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Cube: A Modern 3D Game Engine

Posted by michael on from the little-engine-that-could dept.

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.

7 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Cube, the game by dnaumov · · Score: 4, Informative

    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".

    1. Re:Cube, the game by fingal · · Score: 4, Informative
      "some time in the future" sounds to me like "if I can't sell it to somebody first"

      or when I am sufficiently happy with the internal data structure of my code that it is not going to go through any major structural changes and therefore has an API that is interesting to link to...

      --

      The only Good System is a Sound System

    2. Re:Cube, the game by Aardappel · · Score: 4, Informative

      I guess its hard for both open & closed source fanatics to understand what I am doing with cube w.r.t. to the source.

      No, I am not trying to sell it (cube is a fun little engine, but it lacks 101 features to be commercially viable).

      No, I am not an Evil Closed Source Person. If you look at my homepage you'll see all my other projects come with source code (mostly GPL). If you read the cube docs, you'd see there is a plan to release the sources (BSD/ZLIB).

      and no, the code doesn't require major restructuring / cleanup before it can be released. The exe size on win32 with "mimimize code size" is 80k or so, I am sure everyone will agree that given the feature set there is not a lot of fat to trim.

      My motivation for not releasing the source yet is that cube is purely programming fun, and I have very particular coding/design ideas (minimalism) which I don't trust others to follow (yes, very arrogant, but its my code, deal with it).

  2. Interesting editing mode by theefer · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  3. DM servers by cobar · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:whats best way to begin something like this? by JFMulder · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Argh: Quake is seriously outdated by Junks+Jerzey · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.