Game Developers

Although you could think that, with the amount of game engines already available, most people would avoid the effort of trying to implement a new game engine from ground 0.

Most of you out there, that have been developing indie games, already know  the Newton physics Engine, a very well implemented game engine, that was being used by several developers to manage the physics simulation in their games.

From their home page, you can read that the description of the engine is as follows:

“Newton Game Dynamics is an Open-source zlib-licensed integrated solution for real time simulation of physics environments.

The API provides scene management, collision detection, dynamic behavior and yet it is small, fast, stable and easy to use.

Our engine implements a deterministic solver, which is not based on traditional LCP or iterative methods, but possesses the stability and speed of both respectively. This feature makes our product a tool not only for games, but also for any real-time physics simulation.
You can integrate Newton Game Dynamics into your projects with ease. With our technology you only need to know basic physics principles to produce realistic physics behavior. Tuning time is reduced to a minimum because you don’t need to wrestle the targeted hardware nor set up esoteric parameters to get the correct timing for your simulation.”

Their license was not fully open source, and now they have moved it to the zlib licensing mode.  The zlib License has been approved by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) as a free software licence,   and by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as an open source license. It is compatible with the GNU General Public License.  For the developers the implication is:

• Software is used on ‘as-is’ basis. Authors are not liable for any damages arising from its use.
• The distribution of a modified version of the software is subject to the following restrictions:
  1. The authorship of the original software must not be misrepresented,
  2. Altered source versions must not be misrepresented as being the original software, and
  3. The license notice must not be removed from source distributions.

The license does not require source code to be made available if distributing binary code.

More information at http://www.game-developers.org

 

KGE (Kochol Game Engine) has reach its 0.0.6 version with new features added to the engine like: tile terrain, physics, particle systems, shadow maps, … 
This version has more than 1180 KB of source code. 
The authors of the engine have added tutorials and  an API document  but the engine is still lacking most of the documentation that would make it more developer friendly.

Watching the screenshots and the other materials released in their homesite, there is no doubt that the progress is  interesting, but the engine is still a couple of versions before being appliable to a developement.

Some of the features of the engine are:

• Object-Oriented Design
• Easy to use and flexible
• Dynamic lighting
• Projected planar shadows
• Shadow mapping
• Multitexturing
• Shader 3 support in ASM, HLSL and GLSL
• MS3D mesh, Skeletal animation
• Refraction, Reflection
• Render To Texture with Anti aliasing
• Multi Rendering Targets (MRT)
• Tile based terrain
• Fog
• Particle systems
• Basic GUI
• 3D sound with OpenAL
• Rigid body physics
• Physics dynamics
• Collision Detection
• Triggers
• Joints

 

The engine can be found at http://kge3d.org

More information at http://game-developers.org

According to a news story published at gamesindustry.biz, Epic Games has decided to lower the fees for indy projects made with their free version of the award-winning Unreal 3, UDK. Previously to this measure,  any project that generated revenues above 5 000 $ was to pay to Epic a 25%  of the game revenues. With the new pricing, the threshold is raised to 50 000$, but in turn you have now to pay a 99$ fee to be able to start working in this new mode with Epic.

It is a great step from Epic, in line with the ones that they have been given during the last years, and that has generated a vast community of developers (and wannabe developers) using their powerfull toolset to develop their products. What is the real cause behing these actions? I think that basically assuring a large community of Unreal 3 development, which will make more easy for studios to find Unreal 3 aware professionals and consecuently by the Unreal 3 licenses, which has been drastically reduced over the last years, as they were times were a license for the Unreal engine would cost  above 1 M$ plus a share of the game revenues.

New times forces to new solutions, and Epic has certainly be very aware of what is going around in the 3D technology scene, that there are new competitors in town that could be a future thread like Unity.

More at Game-Developers.Org

There is a  new version  of the free open-source, cross-platform 3D  framework PixelLight , which includes also the new version of the  plugin SPARK_PL integrating the free open source particle engine SPARK, and includes new demos, one of them shows how picking works. .  From the project webpage:

 

“PixelLight is an open-source framework that allows you to create 3D
applications easily. As a cross-platform library it is designed to create
desktop applications for several platforms (Windows, Linux) . Due to it’s
modular design, it is suitable not only for games, but for any kind of 3D
applications like e.g. product presentations or simulations.”

 

The project seems to be heading  to be heading forward although with some low latencies as the released versions of the technology are somewhat happening in the months time frame, but doing opensource projects has becoming harder overtime, as it has become more difficult to find good  team members.

More information at http://www.game-developers.org