Other engines

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

I will be making my own rendering engine soon enough.  However there are a lot of good 3D engines available that could easily be ported to Aurora.  Post any you know about here.

I'll start:

http://www.jet3d.com/

Jet is now free to use as long as you display their logo on startup. 

[Shannara]

http://www.ogre3d.org/

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

Never used Ogre myself.  Is it any good?

[Bruce Peaslee]

C:\WINDOWS\system32\PAINT.EXEÂÃ,  ÂÃ, 

[Shannara]

I really cant speak for the engine itself. As I attempt to use it from the PureBasic wrappings. That in itself is not really possible. So I really cant speak on how good or bad Ogre3D is ...

http://www.garagegames.com  <-- Torque, not worth the time, the lead dev has some issues ...
http://www.revolution3d.net/ <- Open Source thief (at least in the beginning), stole code from the following engine:
http://www.truevision3d.com/ <- These peeps are joke Promised things, never delivered, attempt to ban their previous open source engine I still have a copy if you want, it's in VB ...
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/index.html <- Havent heard much concerning these guys ..
http://www.crystalspace3d.org/ <- This has been around for awhile. Haven't made it past the 18th century yet
http://www.exocortex.org/3dengine/ <- It's in C#, enough said ...
http://www.aztica.com/
http://www.3dstate.com/
http://www.3impact.com/
http://www.terathon.com/c4engine/index.html <- This one is starting to get popular ..
http://www.powerrender.com/ <- I think my grandma can use this engine ....
http://www.artificialstudios.com/ <- I reject your reality, and replace it with my own.

[Parker]

Hey, Irrlicht is now at version 1.0 When C and C++ compatibility is achieved, someone could make a wrapper for that.

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

You can make a wrapper for it now. 

[Steven Picard]

Paul,

Rather than making your own rendering engine why don't you just include support for Ogre (licensing isn't bad and is cross-platform) or Irrlicht which has a very liberal license? This will free you up to focus on other things in the language.  In fact, the Irrlicht SDK comes with the source code so that might be the best option.  Irrlicht  can use Open GL or Direct X and also has a Mac version (and I'm sure with the source code you could make an Open GL Linux version down the road.)

-Steven

EDITED TO ADD:  There's already a Linux version of Irrlicht.

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

Well for one I kind of enjoy it when I am in the mood .  I had a lot of fun getting the terrain generator working for the IBasic engine. 

And I think we need more than one option anyway.

[Steven Picard]

What about including it for now?

Your call but it'd be nice to see some nice networking and sound\music implementation in Aurora as well.

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

Including what?  The engine from IBasic?

[Rock Ridge Farm (Larry)]

I like Paul's "from scratch" approach.
It does not add cost to Aurora and since he is doing the work we
will have the source code available. 

[Steven Picard]

Including what?ÂÃ,  The engine from IBasic?

Sorry, I wasn't clear.ÂÃ,  I meant the Irrlicht engine.ÂÃ,  It's cross platform and includes the source.ÂÃ,  Its license is completely free and they state that it would be nice if you make mention that you are using their engine if you use it, but it is not mandatory.ÂÃ,  That's a pretty liberal license.

It's just a suggestion.  I also thought that if you liked the math involved perhaps you could extend it down the road with good physics (very lacking in most 3D engine with the execption of 3D Impact.)

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

I will be looking at all engines of course   That is why I started the thread.

[Barney]

We already have the wrapper for 3impact engine (made by zumwlat) and it works pretty well.
Jet3D looks nice, too.
Then, there's Panda3D, which looks rather promising.

A rather good place to check on almost everything that's available today is DevMaster's 3D Engines database. Very useful.

However, as I said before, Paul's 3D engine will probably be the best of the lot for Aurora and definitely the one we can all learn from.

Barney

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

Thanks Barney

[Rock Ridge Farm (Larry)]

I only wish I was young enough to understand all this stuff. It takes me 3 times as long to learn half as much.
I am looking forward to playing with the 3D stuff as soon as I learn how 2D works.
It will be a nice feature for Aurora, this is becoming a very useful tool.

[Steven Picard]

We already have the wrapper for 3impact engine (made by zumwlat) and it works pretty well.

3DImpact looks like a very nice 3D engine and I wish I could use it but it costs a lot of money, esp. when there are nice freeware 3D engines available. (Just a note: It costs a lot of money for someone who wants to play around with it for, perhaps, shareware or freeware apps, but not necessarily for professional game makers.)

[J B Wood (Zumwalt)]

Actually, 3Impact is cheap in comparison. Its $100 for full license, unlimited. Thats the cost of 2 video games, or 1 decent xbox game. Its all a matter of perspective. I purchased this for $40, pluss I paid the $20 for the code piece, which haven't figured out where to put it to date. (call me lazy)

I learned in under 3 days how to write a wrapper to allow other engines to be used with Aurora. So, as long as the 3d engine in question has a DLL version of itself, AND you know the entry points to all functions (like I knew with 3Impact), you can write a wrapper for the engine to use it with Aurora, I want an opengl version for 3d with Linux, lately I have been hammering on SuSE 10.0 and BlitzMax along with Torque Game Builder. Its becoming more appealing to me to be able to write games that work on Linux and PC, what BlitzMax gives me is the 3 platform level for Mac also!

Man have I wasted to much money on all of this for 1 game. I am drooling over wanting the Linux version so bad, don't care how buggy it is. I just want to start to use it to learn on it.

Bottom line seems to be, and I am slowly learning this in general, if you have the C code for any 3d engine, you can write a cdecl export of all functions yourself if you take the time to do it, and with either a cdecl or stdcall you can use it with Aurora.

Give me a 3d engine that supports stdcall or cdecl and has standard inputs / outputs (no funky crap), and I can produce a wrapper for Aurora.

[kryton9]

I don't know if this would be considered an engine, I would though. If I bought this could I write programs in Aurora using it?

http://darkgamesdk.thegamecreators.com/
a cool comparison of improvements in speed:
http://darkgamesdk.thegamecreators.com/?f=darksdkvsdbpro

They are going to soon have a physics that can use the new hardware cards coming out and they also already have an ai system out.

ai:
http://darkbasicpro.thegamecreators.com/?f=dark_ai

physics:
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=78284&b=1

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

No. It is a competiting language with a completely wierd syntax

[kryton9]

Paul I was asking about the SDK which is written for c++, not darkbasic pro itself. Unless you meant no to that. Thanks.

[J B Wood (Zumwalt)]

Well, there is something interesting, the answer is technically yes, you can with the sdk.
Although I can't find myself spending 60$ for an incomplete product from that company.
All you need to do, is know the methods and procedures, then you just instansiate the engine.

[Parker]

Not necessarily, while it doesn't use OOP, to make C libraries work with Aurora isn't all that user friendly right now, though for missing symbols you could create a "fake" one - say it complains about _GetLastError@0:

Code Select Expand

#emit _GetLastError@0: jmp GetLastError
should fix it, but there could be a whole ton of those...

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

Actually it is just the underscore.  The linker knows how to deal with C references to parameters, always has.