37637598 on 7/8/2009 at 01:38
My brother and I have been making 3d games for years now, but we've been very graphically limited. We have always used 3D Game Studio's engine to compile our games, but it's not very 'up-to-date', and there's not a lot we can do to help that. I've also looked at other engines such as Torque, Ogre, and Blender/ Python, and I can't say I'm extremely impressed with any of them. They all have things that the others lack, but I'm looking to get everything in one package.
Blender - The graphical capabilities are amazing, but the way the engine handles the graphics creates an off-balance of one of the following:
• Horribly slow framerate with good graphics and no physics
• High framerate at low resolution, bad graphics, and okay physics
• Medium framerate with PS2 graphics (bad) and physics
This seems to be the case with the other engines as well. Unreal's engine would obviously be ideal, but I don't have $350,000 to fork out for a license.
Any tips? Discuss.
Renzatic on 7/8/2009 at 02:01
To throw out an obvious suggestion, any of the Quake engines and their open source derivatives might do you alright. There are a couple of Q3 ports out there that match, and even surpass, Doom 3's engine capabilities.
demagogue on 7/8/2009 at 02:04
Or for that matter the Doom 3 engine. It will go open source soon enough.
Tonamel on 7/8/2009 at 02:05
(
http://www.panda3d.org/) Panda3D is fully supported by Carnegie Mellon, and it's been used in successfully released commercial games. It's definitely better than Ogre, but using it might depend on how much you like to code with C++/Python
Renzatic on 7/8/2009 at 02:12
Yeah, Doom 3 would be a good choice, too. It's incredibly flexible and a joy to work with once you get used to it. The only thing you don't have access to (at the moment) is the core rendering engine.
For a good Q3 source port, check out (
http://xreal-project.net/) Xreal. I don't know how well it runs in comparison to the other ports, but it has the most impressive graphical updates of the bunch. It can even display D3/Q4 assets properly.
37637598 on 8/8/2009 at 00:26
All great suggestions! I was looking online at some specifically physics, cloth, and animation engines/ plugins, and I'm wondering if any of the suggested game engines are compatable with 3rd party DirectX plugins, such as these... I'll have to do some searching. I'm not too opposed to making my own physics scripts, but they could never be as good or fast as the Havok ones, because they would have to be rendered by the game engine I choose.
Qooper on 8/8/2009 at 13:14
Quote Posted by Tonamel
(
http://www.panda3d.org/) Panda3D is fully supported by Carnegie Mellon, and it's been used in successfully released commercial games. It's definitely better than Ogre, but using it might depend on how much you like to code with C++/Python
I've been developing a game logic engine for quite some time now, using Panda3D for rendering and ODE for physics. I consider Panda3D one of the most accessible and developer-friendly engines out there (two lines of code and you have a window, six lines of code and you have a hello world, i.e. a 3D scene fully rendered with camera movement). However, I'd have to say Ogre3D does have its advantages over Panda3D. Could you specify what you mean when you say Panda3D is better than Ogre3D?
Tonamel on 8/8/2009 at 19:18
Our programmers weren't tearing their hair out in frustration every five minutes.
Albert on 8/8/2009 at 20:20
If your talking free, non-commercial games, I think the DarkPlaces engine looks pretty good for a heavily modified version of the original Quake engine...
... As for free and being able to sell what you make, well, um... what everyone else is saying! I... er, guess.
Volitions Advocate on 8/8/2009 at 20:31
you could certainly try sauerbraten. Very powerful editor. I've heard good and bad things about it. at least its fully functional and comes with a game to try it out on.
(
www.sauerbraten.org)
