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Irrlicht - Fast Realtime 3D Engine
Surye writes "Though a few days late on the release, Irrlicht has released version 0.7 of its engine. The site describes it as 'an open source high performance realtime 3D engine written in C++. It is completely cross-platform, using D3D, OpenGL and its own software renderer, and has all of the state-of-the-art features which can be found in commercial 3d engines.' Bindings for java, perl, ruby, and python, and it is platform independent (only implemented currently on Windows and Linux, but when it moves to other platforms, the code will be completely portable). The feature list is simply amazing, and since it's still being quite actively developed, I can see this becoming a major player soon."
This is neat and all, but they need to make a complete game with it. Without the game, the engine developers don't really know what game developers need, thus insuring that it's never used in commercial games.
Something that might pick up where GLUT left off!
There's another OS 3d engine called crystal space 3d. It's been in development FOREVER now, and I'm still waiting for a completed cross-platform game, but it looks like a cool proejct. Anyone feel like porting this to mac?
Ever tried coding with Genesis 3D? The documentation is shit. Take for example the explanation for the "GoEngine" function:
Yeah, hey guys, it seems to have something to do with something! Let's code with it! For fuck's sakes.
Show me a 3D engine with reasonably documented code and I'll jump at it. Until then, you may have all the features in the world Mr. Engine Programmer, but if I can't pick it up and start doing something meaningful within an hour, you've failed miserably at your primary task: making sure the engine is actually usable.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
3D Realms issued a press release saying that they had standardized on it for the final engine to be used in Duke Nukem Forever
When asked whether the move to Irrlicht would interfere with the work already done since their announcement last week that DNF had standardized on the Mario Party 6 engine, 3D Realms declined to answer, instead apparently becoming distracted by and taking chase after a rabbit running through the grass nearby
Its about time. The OSS community definitely needs something like this, which hopefully could eventually lead to some high-quality GPL'd games and such. The current profolio of gaming on Linux isn't very impressive in comparison to Windows or even Mac OS. Hopefully this will also encourage companies to ports their games to more platforms (like Linux). I know fellow gentoo'ers would appreciate this. As much as I love Linux, it lacks seriously in the gaming department.
Hi there
I came across this engine once while looking for a good 3D engine for one of my games. It was great but people are afraid of the "iron fist" developer.
Apparently the engine has only one developer who can supposedly drop the project at anytime. Probably not likely though. Maybe there are more developers now, this was weeks ago.
Actually, you can use OpenGL on Windows too (it's simply on D3D by default). IIRC, it's also available on MAC. But the Unreal engine is neither Open Source nor free.
About this engine, while it's interesting in itself, I wouldn't go around saying "state-of-the-art" out loud. Those screenshots were "state-of-the-art" 5 years ago.
...and download Irrlicht 0.7. In it, you will find "Irrlicht.chm", which starts with (I quote):
Welcome to the Irrlicht Engine API documentation. Here you'll find any information you'll need to develop applications with the Irrlicht Engine. If you look for a tutorial on how to start, take a look at the homepage of the Irrlicht Engine at irrlicht.sourceforge.net or into the SDK in the directory \examples.
The Irrlicht Engine is intended to be an easy-to-use 3d engine, so this documentation is an important part of it. If you have any questions or suggestions, just send a email to the author of the engine, Nikolaus Gebhardt (niko (at) code3d.com).
In the documentation are the classes explained in a quite clear and concise manner, in JAVADOC-style.
I'm sorry, but some 3D-engines do think that documentation is important, so I guess your 3D engine with reasonably documented code is already here....
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Just wanted people to realize the diffrence here. irrlicht is is
a 3d engine, which is about putting things on screen.
For making a full game, much much more is needed. Player control/input
handling, level loading when needed, loading saving of progress. Physics. AI. And , well, a _whole_ lot of other code. Plus some amazing
artists and a good way of dealing with content made in 3d party applications(modellers)..
Can anybody who's used both OSG and Irrlicht talk about a few of the more important differences they've noticed?
I've been dabbling a bit so far. I haven't quite updated to 0.7 yet, however from what I've cooked up it is fairly intuitive. The API documentation is derived from the C header files nearest I can tell. With just about 30 minutes to an hour I had a terrain with some public domain tree models textured and such. I had dabbled with Ogre and CrystalSpace with limited success. Irrlicht has a very nice feature set and a pretty decent software renderer.
( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
Doesn't seem to have normal mapping (bump mapping and its cousins) or portal rendering (and all of its cousins). This doesn't make the engine very modern. It also seems to be lacking in the shaders department.
However, it is open source so stay tuned in the future!
Why would anyone use Irrlicht instead of SDL? Or would it make sense to use both?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Check out the tech demo for irrlicht. Look at the shadows on the running model as she passes by the light source. Irrlicht is still incapable of loading smoothing groups from 3ds models (so all models are unsmoothed). .x format is purported to be the best for irrlicht, yet irrlicht can't load most types of .x format.
Why would anyone want to use this ugly engine?
...wake me up when we've got some hardware raytracers
RegardselFarto
Check the screenshot section to see what this thing is doing NOW (actually, some of this features are there for almost a year now):
.x file loader, new GUI features, the improved .bsp file renderer, new material types, fog.
- Here are some shots of new features of the development version of upcoming Irrlicht 0.5: The
- These shots show the development of version, 0.4.2: Ultra realistic terrain rendering, indoor rendering using the new high quality texture loader, some new features of the user interface system, and curved surfaces.
- New features of the engine are the collision manager, skeletal animations, particle systems, zfail style stencil shadows, the linux port, picking, water surfaces. The image with the landscape is a terrain renderer for the irrlicht engine coded by 'knighttoflight' using some textures from
NO SIG
Imagine if the parrot or mono guys wrote really slick bindings for this and made them availible on all supported platforms. Personally, I would rather have a game that is just "pretty" fast but isn't bound to a particular operating system to one that is really fast, but that I cannot take to any platform I want.
If PERL 6 and Parrot are able to get really mature in the next 6 months to a year, they owe it to their users to try to provide solid support for a library like this as part of the parrot distribution. A language like PERL 6 which is supposed to be really slick thanks to ruby's influence on its design would be great for opening up game development to the masses.
The way I see it, unless a game written in C/C++ is going to completely max out your CPU and GPU then it's probably worth being written in C# or PERL 6 eventually. Something like this would be Microsoft's worst nightmare for home users who play games a lot.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
http://www.code3d.com/blog/
And say an amen to his entry regarding linux and windows.
according to the features list, the API is "well documentated". Phew!
Somewhat OT, but I'm thinking about using Genesis 3D in a new project. Is it reasonably up to date compared to Irrlicht and some of the others?
It's also a good synth album by Klaus Schulz.
Irrlicht is good because it's easy to use. If you want a high performance engine for use in a serious project have a look at OGRE. Sure it's harder to use but it has an active community and the performance in complex, real world scenarios is great. I looked at both when researching what to use for Motorsport and right now, OGRE is a better choice for big serious apps. We're using OGRE for our open source driving simulator and it compiles in Linux and Windows with no changes to the code. OGRE is good because it sticks to what it is good at, 3D. There are a lot of Game engines out there that try to be all things to all people but aren't good at any of them. OGRE is good at 3D.
That said, if you're new to 3D Irrlicht is a good place to start.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Here is a screenshot of the engine at work:
wip9.jpg
can you release a binary or any compiled source, even if "alpha" or worse, under the GPL without the source? That's what he claims to have done (you cannot obtain the source for the current development, nor could you in the past)
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Look at engines that actually get used for game projects in the commercial world: they are GAME engines, with a proven game for it, and a toolchain. Nobody ever licenses a naked engine, as in just a set of APIs. For a modern game, something that can render flashy graphics is only a small fraction of all the code involved.
Another engine that is open source (LGPL) and possibly a bit more mature than Irrlicht is Crystal Space 3D.
...), mipmapping, portals, mirrors, alpha transparency, reflective surfaces, 3D sprites (frame based or with skeletal animation using cal3d animation library), procedural textures, particle systems, halos, volumetric fog, scripting (using Python, Perl, Java, or potentially other languages), 16-bit and 32-bit display support, OpenGL, and software renderer, font support (also with freetype), hierarchical transformations, physics plugin based on ODE, ... See the extensive list of features for more details."
