Easiest 3D engine to use

[Kulangot_AG]

Hello,


I've been checking out the works-in--progress Unity games and something hit me: without a joystick, they play like crap. Some of those games recommended to plug in an Xbox 360 controller, but that's not something you expect all PC owners to have.


So I thought "I wish there were an open platform like PC but with a console control scheme such as a joystick so that I can play 3rd person 3D games easily". And so here I am on the (new) Pandora forums. (Although I did check out the old forums when I first heard about the device).


My question is which is the most likely way that an original 3D game can easily be ported to Pandora? I'd prefer complete developer environments where possible since I suck as a coder. I've read people toss around Ihrrlicht and Shiva, as well as mentioning that games can come through the Android OS port (meaning, you can just develop for Android instead) instead of through desktop linux, but will that affect joystick support?

 

[bzar]

You can add Ogre3d to the list.

 

[sebt3]

You can add Ogre3d to the list.

Do you have a_working_ build for pandora ?

 

[bzar]

Do you have a_working_ build for pandora ?

Nope, but I don't see any reason it couldn't be done. The OGLES support is there and AFAIK it has no fatal dependencies. Aside from the early demos I haven't seen a working irrlicht or Qt build with accelerated graphics on a pandora either, but I still consider them viable platforms for future pandora development, because I see no reason it couldn't be achieved. Of course, if you have experience contrary to getting Ogre working on a pandora, please share so I can avoid spreading misinformation

 

[sebt3]

Nope, but I don't see any reason it couldn't be done. The OGLES support is there and AFAIK it has no fatal dependencies. Aside from the early demos I haven't seen a working irrlicht or Qt build with accelerated graphics on a pandora either, but I still consider them viable platforms for future pandora development, because I see no reason it couldn't be achieved. Of course, if you have experience contrary to getting Ogre working on a pandora, please share so I can avoid spreading misinformation

- Irrlicht


- QT





Lastest svn of irrlicht output garbage though (seems to be a drivers bug more than anything)


But I still struggle to build orgre. Cmake hate me

 

[bzar]

- Irrlicht


- QT





Lastest svn of irrlicht output garbage though (seems to be a drivers bug more than anything)


But I still struggle to build orgre. Cmake hate me

OK, nice


Does the Qt build support QGLWidget based HW accelerated rendering?


EDIT: Oh, and I'll definitely join the struggle once I get my pandora

 

[sebt3]

Does the Qt build support QGLWidget based HW accelerated rendering?

This work with it


http://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qt/trees/4.7/examples/opengl/hellogl_es2


And the widgets are using gles rendering too

 

[bzar]

This work with it


http://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qt/trees/4.7/examples/opengl/hellogl_es2


And the widgets are using gles rendering too

Oh, nice. I stand corrected. I still believe ogre to be viable, although porting may take some doing. OK, enough offtopic, let's call Ogre "plausible"

 

[Lynceus Glaciermaw]

I don't know if one of the engines previously mentioned is what powers it, but I heard Descent I/II has been ported to the Pandora. I've actually worked in that engine before (i.e. I built Descent levels). It's a decent engine, only spazzing out when it detects nonconvex cubes (which is rather a serious issue, actually, but it's possible to work around it).


If you're looking for an engine to reverse engineer, that one might be worth a look.

 

[Cloudef]

Not really a engine, but a OpenGL framework which gives some useful classes and functions, with my unskilled programming. Depends only on 2 libs and should work with Pandora fine. (Currently GLES 1.0 only, because I don't have shader pipeline yet)

3d Model, 2 Camera's, batched sprites and normal sprites.

 

[Stainy]

https://www.youtube.com/embed/fPXatVmAS7E?feature=oembed

Needs Ogre3d though...

 

[Jourdy288]

Can we use the Blender Game Engine? The idea just hit me.

 

[j0n]

My question is which is the most likely way that an original 3D game can easily be ported to Pandora? I'd prefer complete developer environments where possible since I suck as a coder. I've read people toss around Ihrrlicht and Shiva, as well as mentioning that games can come through the Android OS port (meaning, you can just develop for Android instead) instead of through desktop linux, but will that affect joystick support?

I guess you'll probably find it difficult to maintain compliance with Android, linux and windows without some very high level framework like Unity. In fact besides from Unity, I can't think of something like this.


Ogre and Irrlicht seem to have some fairly patchy support for Android, but porting would not be straightforward in my opinion.


I don't understand why you consider joystick support to be a big issue, this is one of the minor changes that would need to be done, consider how your screen size will change on and Android vs. a Pandora vs. a PC and you have a bigger problem on your hands.


Something like Unity seems to try and solve a lot of problems for you, but you will almost definitely need to change some things for each platform anyway.

 

[ibisum]

Modify an existing 3D game engine .. like Wakebreaker!


http://w1xer.at/pandora/

 

[kagato]

I'd like to see Panda3D on the Pandora. It has already been ported to BeagleBoard, so I imagine it could be made to work fairly easily.


I'm not sure if a port would get you access to all the games already written... but as it's cross-platform, and some games run in a browser plugin, maybe we'd be in luck.