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

Alice

[Anonymous Coward]

You can try: http://www.alice.org/

Re:Alice

[Anonymous Coward]

Piggy backing on something visible, here's a summary of some of the shorter suggestion posts:

• http://www.alice.org/
• http://www.ogre3d.org/
• http://www.yake.org/
• http://www.delta3d.org/
• http://www.panda3d.org/
• http://www.idsoftware.com/business/techdownloads/
• http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/
• http://www.garagegames.com/products/1

And personally I think http://sauerbraten.org/ looks interesting, but I've never used it.

Re:Alice

[mcasaday]

Oh fer cryin' out loud. That site hasn't been updated in over six years. Use the 3D Engines Database instead.

Ogre 3d

[Andyman1134]

Ogre is a great 3d graphics library, and cross platform.. Unfortunately it is not (nor will be) a complete gaming library. What I recommend is that you learn the c++ skills (which will serve you well) and use Ogre. Then you can make great games without having to learn the math involved (which is a lot) and the graphics rendering (which even with a masters in math I still think is a nightmare.)

Re:Ogre 3d

[Anonymous Coward]

I second this. I started using Ogre3D a couple of days ago, I've been using the Python bindings and PyODE (Python bindings for the ode phyics engine). In the space of one day I'd consturcted a simple third person demo, using the demo-media that comes with Ogre. I'm in the process of learning how to use Blender to make my own models. But my experience with Ogre has been great - documentation, source and loads of examples. That being said I'd already written a 3D engine in C++ for a project at college, Ogres list of features tempted me away from hard work.^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H writing my own engine.

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?

Torque

[Beowulf_Boy]

For 100$ you can get torque. It was the best investment I ever made.
I'm a gaming and simulation major at college, and I needed something for my senior project. I still have a year left before I have to start on it, but I decided to get a jump start.

99% of things you want to do can be done with the scripting langauge in torque, which in my opinion is very C like. Milkshape will let you export your models to .DTS format which is what torque uses, and you can do all of your mapping with Valve's Hammer Editor, which is a very nice editor.

I'm working on a project with 2 friends, ones a character modeler, ones a mapper, and I'm the progamming guy to put it all together. most of what I want to do has already been done before, so all I have to do is look on the torque forums to find step by step directions on how to do everything from adding flashlights, adding vehicles, night visions, or anything else I could possibly want.

And, if you buy the upgraded lighting pack for 50$, the torque engine looks very pretty.

Quake engines

[layernheart]

Quake 1-3's engines have been GPL'd. You can find them on ID's ftp server. If you're looking for the best available free engine I think Q3's would be near the top of the list.

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:skillset

[TerranFury]

I agree wholeheartedly with the parent. This is a hobby project, right? The point is to have fun, and to learn something? In that case, I think you'll have more fun if you don't start with a premade "game engine."

Start from scratch. It sounds intimidating, but that's just because you haven't tried it: You will be amazed at what you can do.

You don't need to spend any money. Compilers are freely-available. Between that, the web as a reference, and your own intelligence and creativity, that's all you need!

Do you know a programming language? If not: You say you can write scripts. If you can learn to write scripts, you can learn to write code. If you need to choose a language, I'd recommend C++ or Java; C++ is probably the most commonly-used language in game development. This site was an important reference for me when I was getting started. Go through all the tutorials. Don't rush to get out of the console: It's a great place to focus on your logic and your algorithms without worrying about interfacing with graphics APIs. It's where you learn how to think about programming.

Then, graphics! I'd suggest you start with some OpenGL programming. That's for a number of reasons. It's not just that OpenGL code is widely portable: Compared to Direct3D code, it's a breeze to write. Carmack himself wrote a piece about how OpenGL programming is a straightforward, enjoyable experience.

Where to start? Try NeHe's tutorials, and its parent site, gamedev.net. That's how I started writing OpenGL code, and I had a lot of fun doing it.

Then, think about what sorts of worlds you want to represent. Landscapes? Indoors? Look up the relevant algorithms and data structures. You care about spatial partitioning schemes, occlusion culling, and LOD. This is where it starts to get advanced. Here, you'll learn more than just to code; you'll learn some actual Computer Science.

You don't need to worry about this now, but when you get to the point where you're ready for it, there's stuff you can google. Spatial partitioning: BSP (older algorithm, computationally beautiful, generally used for indoors), Octtrees (more modern approach, conceptually simpler, lets you efficiently throw stuff at the graphics card), Quadtrees (variant for outdoor environments where the map extends mainly in two dimensions), K-D trees (special case of BSP which behaves more like Oct or Quad-trees). LOD: For outdoor scenes in particular: ROAM, geomipmapping. Occlusion culling and visibility: Portals, precomputed PVS, image-space techniques with occluders.

Just explore, experiment, and have fun. You'll learn a lot.

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 :)