From the about us-blurb "Crystal Space is a free (LGPL) and portable 3D Game Development Kit written in C++. It supports: true six degrees of freedom, colored lighting, lightmapped and stencil based lighting, shader support (CG, vertex programs, fragment programs,
Read more at http://crystal.sourceforge.net/
I'm impressed. Downloaded the 0.7 zip file from the site (it was the only download available). I thought... well, this must be the windows version (I'm on Linux FC2), but I'll have a look at the code anyway. Unzipped it, realised it was for Win and Lin, looked for a "configure" script, couldn't find one, so just ran "make". All compiled without a single problem. Then went to the examples and compiled all those, again just with a make, everything ran OK. It seems pretty solid. I think this is going to be great.
I'm a gamer and that looks like ass. you'd have thought if the demo was capable of it, they'd have come up with something amazing to demonstrate the engine. It's impressive in what it is, an open source cross-platform engine. But it's certainly not competitive with proprietory engines.
Hi there, I was wondering if anybody knows how this engine compares with other OSS stuff like the CrystalSpace and particularly the VegaStrike engine. VegaStrike has the advantage of having a game already built using it. But I don't know anything about the interfaces of these toolkits and the capabilities such a bumpmapping and the like. I'd really like to hear from someone with the ability to compare the programming interfaces and features.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
"No, I cannot send you the code I am currently working on. "
It is open source; there is no CVS repository for code currently under development, but each release contains the source code for that release in source/source.zip.
Bravo for the effort, but free 3D rendering engines like Irrlicht should be considered nothing more than toys. It certainly isn't revolutionary.
(1) Their animation system absolutely sucks (animation is incredibly unsmooth, you'll be wanting to use the Cal3D animation engine instead).
(2) Their software renderer is broken (it draws garbage on screen in one of the tech. demos).
(3) There are a thousand corridor shooters and a hundred corridor shooter engines. And if I was to build a corridor shooter (assuming I wanted to use a 3rd-party engine), the engine had better have some damn good features to differentiate itself from the competition.
Besides, once you know what you're doing and what you want to do (ie: you've been programming for a while), a 3D engine is really not that difficult to build.
You still have to do programming if you use 3rd party engines, and in the long run you're going to be better off mastering the OpenGL API rather than the API of some non-standard 3D engine that nobody has heard of.
It is open source (under the zlib license I think) but there is no CVS access. The code you have access to and can do whatever you like with is released in snapshots because the guy does not want to field support questions about unstable code. The releases contains pretty stable code, but there is no nightlies - his choice. Still the code that he does release, you can do whatever you want with.
Spine World
The most important feature of a commecial game engine is the maturity of its game development tools, eg an editor, scripting system, and object management system.
If you don't have a solid development framework there's no way you can begin to make a successful game with it, because your artists can't begin to make real game content with it.
This code has to be mature because you don't it breaking whenever an artist or designer tries to create something awesome. Typically one of the major benefits you get when you license an engine is that you're not paying your artists and designers to be idle while your programmers get the tools into a state where real GAME development can actually occur.
Note that a development "tool" is a lot more than a "file format importer". You need somewhere to bring it all together to actually make some gameplay.
Some components of a game engine:
- Editor
- Scripting system
- Object management system
- Physics
- Networking
- AI framework
- Player input
- Renderer
A renderer - which is all this is - makes up less than 10% of a game engine's code. Without tools, you're never going to have anything more than some programmer-art type levels in a tech demo.
The only other reasonable option is the Torque3D engine.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
When your karma is so low that you post at -1, it's time to create a new account.
Here's the actual license, for those too lazy to follow the parent's link. It's very short, and allows you to do pretty much whatever you like with it:
-jim
3D games require a significant about of art assets. Don't waste your time starting out on making a game with this or any other 3D tech unless you have a solution to this problem.
"If PERL 6 and Parrot are able to get really mature in the next 6 months to a year"
perl6 won't even be beta within a year.
*cough* vapor *cough*
You cant use those features with the available code.
What you are saying is the typical vapourware talk.
Maybe there is even code for realtime radiosity in the cvs, it just doesnt work... Would you then also claim that the engine supports realtime radiosity?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
You only have to pay that fee if you want to sell your game. You can freely mod the game and distribute the mod. What you don't get if you go this route is the bulk of the documentation. There are some resources online and access to the game script source is free too.
-]Phreak Out[-
Parrot already has SDL bindings, and it should be relatively easy to add in anything that has a C API, thanks to NCI.
:)
As for maturing, well, I'd consider parrot to be of at least beta quality; it isn't stabilized yet, and many things are still subject to change, but on the other hand, it promises to be at least on par with (and in some cases substantially faster than) php, perl, ruby, and python as far as VM performance goes.
