Quake 3 engine going opensource?! Engine advice

#1

I’m giving advice to one of my long term freelance clients at the moment on choosing an engine for his game.

Apparently, looking at forums and such the quake 3 engine is going opensource. Which considering it will be his companies first game a free engine would probably be a good bet.

He said hed pay up to $75 000 for an engine. However I’m not sure if it would be worth the gamble. If we get the quake 3 engine and the game doesnt sell, we’ve only got the cost of the programmers and the artists. (Which would be me)

What do you think the best course of action is?

Simon

#2

you probably already know this, but the biggest hiccup for alot of indy game developers hasn’t been engines, it’s been tools; most especially the compiler. i’m watching now mainly to see if someone from one of the open source projects (like Ogre) puts out a bsp compiler since so many of them use Q3 bsp’s. if that happened, then i’d probably wonder how the AI mods have come along.

personally i’d be evaluating a few open source engines. top of the list might be Nebula 2 (haven’t really paid attention to it for a while tbh, but i expect it’d be the best). and there are a few low-cost engines worth a look too. depends on what the game is really.

#3

Hey,

I think that at this point there exists some interesting engines out there which are free, such as Ogre. Check out the Game Engines thread for a discussion. If you have some good programmers they should be able to do some wild stuff with that as a starting point. Getting results comparable to Quake 3 shouldn’t be impossible.

The game I, as part of North Winter Studios, developed for the IGF demonstrated one thing for me though, and that is that a modern 3D game needs a huge amount of art related work. If you have good programmers, you can get by with a small number if the engine is good enough to begin with. But no matter how good the artists are, they can only output so many 3D models, textures, lighting sets, GUI parts, etc, in so much time.

So if that was my money I would go with a well written but cheap engine and spend the rest of the money on extra staff.

#4

Tools has always been a massive issue for me.

I’m a lightwave artist and never do I see a lightwave export tool. Although most of my team use max and maya, and working as a freelancer i dont have the time, nor money to spend retraining and buying new applications.

Never do I see a lightwave export tool. If deep exploration didnt exist I’d be out in the cold.

Simon

#5

If programming is no problem I’d recommend Ogre. It’s main focus is rendering though, however there are some game frameworks written on top of it. You can put the money on an existing engine or pay a few people to work something out with open source technology eh.

#6

Even with Maya or Max its sometimes hard to find the necessary tools, in my experience. We had to write our own export plugin for Maya to support some things the Softimage XSI plugin didn’t.

#7

personally i’d be evaluating a few open source engines. top of the list might be Nebula 2 (haven’t really paid attention to it for a while tbh, but i expect it’d be the best).
It is the best imo, our indie development team [shamelessplug]www.blueprintgames.com[/shamelessplug] has been using it and it supports both maya and 3dsmax. However it needs good programming skills to integrate in a game nevertheless. But the engine is capable of alot of things that might even put it in competition with doom 3 if it had alittle more documentation and better support.
www.radonlabs.de is nebula 2’s site

Also, if your client is willing to pay then the torque engine isnt exactly a bad choice. Its a very sturdy engine and costs 499$ for a team license i think or 100$ per programmer. It also has alot of support and tools. not sure about its site but im sure google wont fail you :wink:

#8

Ogre has a lightwave exporter or lwo converter.

The community there is very well aware of the importance of tools. It uses it’s own mesh format optimised for realtime rendering, but there are exporters for Wings3D, Blender, 3ds max (a bit broken, but a better one is in the works), Maya, Lightwave, and soon XSI (trough developer partnership with SoftImage). Next to that new community projects keep popping up every day like a particle editor, world editor (like Chronos, built on the c# port Axiom), Gui editor (using the great CrazyEddy opensource Gui library), etc etc etc. After 1.0 goes live i guess it will only get better, with complete toolpipes for many way’s of working.

#9

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