Slashdot Mirror
Cube: A Modern 3D Game Engine
An anonymous reader writes "There is a new 3d game engine being developed by Wouter van Oortmerssen (aka Aardappel) that utilizes SDL and OpenGL. It is pretty full-featured already, and is heavily influenced by Quake3." Same guy who did panoramic Quake.
There's more to Cube then just the engine. It makes for a very nice game. It currently has deathmatch, deathmatch-sp and primitive sp. Try the deathmatch sometime, it's very fun. The engine itself is actually developed by 2 people, Aard does all the main stuff, while the other guy does the networking and the porting to *NIX platforms.
There is also a very nice community of people developing maps for Cube, Aard is rather open-minded, so every new Cube release also tends to include at least several new maps. The game engine is not currently open-source, however, Aard plans to open-source it in "some time in the future".
The main interest in this engine is, I think, the editing mode. It's simply amazing. Anytime you want while in game (I suppose not during a deathmatch though), you just press E and enter the editing mode.
;-)
...
You can raise/lower small cubes (or group of cubes) with the mouse scroller, etc. Everything can be built this way. It's both easy and powerful, requires no compilation (press E again and play) and works really well !
The graphics are far from ugly, I'd say the game is rather pretty. It works well under linux, which is a good thing too.
But you really have to try this editing mode
Let's hope the engine will be open source
theefer
For anybody that's interested in trying out the multiplayer, I have a server running at:
deskstar.101freeway.com
for at least the rest of the weekend.
You should first look at NeHe OpenGL tutorials. It will teach you a long way into 3d programming. It's very well written and covers a lot of subjects. Check it out at http://nehe.gamedev.net/. There are a lot of tutorials, and most of them is written in more than one language, so you can learn about using OpenGL even tough C++ is not your favorite language. The are tutorials in C++, PowerBasic... And code for Mac, Windows, Linux, everything! A true gem. This is the best beginners ressource you can find.
He did quite a lot of work on the front of visual programming and came up with a lot of programming languages which are definitely worth a look.
Check out the page: http://wouter.fov120.com/proglang/index.html.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Note: I am not a game programmer, but I am a programmer with some very basic knowledge about game design.
... any useful advice would be most welcome ...
:)
what would be the best way to start on a project like this, say 3d enigine, from a beginners level?
Use a really high level graphics API, so that all the gritty details are hidden from you. OpenGL is IMHO very low level in this context. SGI's Open Inventor sounds about right, but there's probably better API's out there for games.
any one care to share how they got started on game programming? what would be the best plan of attack? or is it just a matter of sitting down with a C++ book, then a visual C++ book (or could anyone tell me what other avenues i might look at with regards to IDE, including under linux), then a game programming book etc etc???
I suggest that before you start getting into game programming, start with seperately writing little programs to tinker with different aspects of game programming, like writing a screensaver (mostly graphics work, you can throw in a little AI, but there is no user interaction so it makes it much easier for you). Once you know your favorite language's syntax in and out, and you know how to attack/avoid the typical design problems you will no doubt encounter in game design, you can start thinking about design a game/engine.
You're on the right track in terms of reading books. But it is definately not a matter of getting a C++ book, then getting a video game book, and going at it. Designing games involves a lot of things other than drawing graphics. You will need to be familiar with physics, human perception, collision detection, artificial intelligence, and many other things. For most people, this (at least!) means having taken a major in CS and/or CE and/or EE and/or Math (pick one). A game programming book will summarize some of these topics, but unless you dive head first into, for example, AI, your understanding of it will be very shallow.
and are there specific websites, examples, source code that i should be checking out???
I believe the Quake2 source has been released. Download it and read it. I'd recommend you start by hacking the code to add in your own features to the game as a first step to understanding it. Run it through a debugger to get a feel for how the game works (I have a feeling debugging quake2 in gdb or ddd would be extremely painful -- try to get your hands on Microsoft's Visual C++ debugger, it blows away anything on Linux and even Workshop on Solaris).
ive wanted to do game programming for ages, but ive never pulled my finger out and sat down and got into it, but now that the new version of the stupid accounting software i code at work has gone gold, i wanna clear my brain of VB and get down and dirty into some serious (and entertaining) coding
Game programming is really, really hard. Much harder than you think. However, I hope I haven't discouraged you. If you feel motivated to do it, then don't let anyone stop you! Just know that it will take an insane amount of hard work and study (I'm talking on the order of years, not days, weeks or months) to get even a mediocre game or game engine out the door.
Good luck,
-Mani
I'm a game developer, and I find it endlessly amusing that internetters love to equate Quake technology with the cutting edge. I guess it begs the question: Do wannabe game programmers and fanboys have any experience with engines that are *not* Quake-like?
For example, look at the amazing stuff done in high-end PlayStation 2 games. There's no way you could get the Quake III engine to do those kinds of things. And yet everyone fawns all over Quake like it's the only game technology available. In reality, it's just that there's a distinct lack of familiarity with what else is available, much as hardcore Linux advocates don't know about OSes other than Linux and Windows, and don't know much at all about OS history prior to 1991.