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.
Great effort but not comparable to modern day "eye candy" engines yet.... looks more like a Quake 2 level of geometry with nice colour and lighting ability. Perhaps the adjustable LOD is set on a low level....
I wonder how well it handles high polygon counts or is the empahsis more on engine ability rather than model design for now?
- HeXa
"Most of the engine design is targeted at reaching feature richness through simplicity of structure and brute force, rather than finely tuned complexity."
This doesn't really sound like a *good* thing to me. Can somebody with a little more technical knowledge explain how this is advantageous?
sig.
that this guy isn't already working for id?
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".
I've managed to download the game in under 30 mins with a 56k modem!
I remember back in the day, when all this was fields, real men programmed in Cobol and simply uttering the phrase Slashdot Effect was enough to make any sane SysAdmin turn into a gibbering puddle of jelly and spend the rest of his life in rehab :/
You kids nowadays with your fancy broadband, useless :/
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
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
I have 1 beef with full screen games.
I can't switch back to X.
I like linux because it multitasks, and multitasks well. Stable and I can leave it going with all my applications right were I left them.
Then I play a game, I can't pause it and switch back to grab a phone number, check a calendar, I'm stuck.
Why can't they simply put the game in a window, or leave some way to flip back to X?
...Having problems? I get 9fps, on my p3 1g with a gf2mx, and that ain't right! Running in XP
Anybody know the answer?
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
What makes this different then a Voxel engine?
All I want is an efficiently programmed game that's small in size so I don't need another hard drive to install it. Unreal Tournament in ASM - 20MB and faster than a cheetah riding a rocket, lovely :o)
[JJ]
"Insert Dead Smart n Clever Sig Here So I Look Brainy"
If for no other reason that the game's storyline. From the docs:
Official game storyline: "You kill stuff. The End."
Finally a first person shooter that doesn't try to beat me over the head with hours of meaningless plot development!
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
quote from the "most wanted feature" forum:
..
"#267:
by Gom Jabbar on 07/20/2002 14:46 through 217.4.101.162
There won't be room over room. At least not within the next 10 years..."
sounds like doom 10 years before
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.
looks pretty cool, but it does look kinda like a prettier version of that old 'chasm' game ... or quake 1 i suppose ... not to be critical, i loved both of those games ... and im in no place to be critical because i cant even do anything remotely this good ...
... what would be the best way to start on a project like this, say 3d enigine, from a beginners level? i know that a 3d engine isnt even something you consider from a beginners level, but this is what i would like to be looking at doing some time in the future ... 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??? and are there specific websites, examples, source code that i should be checking out??? ... any useful advice would be most welcome ...
...
speaking of which
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
replies to my hotmail acct welcome
A quote from the page:
:) It will be open sourced in the future, under a license similar to BSD/MIT/ZLIB etc
:-)
The source code for Cube has not been released yet, because Cube is for me a purely fun programming project with a very minimalistic style of design & implementation, and I want to keep all the fun to myself
Such a shame, I'm sure some people out here would want to help this guy make his stuff...
On the sidenote, Aardappel is Dutch, and it literally means potato
This isn't a troll, far from it.
While I agree that Open Sourcing is a better way to go with Operating systems and Applications it shouldn't apply to games that are going to be played over the internet. It gives l33t h4x0rs and script-kiddies an instant referance to help them in cheating. SDKs are bad enough(but at least theses take some time to work with) but the entire source would cripple any hopes of playing a fair game.
The saddest thing is that this looks like a really interesting project and from what I can gather from people who have it already the games engine is pretty flexable and innovative, if cheaters didn't exist then I would support open-sourcing every game under the sun but sadly I can't. Sad day.
Read Errant Story.
Am I the only one noticing this game technically has the same level design as duke nukem or something similar? From what I can see there are no rooms above other rooms... I mean it doesnt look like things can hover in mid air (like bridges).
I'm not sure about this at all but I played it a while ago and now that I look at the screenshots it doesn't look like it's possible.
The game is fun and all but is this "A Modern 3D Game Engine" ?
Still downloading the engine but the docs on the site make for interesting reading. This engine is not capable of having rooms over rooms, in fact the author compares it to doom which is obviously not 3D.
From reading the docs I think the real innovation here is in the gui which sounds like it has obviously had a lot of time spent on it.
Having edited with the quake and unreal engines it seems this prog is trying to remove the bar into editing by making editing easy enough for anyone to jump in and play around. A good thing in my opoinion.
I'm far from being representative of the "Linux community".
Yet, one of the very first things Cube's Readme says is:
'note well: the engine is still in beta stages, and also VERY different from any engine you have seen before. Failure to read the documentation in its entirety may cause you to:
* miss out on the cool features.
* run it in an unoptimal way for your system.
* conclude it "sucks" prematurely.'
The -t option can be found simply by following the first link in readme.html, clearly labelled with "config: on running the game and configuring it for your machine". The link comes even before the blurb I quoted above. It's not like it is buried in an obscure file somewhere.
I usually go out of my way to help people and whine a lot myself when there's missing, cryptic or misleading information, but in this case it definitely would have taken less time for the original poster to just look at readme.html than to post on Slashdot (at the very least he had to wait the infamous 20 seconds).
