3d Engines ?

[Wegg]

I'm wondering what 3D game engines you guys are planning on porting and optimizing for the Pandora. Would the Quake 3 engine be too much? Ogre? Irrlicht? Crystal Space? I'd love to help out on some projects with my 3D knowledge so I'm itching to see what direction you developers are headed.

 

[efegea]

My favourite is Irrlicht, althought it'll need some work to get it ported to opengl ES 2.0

 

[Wegg]

Would be cool if all the Devs could look at whats out there and pool their efforts on making one of them kick butt.

 

[synkro]

IMO: For most smaller games you don't need an engine. OGL provides most of teh stuff you need If you want animated geometry things get complicated (eg Skinning).

 

[davidgutierrez]

I'm posting in Ogre3d forums asking for OpenGL ES 2.0 support (there is a PocketPC port using OpenGL ES 1.0, but it's incompatible with OpenGL ES 2.0). Maybe if there are more people insterested they will do it. If they won't, I'll try to make that port (no promise, eh?).

 

[squeakypants]

IMO: For most smaller games you don't need an engine. OGL provides most of teh stuff you need If you want animated geometry things get complicated (eg Skinning).

Yesterday I was messing with that, and I never realized it was so simple. For some reason I always assumed using OpenGL was really complicated, and that it was much easier to use an engine. Now I know I was wrong

Still, it's much easier to use an engine if you're doing anything beyond simple rendering.

 

[Wegg]

I'd love to see support for full character animation, particle effects, physics, bump mapping, height map terrain editing etc. As much as I love it when programmers write to the "core" of OpenGL. . . it cuts the artists out of the creative process and you end up with "meh" instead of "awesome!".

I can't really see home brew games being made without some kind of designers brain -> level builder -> compiler -> engine pipeline.

 

[Julius]

Quake3 will definitly be ported and should run just fine.

Personally I would really like to work with the Cube2/Sauerbraten engine, but someone else would have to port it, as that clearly exceedes by code hacking (butchering) skills.

 

[Sphinxter]

There are hectares of 2d space I've yet to explore. So few indie 3d games ever rise to the play level of say, After Burner II or any hope of achieving the production value of the commercial 3d competition. Would be nice to see a blessed engine though but at this moment I'd have to be rather doubtful I would ever actually use it, so many resources required for a full on 3d game from a single indie's time to market view.

 

[IcantDeleteThisAccount]

There are hectares of 2d space I've yet to explore. So few indie 3d games ever rise to the play level of say, After Burner II or any hope of achieving the production value of the commercial 3d competition. Would be nice to see a blessed engine though but at this moment I'd have to be rather doubtful I would ever actually use it, so many resources required for a full on 3d game from a single indie's time to market view.

If you look on sourceforge there is quite a lot of open source 3d engines for people to play with, some even with physics engines, albeit not quite as advanced as the havok, source, or crysis but its something. I'm very excited to see what some people come up with because we've seen some quite amazing games come out for the gp2x even with its limited specs.

 

[davidgutierrez]

I've received this answer from one of the Ogre Team Member:
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=276541

QUOTE

@WORMSXP: I promise you that when I will have a device that support OpenGL ES 2.0 and C++ with STL apps – I will create that render system. Will that do?

Edit: A portable device ofcourse...(not a pc or a laptop)


I think that he said that because he didn't think a "portable device with OpenGL ES 2.0 support" would be launched in few months, but maybe if he receives a Pandora MK1...

 

[Wegg]

If we could get him to put that in writing. . . we could all chip in and send him one. You'd have to gauge his sincerity first but. . . could be cool. Doesn't Ogre use Blender for its level building and content creation?

 

[ldesnogu]

Don't want to look negative, but porting a 3d engine that has been thought for a desktop on a machine with 128 MB does not seem the right thing to do...

 

[davidgutierrez]

Don't want to look negative, but porting a 3d engine that has been thought for a desktop on a machine with 128 MB does not seem the right thing to do...

There is already an PocketPC port which uses OpenGL ES 1.0 (without hardware acceleration) and fixed point math. Unfortunately, OpenGL ES 1.0 is incompatible with OpenGL ES 2.0

 

[ldesnogu]

There is already an PocketPC port which uses OpenGL ES 1.0 (without hardware acceleration) and fixed point math. Unfortunately, OpenGL ES 1.0 is incompatible with OpenGL ES 2.0

That looks like a very good start, especially given that fixed point is not really needed on Cortex-A8.
But are there real applications using that library? All I could see was some demo being run on a PocketPC.

 

[davidgutierrez]

I don't have a PocketPC, so I can't try any demo or game for that plataform. However, I guess they would look much worse than the PC version because of the fixed point maths. Since we will have graphic hardware acceleration and floating point maths, we shouldn't have those problems.

 

[hybrid_irr]

Hi, I'm hybrid from the Irrlicht dev team.
We are currently developing several device drivers for mobile/embedded systems. A WinMobile port and a framebuffer device already exist. In conjunction with our software renderers we can easily port this setup to any hw device, though without hw acceleration. An ARM cross-compilation already exists...
But we also have an ogl_es 1.x implementation being prepared by our OSX and PSP maintainer. Since the basic setup is already working it shouldn't be too hard to finalize this extension.
Is there a way to access a Pandora SDK and a simulator somehow? And what would be necessary to get an Early Access to the actual HW?

 

[ldesnogu]

Hi, I'm hybrid from the Irrlicht dev team.

Welcome

QUOTE
But we also have an ogl_es 1.x implementation being prepared by our OSX and PSP maintainer. Since the basic setup is already working it shouldn't be too hard to finalize this extension.
Is there a way to access a Pandora SDK and a simulator somehow?

No simulator exists as far as I know. But you might start porting to OpenGL ES 2.0 under Linux running on an IA32 platform by using PowerVR SDK. I think it would be the most sensible thing to do.

Look here : http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/insider/sdkd...index.asp#GLES2
I think you need to register first.

QUOTE
And what would be necessary to get an Early Access to the actual HW?

Try to get in touch with craigx.

 

[hybrid_irr]

Thanks for the welcome and your infos. I already have this emulator up and running for a while. I'll check how far the current driver will work with ogl-es 2.

 

[ldesnogu]

I already have this emulator up and running for a while. I'll check how far the current driver will work with ogl-es 2.

I think porting from Open GL ES 1.x to 2.0 won't be a trivial task