seperate codebases: Id Software releases the game logic seperately from the engine code, and usually years before, so that mod authors can play with it. And of course, the GPL does not "infect" anything but code: your textures, skins, models and levels remain your own no matter what.

    The art, music, textures, levels, models, etc are not "infected" by the GPL. But I would say that "game logic" includes such things as the code that reads the level files (other than the engine code, any OpenGL wizardry you added to give it that added "whiz-bang" factor, any AI programming you did for command recognition or enemy reaction, etc. And as far as I know (never having used the Quake engine), the engine is static-linked into the rest of this "game logic", so it must also be GPL.

    Another problem that might come up is this: what if I want to integrate the program with ViaVoice (or any other closed-source voice rec program), or with a closed source 3D game controller? Can I do that if it requires that closed source glue code be statically linked into the binary? This problem comes up with regards to Newton development as well - specifically with using the C++ tools, which require closed glue to be linked - more generally becasue the main development program, Newton Toolkit, is not open-source, and no clone has been made (yet, one of these days I'll get around to it..) Jim

  49. Re:Is this like by beef3k · · Score: 1

    Yes it is, only CS is cross platform, while Ogre is not.

  50. Object oriented? by Junks+Jerzey · · Score: 2

    Strange that OO-ness is such a major feature that it found it's way into the name of the engine. I've never really thought of OO-ness as making or breaking an engine.

  51. Awww by xihr · · Score: 1

    I suppose it was inevitable. I, too, was working on a Python OpenGL rendering engine called OGRE.

  52. Huh? by Ogre332 · · Score: 1

    waht about me?

    --
    Shut up brain or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip. - Homer Simpson
  53. No, no, no by some+guy+I+know · · Score: 1

    That's wrong.

    You can use GPL code in a commercial app if you either:
    a) Distribute the modified source code under the GPL along with the binary, or
    b) Don't distribute the binary.

    Why would people pay in case a)?
    To receive support.

    How can a commercial product not be distributed (case b))?
    You can use it in-house or as a server (e.g., a database or web server).

    So you can use GPL code in commercial apps.

    --
    Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
    1. Re:No, no, no by beef3k · · Score: 1

      Yes, you'll have to distribute the code, which for the _wast_ majority of software companies is not an option.

  54. ACK!!! by Fig,+formerly+A.C. · · Score: 1

    ACK! I'm being killed by the letter "h"!!! Oh noooooooo... It _h_urts... How _h_orrible.

    --
    Murphy was an optimist.