Good free games engine for commercial game

[Anonymous]

Hey guys, I’m getting involved in a games related project that aims towards producing a commercial PC product. It will be played from a first person perspective with standard collision detection, movement etc. and preferably have good lighting and atmospherics as well as sound support.

I’ve been looking for games engines that could be used. As well as allowing you to easily create what you want, it should be free to get and work with as well as allow you to sell what you make without paying royalties or legal complications.

Qube ( http://www.qubesoft.com/ ) seemed to be the ideal one and the one I’m sort of going for, but Crystal Space ( http://crystal.sourceforge.net ) also has my interest. Are there any others that I should be aware of? What are the pros, cons and restrictions of them? And any advice about working with game engines in general?

Any advice you could give me would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

[Anonymous]

If I was starting a game now, I’d go with Qube. It’s been used commercially ( for the Lego games etc ), and more importantly it will ( relatively easily ) allow you to port to consoles, which your publisher will be very interested in, with regard to creating new revenue streams, especially on PS/2..

If the company has some money in the bank, take a look at Renderware as well. Renderware has become a recognisable term to publishers, which they recognise to mean that your team will get a head-start with a stable, fast 3D games engine ( rather than writing your own, which could potentially be a lot faster, but could also never get finished… a lot of publishers have been burnt with this type of thing in the past ).

Regards…
Mal

[Anonymous]

you could also check out
ogre
it seems to be a nifty graphics engine with a number of game frameworks (input sound networking etc ) built to be used alongside it.
It’s GPL’d and there’s a good community of developers. There has already been commercial games released using the code but as always it’s a work in progress and may or may not have everything you need.

[Anonymous]

It’s actually LGPL, even more usefully, which means you can use the library without having the open source your entire project:

A summary from their website:

”
Under the LGPL you may use Ogre for any purpose you wish, as long as you:

Release any modifications to the OGRE source back to the community
Pass on the source to Ogre with all the copyrights intact
Make it clear where you have customised it.
”
May still not be useful though, if you want to keep the graphics engine work you do proprietary.

[Anonymous]

What about the Torque Engine from garage games? Anyone used it before?

Paul

[Anonymous]

I’ve used OGRE.
The one thing I would say against it is that the 2D system is poor. Its kinda on the end of the list of things to do as well due to the guy who wrote that bit not working on it anymore.
Other than that its pretty good and there is definitelly a good communittee and forum for help.

[Anonymous]

One other engine that most people miss is TrueVision3D – (http://www.truevision3d.com) – we are using it within our commerical title and the license is excellent.. The cost is only ~$100 for a commerical license and the next update (v6.5) is due out soon with full DX9 features..

Its free to use as long as u don`t mind the logo :)

Its also compatible with most languages and has a large / active support base.

[Anonymous]

If you don’t mind us asking, James, what exactly is Deep Voodoo working on?

The site is down and it’s been very quiet lately.

[Anonymous]

Hey, I`ve had some DNS issues that I haven`t got around to fixing yet (plus I was away in America).. some screenies of new stuff (all programmers art)

New level, just started designing..

[Anonymous]

Thanks for that, James. Be sure to keep us updated.

[Author]

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