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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."
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 ?
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.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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