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archive: Sauerbraten - new version released
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Sauerbraten is changing alot of things. We've all heard of 'in-game editing' but short of the proprietary and expensive Serious Engine, there hasn't been an engine allowing the user to so easily and rapidly switch from play to edit use contexts.
Sauerbraten makes this otherwise rarified technology accessible, for the first time. Furthermore, the engine is completely opensource and portable, now running on the Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms.
New features in this '2006_06_11' release include full screen shaders, new trigger system, a heightfield mode' for terrains, and improvements to the scripting interface. Cheers Wouter, and thanks yet again to fine folk at Linux Games for the pointer.
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tech: Sauerbraten - 6 Directional In-game Heightfield Modelling
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This looks promising. An experimental evolution of the Cube engine code base, Sauerbraten takes the unusual bi-directional extrusion-based in-game modelling paradigm several steps further; here the entire worldmesh is a 6 direction heightmap (a cube has 6 faces so you can imagine the possibilities). Looking at some of these screenshots it's no wonder Escher's universes come to mind.
I found Sauerbraten compiles easily under Linux with gcc-4.0, a simple 'make && make install' in the src directory. I just had to ensure I had the SDL 1,2 image and mixer headers in my path. Once done 'cd ../sauerbraten' and '../src/sauer_client'.
It's a brilliant project, and ideal for teaching, rapid prototyping situations; within seconds I was in an FPS map. I hit the EKEY and I'm editing it realtime. Great work and congrats to the developers.
Update 06.09.05
I forgot to add you need to ./configure && make in the enet/ directory (they provide the libs). Tak pix and Nils!
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questions, engines or suggestions mail julian at selectparks dot net
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Tenebrae2. This is an incredible project whose high quality renderer predates anything we saw of Doom3. When idsoftware released the quake source, the Tenebrae team grabbed it, rewrote it to include stencil shadowing and per-pixel (dynamic) lighting for Tenebrae1. Tenebrae2 improves on this, now using the Quake3 BSP format, meaning you can edit for the engine using the popular gtkradiant. Make sure you check out the screenshots..
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The Cube Engine. More of a Quake-like engine but with a strangely useful 'in-game' Level Editor (while the game is running you can edit the scene contents). Compiles on just about any OS due to the thankful use of open standards. Definitely the place to start for new developers wanting to get away from relying on their audiences having an existing proprietary engine installed to distribute their work. Good for projects already made for Quake engines, as these files can largely be 'recycled' into a Cube Engine project.
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NeL. Used to make the game Ryzom. This is the engine to choose if you are working on a massive multiplayer project. It is designed as a total solution for this genre of game. The art pipeline is a bit frustrating (you have to install Unix Tools on Windows to manage and manipulate a massive asset database) but it is very powerful and has a wonderful server architecture. chrs J
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Crystal Space Better suited for FPS than anything else but a mature project nonetheless. Has sound and physics in place ready to go.xx J
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The Nebula Device. Another Excellent Cross Platform Engine under flexible license. This engine has a very friendly scripting interface in TCL, but also supports Python. As is the case above, Nebula is primarily a realtime 3D engine, but is low level enough for you to be able to build unique projects around it's offerings. The scene management is easy and clean and the engine is extremely fast (we tested on Linux). The community is very active and Nebula has been used in several commercial games. Used to make the art game fijuu. We advise you use Nebula1(CVS version) while Nebula2 is being ironed out.
Thanks Julian :)
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Ogre3D Excellent Cross Platform 3D Engine under LGPL License. Features include: Skeletal animations, Blender, Maya, 3DSMAX export support, BumpMapping, CubeMapping, EnvMapping, Dynamic lighting and other sticky treats.. Ogre3D is Very fast, tested on Linux and OSX and compiled easily (at least for us). If you need physics and multiplayer functionality you'll need to find code elsewhere and tie it in.Thanks Julian!
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tech: Ogre3D gets massive upgrade
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Possibly the biggest changelog ever for the open-source Open Graphics Rendering Engine; tons of treats like OpenGL Shader Language support and a general renderer workover/optimisation.
For those of you with a bit of code up your sleeves wanting to develop a portable (Linux/OSX/Wintel..) and unique project, Ogre3D is a fine start.. Remember though, Ogre3D isn't a game engine, so much as a 3D engine especially designed for use in games. If nudged I may even write an artists tutorial (though my nebula tutes still need a happy ending.. oops).
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tech: Nebula 3D Engine Tutorial PT 3: Editing and Animation
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And here is the next Nebula tute in the series. Following this we'll look at using keyboard input to control scene elements and creating assets for Nebula (and other engines) using Blender.
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