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Snowboarding Soul Ride Engine Goes GPL

Posted by timothy on from the hurts-less-than-the-real-thing dept.

TuringTest writes "LinuxGames reports this news update at the Soul Ride game site. Soul Ride is a snowboarding game with real character physics, and its engine is now released under GPL and available for download. You may see its beautiful screenshots until it gets /.ed. Note that only the engine is GPL'd, not the artwork and data. Can you imagine a GPL game with the Fellowship of the Ring crossing the Caradhras with these graphics?" I hope this release spawns a Linux-friendly snowboarding simulator -- Soul Ride is limited to Windows (9X, NT, 2000) for now.

1 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm? by ikoleverhate · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "render the entire gameworld as polygons and let the video cards horsepower deliver the framerates because its way easier than only rendering on-screen action"

    You think so? I doubt very much Thatcher Ulrich would code a new crappy engine, when he could use his famous (at least among those who keep up with such things) Chunked LOD algorithm. Thatcher released a sample implementation a while ago on sourceforge with source for linux and windows.

    The chunked LOD algo is capable of using HUGE datasets (eg 285MB in the demo). Unlikely then that he's doing a "render the entire blah blah" thing...

    You obviously know very little about graphics programming and more importantly have spent zero time investigating your claims.

    Fair enough if you don't like the screen shots, but you really can't put down the engine, or it's programmer. Thatcher Ulrich is one of very few professional game programmers who publishes (both source and papers) his CURRENT algorithms (eg not 5 year old ones like Carmack). He invented the (also famous among people who know) "loose octree" method of spacial partitioning.