{"id":117,"date":"2006-03-15T00:23:59","date_gmt":"2006-03-15T05:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bitpost.com\/news\/2006\/03\/15\/gawking-at-gaming-goodies\/"},"modified":"2007-04-20T22:10:29","modified_gmt":"2007-04-21T03:10:29","slug":"talk-is-cheap-but-its-better-than-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitpost.com\/news\/2006\/talk-is-cheap-but-its-better-than-nothing\/","title":{"rendered":"Gawking at Gaming Goodies"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been poking around at the edge of 3D game development for a long time. The engines I have run across are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Descent ][
    \nThis engine was released a thousand years ago and I kicked its tires a little bit. There’ve also been all those Doom\/Quake engine releases. But there’s so much newer stuff. Let’s move on…<\/li>\n
  2. Torque Engine
    \nI noodle around on the garage games site<\/a> on occasion, playing with the idea of getting the Torque engine. I was always a Tribes fan and access to the engine always seemed like a good idea. Sounds like they’ve been working on it some.<\/li>\n
  3. Unreal Engine
    \nYou’re not going to license this for a stand-alone game anytime soon, without selling your house, but there are great tools to help you create a mod that can run on top of an Unreal Tournament installation, which is just about as good. If nothing else you can get a feel for the quality of a top-shelf professional product. And you can get the job done quickly since just about EVERYTHING you need is already available. One problem: 2004 (available, lots of mileage) or 2007 (not even out yet)? Also, Half-life has a similar toolset available.<\/li>\n
  4. SDL
    \nIn my last post, I mentioned my friend John’s 2D space shooter,     Terminus Est<\/a>. He’s using SDL<\/a>, which handles a lot of gaming issues (sound, inputs, etc). This isn’t an engine, but you can gain low-level access to 3D hardware through OpenGL.<\/li>\n
  5. Ogre
    \nI recently stumbled upon Ogre, an open source graphics engine that looks like a whole case of whoopass.     This demo<\/a> from “Game Academy” students has me crying on my knees like a little schoolgirl.<\/li>\n
  6. IOQuake3
    \n(From John, thanks!)     Here<\/a> is an OSS 3D-engine based on the Quake 3 engine. Are you ready to make a cross-platform FPS? -J<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Then there’s all the modelling tools to play with… UnrealEd, Maya PLE, Modo, blender, oFusion, etc… and which work best with what engine, as far as meshes, scripting, shaders, etc…<\/p>\n

    Focus, grasshoppa. The only way for me to get anywhere with any of this is to set up a specific small goal and try to steal time to work on it. John says I should port his game to linux, sounds like that should fit the bill. After that, perhaps I can weld in Ogre into SDL<\/a>. And there is always Unreal modding to temp me with a quicker route to 3D nirvana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I’ve been poking around at the edge of 3D game development for a long time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,4,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming","category-projects","category-chatter"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t