Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Trying Crystal

No, Im not talking about Krystal Steal (I wish so), but about Crystal Space game engine. After delaying it some time, I decided to give it a try and have my own opinions.
Crystal Space is a full game engine with lots of features like sound, OpenGL based 3d rendering, networking python scripting... A totally self sufficient package, unlike Ogre, which is just a graphic rendering engine. I havent gone too deep on it, but I can confirm a few things I heard about it. First, it is a bit complex. Do not expect to get the basics in a couple of days. But hey, it is a big engine! There is a lot of topics to master.
The manual is very detailed, and seems to contain the best step by step tutorial I have found, more exactly, the only one I have found. I miss a wiki with more choices and more practical applications. So, as average, the documentation is not enough; when you start you need a lot of samples and they should be very accessible.
Do I recommend this engine? Yes, I do, if you have some experience with game programming. If not, go for Irrlicht, it is much easier. CS have CELstart, which is supposed to be a framework that lets you build a game just with xml and python. Sounds easy and nice.
So, after you finish playing with Unreal Engine, give it a try to Crystal.

Monday, November 9, 2009

OpenAL Soft 1.10.622 released

OpenAL Soft is an LGPL-licensed, cross-platform, software implementation of the OpenAL 3D audio API. It's built off of the open-sourced Windows version available originally from the SVN repository at openal.org.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

SDL_mixer 1.2.10

SDL_mixer 1.2.10 has been released. SDL_mixer is a sample multi-channel audio mixer library. It supports any number of simultaneously playing channels of 16 bit stereo audio, plus a single channel of music, mixed by the popular MikMod MOD, Timidity MIDI, Ogg Vorbis, and SMPEG MP3 libraries.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Free Unreal Development Kit

Nvidia announces the release of Unreal® Development Kit, the free version of the award-winning Unreal® Engine 3, the software development framework used to create computer and video games, 3D simulations, TV shows, films and more.
Of course, free for non-commercial projects. If you plan to earn money with your project, then check the licensing terms. Expensive, IMHO, but not as the elder brother used in almost every major title released in the last 2 years.

Nebula SDK nov 2009

There is a new SDK release for Nebula 3, an open source multiplatform engine created and maintained by Radon Labs. Nebula was used for Drakensang, a commercial title, and of course it is being used also for Drakensang 2.

Monday, November 2, 2009

OSLASH+3d engine

I had a long chat today with superoptimo (aka projectileman), author of OSLASH. As he told me before, OSLASH is just a base to build a 3D game engine with lots of interesting features, the most important from my point of view is that it is going to give simplicity and power. We mostly talked about the 3d engine features, which is still in very early stages.
Believe me, it is going to be awesome. Based on OpenGL and specifically optimized for it, using advanced rendering algorithms and including its own physics library. Later it is planned to add networking, scripting, sound, until completing a full featured game engine. OSLASH will make a next generation game development framework which aims to leave far behind the currently available choices (Ogre3d, CrystalSpace, Irrlicht).

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Unity Indie is now free

Im not a Unity fan myself (it is in the list of pending tasks), but I have heard good things about this engine. I read in Gamedev that it has a free version for indies now. Go get it!