However, Perl 6 I'd consider to be alpha quality; more of its design is in flux, and although there is a proof-of-concept compiler for most of it, the real one has yet to be written. Although you may or may not see Parrot get mature in the next year, I doubt you'll see Perl 6 by that time as well--although I wouldn't mind being proven wrong here.
Modern games will always try to max out your CPU/GPU. That doesn't mean scripting languages don't have a place in games, but critical portions of them, or their libraries (like a 3D rendering engine, heh) will probably stay written in C/C++. However, there are already games written in scripting languages, and some of them are quite fun.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
For my game project we're considering using tv3d (http://truevision3d.com) which is actually cheaper than torque (it's $150 for a single project -- torque is about that price, but the price goes a lot higher if you start making serious money).
Does anyone have any thoughts about tv3d? Check out the features of the next version (new version), they look pretty nice for what I'm trying to do.
When they get to where they release 1.0, then it will be interesting. Until then, it is just another project that may or may not produce anything beneficial.
I hope they aren't like most OSS projects, which never have the backbone to release a version 1.0 for fear of being accountable for what they produced. Until then, it is version 0.99.999.99.9.999.99.999 (beta)
I have been following the releases of Irrlicht because I've been looking for a good 3D Engine that's easy to use. The only problem that I've found with the Irrlicht Engine is that things just don't look so good, and have a gritty look to them. I don't know what is the problem, but I haven't seen any "nice" renders of anything using Irrlicht yet. Nothing production quality, anyway.
...I am proof that intelligent beings are not always intelligent...
Not really. There are already several open-source 3D engines like OGRE and Crystal Space 3D.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
It's probably good to note that Irrlicht is entirely the work of one person. Considering that, it's pretty damned good, though not neccesarily at that "professional" level. I've done some little projects with it though, and its a pretty capable graphics engine.
I still wish people had the option to post -1 or 0 for those times when you want to say something, but you know it probably isn't worth some people's time to bother with reading... That, and it can also help protect karma when your idea totally bombs. (Unless of course a bunch of people mod you to +5 funny, then down to -1 over rated.)
Note to poster :)
First of all, I work in the REAL WORLD of games development.
That said, $250K is not cheap but it's not an exorbitant cost to license a full graphics engine and tool chain. That's the same order of magnitude cost as Criterion Renderware which many companies license (and is what we use at Midway Games for nearly all of our games including the upcoming Mortal Kombat 6). Of course, with Renderware you can license just the engine (without the tools like Renderware Studio / Physics) or the additional packages you like rather than everything and save some $$$.
You just have to put it in perspective that the engine license typically cost less than 2-3 Senior Engineers for a year. Plus most teams only have a couple really senior graphics guys and they tend to also be the senior system level guys as well. Do you want those guys stuck writing the graphics engine and supporting it for the whole game or do you want them making a better game?
Freshmeat is that you?
I hope they improved the renderer, as it used to have poor performance and poor visual quality.
In addition to some extensive examples or maybe even whole games that show the potential of a game engine, I think that we need a portable open source gameart format. It should contain for example the visibile/audible information, the basic physics and maybe the artificial intelligence of a gameobject. If done properly it could be portable between game engines and platforms.
With such an exchange format and a useful open art license there will be many freely available gameobjects of good quality. This would greatly simplify the development of good open source games.
Of cource a good modeler for that format that is acceptable for artists would help too.
Our current project uses OGRE (http://www.ogre3d.org). We evaluated Irrlicht, CrystalSpace and others, which are good, but you defintely want to take a look at OGRE.
OGRE doesn't try to be a game engine - just an Object-oriented Graphics Rendering Engine. It can be easily integrated with other libraries to create a complete game framework - ODE for physics is a quite popular choice.
OGRE itself focuses on a clean and well designed API, while other engines are just hacks over hacks. It also has a very knowledgeable community and a very involved project leader.
My website
dumbass.
"Powerful, customizeable and easy to use 2D GUI System with Buttons, Lists, Edit boxes,
2D drawing functions like alpha blending, color key based blitting, font drawing and mixing 3D with 2D graphics."
Irrlicht offers a GUI toolkit. How about a window manager, so we can finally have realtime 2D objects like documents, lists, pictures and component GUIs, in a 3D space (not just Z-buffered)? I'd love to be able to stack tabbed windows in bundles, and turn them on their side (rotating around the Y axis), using the spatial operations I use in my physical office to organize my virtual desktop.
