Simple Open Source 3D Game Engines?

Zenitram asks: "I'm trying to find a good open source/free, 3D first/third-person game engines. I can write basic scripts and make basic programs in various programming languages, but when it comes to making 3D worlds I do not have the skill set. Most of the Open Source programs I've found are not for beginners. I've found some pretty good commercial programs, however the game I am making has no chance of ever making a profit. As such I don't really want to invest money on a personal project. Any advice?"

Comments

skillset

[Forrest Kyle]

My advice is that you get the skillset. It sounds like you want something for nothing. Any skill requires some sort of investment, either financial or personal. You can decide which investment you'd rather make.

Re:skillset

[heinousjay]

Coding is not an easy skill in general, and some branches are harder than normal. You obtain the skill by reading about it, thinking about it, and practicing it. There's really no shortcut you can take to become a 3D graphics guru.

This is akin to saying that the NFL doesn't make it easy for high school players to get drafted.

Re:skillset

[hackwrench]

Um, could you at least provide a dewey decimal number or something?

No, it's more like saying the minor leagues doesn't make it easy... no, not quite, more like saying once you're out of HS there's really not much infrastructure for learning any given sport.

Re:skillset

[theVicar]

After seeing people from that background follow the same advice given them by more advanced programmers, I can say from experience that this is usually bad advice.

Unless the person's real interest is in learning about culling algorithms with the eventual goal of improving on them or inventing new ones, please don't tell them to write a 3D engine from scratch and then sometime later start looking up things on how to implement their own culling algorithms from scratch. For them it would be a waste of time, unless they are more interested in 3D game engine architecture than in getting their game design idea up and running, which is clearly not the case. The fact that John Carmack says all this stuff is fun and easy might not be the best argument...

Like someone else said, it's not surprising that there aren't a lot of good choices of cheap/free 3D game engines that are well-designed and easy to use. It's a huge design and engineering task to create something like that. Try Blender, Torque, Unity(if you have a Mac), Panda3D, Alice, Yake, maybe do a tutorial in each to see if any of them will do what you need. If none of those work out, maybe try a 3D rendering engine like Ogre or Irrlicht together with other libraries for physics or whatever - this will require being comfortable in C++ though.

I will say that it's probably going to be worth it to take a course / get a book on C++, whatever you do - it will allow you access to a wider range of tools, and also the ability to figure out how something works (if it's well-designed) by reading the source code when the documentation isn't cutting it. Also, if what you're mainly doing is using a single high-level game engine with a C++ API, a lot of what you'll be doing with C++ will be much like scripting anyway.

Re:skillset

[MaestroSartori]

No. Wrong wrong wrong. Wrong! Assuming the guy wants to learn about game programming rather than 3D engine programming, that is... ;)

See, most people who work in the games industry don't write 3D engines. And the ones that do often don't get to actually work on games, they get shunted off into R&D or game support roles. The rest of us write other systems, like AI or physics or GUI/HUD or cameras, or any number of other things. Or we implement gameplay stuff using all of the above systems (that's what I do, yay me!) :D

For some reason though, the graphics programming aspect has glamour. Maybe it's just the easiest one to see a result from, I dunno. But whatever the reason is, you can virtually guarantee that unless you're a really outstanding graphics programmer, you'll be doing something else a most of the time.

And if the op is doing this solely as a hobby project, I'd offer my opinion that working on some of these other areas of a game is more accessible, and more fun, than doing graphics stuff. Just writing graphics code won't really result in a playable game, whereas writing some basic AI gets you into the realm of simple games of many kinds. But at the end of the day, if he or she ss asking for a graphics engine, I guess graphics isn't really what they want to work on :)

Ogre and friends

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're willing to spend the time learning C++, using Ogre is very rewarding in terms of what you can accomplish with (fairly) little code. Ogre only handles (3d) graphics though and even though there are additional bindings for tying into 3rd party GUI/physics libraries, you'll be handling the bulk of integration yourself.

Of course, there's also Yake, which is more aimed at being a complete game development framework.

If you're not interested in building a game from scratch, have you looked into implementing your game as a mod for some already existing game?

Pick two...

[NevarMore]

Simple, Open Source, 3D Game Engine

You get any two.

Mod mod mod

[sd.fhasldff]

"If you're not interested in building a game from scratch, have you looked into implementing your game as a mod for some already existing game?"

Mod parent up for suggesting a mod.

Seriously.

Unless you have VERY specific requirements for your game, you should be able to get quite far by creating a mod for an existing game. Now, that could either be a close sourced game or an open sourced game, that's entirely up to you.

Since you stated that your game is never going to make any money anyway, going with a commercial, open source game seems viable. This opens up the possibilities even further. Depending on the type of game you had in mind, Quake3 and Descent2 are both mod'able and both have their source code freely available.

If you don't want to use a commercial open source game, you could use one of the many "free" open source game (feel free to insert the obligatory speech and beer comments here), e.g. Vegastrike ( http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/ ).

All that said, you don't NEED the source if you can keep it 100% in the mod realm - and people have done some amazing things with mods!

A bit of a contradiction

[Yst]

"I'm trying to find a good open source/free, 3D first/third-person game engines. I can write basic scripts and make basic programs in various programming languages, but when it comes to making 3D worlds I do not have the skill set.

So let me get this straight: you're looking for an engine which allows you to build something you readily admit you are unable to build?

This is rather baffling. It seems like your skillset (scripting, basic coding, no modelling or worldcraft) would strongly recommend itself to modding or storytelling within existing commercial engines where there's a huge base of art, maps, models and media inherently available, which let you do the scripting and writing with little compulsory art design. If you want to do something FPS style, why not Source? If you want to do something RPG style, why not NWN2 when it comes out, or NWN now? As nice as it would be to have an open source alternative, a high quality open source game SDK with all the functionality of the more comprehensive commercial equivalents (with the various fan-made tools which have been created to complement them) simply does not exist.

Re:A bit of a contradiction

[Jack9]

So let me get this straight: you're looking for an engine which allows you to build something you readily admit you are unable to build?

This is rather baffling.

There's nothing out of the ordinary about a person admitting that they are not very familiar with how to properly implement a very complicated system. Looking for a packaged suite is quite typical.

While you may be competent enough to write an inventory control system, that doesn't mean you are confident or even interested in discovering, coding, and implmenting the features that stock managers would consider "basic"...especially with the wide variation from industry to industry (discovery!).

This should help relieve your baffle.