On the other hand, this engine seems like it was designed for the ULTIMATE Tron cycle game. ;)
------ What's sadder than realizing you've filtered out your own comments?
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.
"Combines very high precision dynamic occlusion culling with a form of geometric mipmapping [...]"
Thats a nice way of saying "It looks pretty and lets you kill stuff". Hehe.
No, I RYFT(roll) instead. You said that my post proved the bigger picture. Wrong. I even agree with you that the "you-idiot-don-t-get-it-why-don-t-you-go-back-to-w indoze" attitude stinks, but obviously in this case the original poster hasn't even attempted to look for the answer, which is one of the very first things the documentation clearly mentions - had it been otherwise, he would have had all the reasons in the world to complain.
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.
Apparently some people swear by kdevelop which, as you may be able to tell, is a KDE application. I haven't used it much personally, but you might want to check it out at http://www.kdevelop.org
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. --H.L. Mencken
...the game can be hacked. Source doesn't make it much easier from what I can see- there seems to be enough hacks and "trainers" out there for the games out right now. These cheating tools end up showing up fairly quickly after the game comes out and so far, all of these games are closed source. Simply put, securing things is a difficult proposition at best (curtailing performance, etc.) if you rely on the client side being clean, etc.- having source only makes it slightly easier.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Erm. I'm curious.. what can PS2 games do that games using Quake3 engine can't? Nearly a year after Q3 was out, games continued to use Q2 engine. I know Q3 isn't much more than Q1 with shaders and lightmaps, etc. But a low-res PS2? Certain things engines are good at and certain things they are not. Q3 is still very good for indoor environments. For outdoor environments it sucks ass. It probably wouldn't be good for a Mario or Sonic type game. I don't doubt there is a better indoor engine. Infact, I know it's name: Doom 3.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
almost every OS is compared too windows, though you know it's not really great and there are better. Sometimes it's not quality but "well known" that counts.
If the game code were open source, it would be possible to add security that actually worked. The chances that a cheat would be found by l33t h4x0rs would go down as many eyes would have had a chance to really close the holes.
Even in the event that a cheat were found, the ability to respond quickly would be a plus for open sourcing the game.
If your FPS is going very slow, as in 9FPS-ish, and you're using an NVidia Card, go to nvidia.com and get the latest video drivers. It fixed the problem for me.
You were so busy to talk about your favourite feature that you forgot to actually look at the page I guess. Quite a few languages of mine do TI, for example the "Bla" one (read the doc and/ or source code) has quite extensive TI.
Yes TI is great. But it is not without issues outside of the world of functional programming (though most have sensible solutions).
cool, looks like i have enough stuff there to keep me going for a while ... thanks for all the links/ideas everybody, and for the blatant BlitzBasic spam hehehe (joke) ;) interesting that i dont think anyone made mention of the directX sdk etc etc ... although i guess i do have to remember that this is /. hehehe :)
... and i have been a VB programmer professionally (i dont think those words go together but whatever) for the past 2 yrs or so, and VB tends to let you be a very lazy programmer, and MDI form accounting software is just ridiculously easy to the point of tedium, so before i go senile from VB infection (yes, thats a B, not a D, its a lame joke, i hope you enjoy it) :) at the ripe old age of 25, i would like to get back into what i originally had planned, which was C++ game programming ... wish me luck (*walks off into the sunset, cue campy tear-jerking music*)
just to give the full pic for those who like to read a bio, i actually have a CS major which i finished 3 yrs ago, and i am two third year maths topics short of making it a CS/MATH double major (which i plan on going back and doing at some point in time), and a fair bit of C++ experience (i wrote my own text based blackjack program at uni on the unix machines, and then 'ported' it to DOS) and tinkered with it at a graphical level in DOS (good old Black Arts of 3D Game Programming book), but had a major issue with some sort of pointer array which ended up with me putting a stop to the whole thing
Left/right arrows "Strafe", and there seems to be no way to actually TURN into some direction.
Any ideas?
No, "mouse turning" isnt what I am looking for.
Shut up, Bill. Get your own forum! ;-)
Coderz 4 Life
So we got all these hi-dollar video cards that can render cgi movies that takes several machines hours. Why is it so hard for them to make a real physics game engine. Lets not forget the enemies. Why must all henchmen in games look alike. Doom4 will have clones. I mean all this time they spend makeing levels why can't they make about 400 difffernt unique henchmen and 3 or 4 levels. I like variaty. Why can't legs fall off at differnt sections and flesh splatter. Why can't I use question marks. Why can't Model's mouths move when they are talking. Why do i continuiously believe the hype. ...
l8r
You would think John Romero could think of a better new alias than "Wouter van Oortmerssen (aka Aardappel)".
I think a point is being missed here. Cube is modern simply because game engines really haven't been done quite like this before (ignoring TombRaider). It's admirable that the developer decided to be creative and look at indoor world geometry in a different way than the current prevailing tech-fashion demands. Quake is Quake-- it's one game (even it's an amazingly good one), and it has a particular focus. I think we're all so wowed by the technology that we forget that Carmack designed the engine to do certain things at the expense of other things. Cube is obviously well designed and is working (how many of us programmers can claim both of these), but also is probably more of a true game engine than most out there for the simple reason that it choses it's own priorities rather than using those of a popular game.
-- Cheers.