--
make install -not war
You haven't seen many great engines before the art goes in. If you stuck the models he's using and the textures and the land into Unreal 2004, you'd still have something that looks like ass. Many Unreal 2kx mods do look pretty bad.
" I'm a gamer and that looks like ass. you'd have thought if the demo was capable of it, they'd have come up with something amazing to demonstrate the engine."
Who are they, white man? There's just the one guy. He's a programmer, not an artist. He's busy programming so he just has models and textures sufficient to test that various effects *work*. Often it's actually better if the test models are ugly because then it's more obvious how the shading effects are being applied.
If the coding is solid, if the API is good, if the speed is decent, and if relatively modern features are supported, the engine is fine. Let a team of artists at it and see what happens. Epic always does this when they put out tech screenshots, but that's because a) they already have an enormously talented team of artists on staff just waiting to do things like this and b) having a gorgeous set of shots gets them investor cash or developer licenses or whatever.
People have to stop abusing this term. There's nothing in that API that even qualifies it as soft-real-time. Real-time APIs have runtime estimation, deadline scheduling, and other things that have to do with managing time.
Not that I'd expect it to be real-time given it doesn't require any real-time OS features, and not that I know anything about whether game developers can use real-time features, just a pet peeve.
Someone had to do it.
could be written right on top.
however, game engines are a bit harder to create than 3d engines - it's like developing a programming language vs. creating an industry specific api.
the great thing here, though, is that the project's begun as os, so finding a team to do the game engine should be a natural evolution.
I almost forgot... One of the best features of OGRE is its awesome developer forum. Ogre has one of the most mature, professional, and helpful developer communities around.
Even though I'm not involved in all the collaborative projects, it is a breath of fresh air to see intelligent people working together to produce awesome features, like paging scene managers, modular game frameworks (making use of OpenAL, FMod, ODE, etc), and CrazyEddie's GUI, which may end up being one of the best performant and most feature-filled GUIs for any 3D environment. (Note: CEGUI won't just be for Ogre.)
Open source, used in a commercial game. Check it out:
http://www.radonlabs.de/nebula.html
..but how does raytraced Quake 3 grab you?
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
We allready have a nice open source engine with "state-of-the-art" features...
just have a look at http://www.tenebrae2.com/
i would guess its the best we have even though its based on quake1
i've worked with OSS engines for years.
check out ogre3d.org or nebuladevice.sf.net. wonderfully eay to develop for, and in my professional experience, easier that developing on the bones of our US$420,000 quake3 licensed engine.
bigcathead
Unfortunatly, it sounds as if this is incompatible with the GPL. I know it is a small sounding issue but the requirement that this notice cannot be removed or altered is an 'additional requirement' and disallowed by the GPL. It is just this sort of minor issue that is causing the problems between GPL and the...apache liscense (I think this is the right one).
If someone on the project is reading this may I suggest that the lisecensce be changed to add an additional clause. This additional clause would allow any liscensee the power to re-lisecence the source code under the GPL instead of this liscensce.
Sure, while it is *possible* this would cause a loss of attribution it is unlikely. A commercial project might have reasons to hide the origin of their code but a GPLed project has no motivation to lie and say their code didn't come from the community. Furthermore, it would be a big help to people trying to make GPLed games.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
So you actually need like artwork and graphics and stuff to make a game? Incredible! You'll be telling me I need sounds and tunes to make the soundtrack next. What about code, is that important too?
Stunning insights like this are the reason I read Slashdot.
They should put Carmack on the team
There are quite a few 3d engines out there. The biggest I guess are Crystal Space 3D, Genesis3D, OGRE, Toque (Tribes2), Quake and Quake II. Of course there are others to fill certin niches like Yeti or ExoEngine and libraries like DevLib and G3D for those who want to write their own engine, but don't feel like they need to implement yet another file loader. I'm not sure why 0.7 of Irrlicht was worth mentioning on /. as it is isn't clear what its roll is compared to those other engines.
I was at Siggraph 2004 and attended a round table on "how will you (game developers) feed next generation games". The problem is going from a Playstation1 to Playstation2 many developers found games now took roughly 2 to 3x the man years to create. But profits didn't really go up that much to compensate. This has happened every console generation and will happen again with the up coming generation. PC games don't have clear generations, but the same concept applies.
