Advanced Open Source Engine Based On Quake 3

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix is running a news story about the XreaL project, which its lead developer claims is the most advanced open-source game engine. XreaL is based upon the vintage Quake 3 engine, but it has been rewritten over the course of many months such that it no longer resembles the original id Software engine. The XreaL engine has its renderer written entirely in GLSL with compliance toward the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification in mind, but it supports the new OpenGL 3.0/3.1 specification and is able to take advantage of its new features. XreaL has also added an HDR pipeline to its engine and on modern hardware is actually GPU — not CPU — bottlenecked. XreaL can also load game content from Unreal Tournament 3. This engine, which is described to be as powerful as what can be found in Doom 3 or Call of Duty 4, is written entirely with free software. The XreaL project has created plug-ins for Maya to broaden their game development capabilities."

Comments

Re:Humility would be a virtue

[Opportunist]

"basics such as dynamic shadows"

That's basics? Wow, times change fast these days, even I can remember the time when "dynamic shadows" weren't basics but rather bleeding edge, something you'd need a killer machine for to pull off at all. Maybe 'cause it ain't been a year ago or so.

You know what "basics" too many games lack these days? An interesting concept, some originality, replay value and generally something that makes me want to play them. If you can put that in a game, you can keep your eye candy. Eye candy is like new car smell. Yeah, it's nice, but it wears off too quickly and after it's gone, you only get to see that you have, essentially, the same crappy game that you didn't want to play a year earlier already.

If this means we have now a good FOSS engine at our hands that allows the development of games without first forking over six digit sums and thus being pressured to deliver something "mainstream digestable" (read: uninspired copy of something that sold well), we might get to see a few daring new ideas.