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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".
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
We tried to get him to submit his resume to id Software. I dunno whatever became of that.
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.
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.
There won't be room over room. At least not within the next 10 years...
Geez, 2D projections to 3D again?
Why was this interesting news item? It's not open source, it's like Doom with enhanced lighting, but not even enhanced enough, since it's vertex based (although fine grained). Just because it's built on top of SDL/OpenGL doesn't count for much, because there are numerous such projects out there, sadly none of them have gotten much wind under their wings. GPL'd 3D engine that gets masses moving is what I'm anxiously waiting for.
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
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.
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.