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Open source 3D engine from Slashdot article
Posted: Sat Sep 18, 2004 7:23 pm
by Aquitaine
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/features.html
Not sure if it's right for us, but it might be worth looking in to.
Posted: Sat Sep 18, 2004 9:15 pm
by leiavoia
I've had my eye on this one for almost a year now. I don't know what it would have to offer, but it's a 3D engine and the big question would be whether or not you could couple it with the current rendering setup. Some engines do everything from creating a window to the game loop itself. They are so monolithic, it's hard to customize for a project like this.
Posted: Sat Sep 18, 2004 10:59 pm
by Aquitaine
I'd put my eye on it but I only have the one. :-/
Posted: Sun Sep 19, 2004 5:53 am
by Tyreth
The license might be a problem if we need to mix code, since it is under zlib and FreeOrion is under GPL.
Posted: Sun Sep 19, 2004 12:53 pm
by Yoghurt
The zlib License is compatible with GPL.
(And if it wouldn't we already've had a problem as we're using zlib itself!)
The engine looks nice so far, BTW. But I miss Python wrappers
Edit: WTF? I get more FPS using the Software Renderer instead of OpenGL...
Posted: Sun Sep 19, 2004 1:35 pm
by Tyreth
Ok, I didn't realise about it being compatible
Zach was considering another engine that was minimalistic for FreeOrion. I can't recall what it was though. This seems to come up as a topic every now and then, but I can't find any references to what it was.
Posted: Sun Sep 19, 2004 1:57 pm
by Yoghurt
I think it was
http://www.vrs3d.org ; the template-overkill
Posted: Sun Sep 19, 2004 5:33 pm
by miu
hmm, neither of them has normal/bumpmapping (As ogre does), which is kind of requirement to be called next-generation engine. When 1.0 comes out, all of commercial games will have it and I want freeorion to be comparable. I can live without it as close zoom isnt so often used in space-battles, but that certainly would be a fantastic feature to have graphic-wise. Other than that, those engines look ok, I follow curiously how the will develop.
Posted: Sun Sep 19, 2004 11:58 pm
by Tyreth
What ever we use, we should be able to add bump mapping in ourselves.
Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 11:55 am
by pd
as mentioned by miu, normal mapping would be even more interesting than bump mapping. here is a short explanation what it is:
Ben Cloward wrote:In the last 10 years or so we’ve seen lots of video games released that use low poly count models for the game play and then tell the story using pre-rendered cinematic sequences. The characters in the cinematics always look really nice with lots of detail and realism, but as soon as the game play starts again, the model is back to being low poly and very chunky looking. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could make your 1500 poly real-time model look like your 2 million poly cinematic (software rendered) model? That is the main goal of using normal maps. The idea is that you take all of the detail from the high poly model and put it in a normal map. Then you apply the normal map to the low res model just like you would add a texture map. Now you have a low res model that looks a lot like the high res one. It’s not perfect, but it’s a pretty good trick that makes low res models look A LOT better than they have before.
found here
the technology itself isn't that new, but in these days game engines actually started to use it. some of you might have seen those unreal 3 engine demo video. if not, take a look at
this and scroll down to 'Distributed Computing Normal Map Generation Tool'.
in one sentence, what normal maps do is simulating a highly detailed mesh on a low poly mesh, without raising the poly count.
Posted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 10:29 am
by Asraniel
whats about crystal space?
Homeworld Engine
Posted: Sat Oct 30, 2004 11:40 am
by ildoge25
Relic has recently released the code for Homeworld, and there is an open source project to port it
http://www.machomeworld.com/
Can´t FreeOrion adapt this code for the 3D engine? Space combat in Homeworld is fantastically portraited...
Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2005 11:26 pm
by Dreamer
Asraniel wrote:whats about crystal space?
I used crystal space about a year ago both in Windows and Linux and worked quite well. Should be a good idea to take a new look since the renderer was being rewritten.
Posted: Tue Apr 26, 2005 11:44 am
by Yoghurt
It is more or less decided that we will use VRS (
http://www.vrs3d.org), I want to take a new look at OGRE, though, as the engine seems the most promising; but, alas, it probably is totally incompatible with GiGi and SDL.
But I will look at CS, too. If you find other potential engines, feel free to post here.
Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 10:12 pm
by charlieg
Well there's plenty of choice in the 3D engine department.
OGRE and
Crystal Space are two of the high profile ones.