The main ideas were to reuse content. For example if you're making a Matrix game, get the 3d models from the movie instead of making your own and start from there. Or if you're making a port try to reuse as much as possible. Future games will have a lot of computer generated stuff which is artist guided instead of artist created so that one artist creates a forest instead of creating a bunch of leafs on a single tree.
A big surprise to me was open source wasn't mentioned until somebody asked. A company like id will implement something cool like unified lighting for all objects first, but a year later everybody has their own implementation of it. Every year has something like this that gets the anual lens flare award; colour lighting, ground clutter, normal mapping, rag doll physics, etc. Yawn. Every company spends all this time re-implementing the exact same technology. All developers can read the same papers from Siggraph, Eurographics, or GDC and then discuss them on the same mailing lists so there is plenty of open sharing happening already. So I was surprised to hear none of the guys at the round table thought open source would really be useful to help save them money in the future other than for rather basic things like zlib, lua, etc.
It sure would be nice to see some engines reach commercial quality to used in some good games instead of getting more and more re-implementations of the foundation, which /. apparently is finds interesting. Once it happens there will be a huge snow ball effect where it picks up a LOT of developer attention. Maybe in five years one of the existing engines will reach a level of maturity that it can start to be really used and then in another ten we'll see it catching on like GNU/Linux is now?
You don't pay $250,000 for the right to sell a mod to UT. What you get is the source code, free for you to do anything you want with it except sell it. This is far more flexible than UnrealScript could ever be.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
$250k is a pittance in terms of a modern game budget. No, it's not accessible to the average joe programmer. But to a project looking to drop $15+ million on a 3+ year project, if the engine provides what you need and has solid support, it's a no brainer.
You know you wrote all that and forgot the game engine in Blender.
More info at http://tenebrae2.com/ and pretties at http://tenebrae2.com/tb2_screenshots.html
/ 17584 that uses a new renderer with quake data files (not included).
For OSX, there's a game called tenebrae quake http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx
--
"Extra Anus Kills Four-Legged Chick" -- Headline
Ive been using irrlicht for nearly a year now, and it is definitely the easiest to use 3d engine i've ever worked with. I have also tried many versions of ogre, crystal space, neoengine, and even purple#. i love working with irrlicht, and as many have mentioned, what it needs most is a fully featured game engine built with it, so that precisely what i'm trying to do(in my limited free time....) many other people are doing this also, but there is some disagreement in the irrlicht community about whether to start adding features like sound, ai physics etc to irrlicht...or to keep it a pure 3d-only engine. anybody who likes irrlicht, should definitely contribute to irrlichtNX, because from 0.7 on, niko will be using CVS(prolly irrlichtNX's CVS) along with the rest of us. good things happening on the horizon for Irrlicht :-)
sometimes, i wonder if i'm the only conservative on teh intarweb. ah well, back to mah hogs and warmongerin'....
I think they need to change the name. A product which sounds like "ear-licked" doesn't sound like it will become too popular.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The name is nice for a 3D project, translated to English it means will-o'-the-wisp, but it's all explained in the FAQ, including a wave file to explain the pronounciation (although featuring an Austrian accent).
I tried the demonstation program. It runs at 75fps until the female runner and jumper are displayed, then it drops down to around 35. Curiously, the character meshes seem to be antialiased and run at 10fps, when the world is not antialiased and runs at about 30-40 FPS when the characters are displayed.
There are stencil buffer bugs when the shadows of the character meshes are hidden behind a partical effect such as the flames.
I would not call this engine "fast" from the demo. Sure, the flyby ran at 75fps but the world geometry was extremely simple, and I would have expected at least 70-100fps from that without vsync enabled. I can imagine that when character meshes and moving brushes are added this thing will crawl. I imagine this is because they strive for cross-platform portability on the processor side of things and thus (I'm guessing) there's no optimizations (MMX/SSE/SSE2 assembler etc) in the matrix transforms. Someone may want to correct me on that one since I havent looked at the source.
A good try, but Just Another 3D Engine for now.
i cant find a word about the java bindings on their site. did anyone find them? it would be interesting.
I've never seen Civ 3 really eat into my CPU cycles. I assume the same would be said for any game that doesn't involve 3D. Not all modern games involve 3D, most of the best ones don't. Unfortunatley, the most popular do.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.