Game development has always been one of those areas of programming that i’ve found really interesting, albeit one of the hardest. Though as the summer has gone on, my boredom has grew exponentially, and i decided that its about time to start a project to remove some it for now at least.

There are a lot of good open source graphics engine, that offer near commercial quality. I’ve experimented with a lot of these in the past, and the results have been mixed. I found that the best open source ones out there are currently Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org) and Ogre (http://www.ogre3d.org/).

This is a screenshot of Decals running in CS.

Decals

In comparison, MotorM4X running in Ogre…

MotorM4X

After playing with both of them a couple of years ago, i managed to get bored with the simplicity of the coding these APIs allow to create a game, with even a complete newbie being able to create something good in a few days.

Thus, espresso was born. Its my (and adam’s) first attempt to build my own graphics engine from scratch and is definately going to be an interesting project. It not only means exposing all of the crazy vector calculus of creating a 3d computer world, but also the endless physics, algorithms and rendering techniques with OpenGL / DirectX. thanks to the good people at google, we have a subversion repository along with project management tools hosted with google code (http://code.google.com/p/espressoengine/). Its also being released under the MIT licence, so anyone is free to download it and use it as they wish.

Check back every once in a while, and i’ll add some articles of the endless fun, and psycotic moments while attempting to implement it

Tags: C++, DirectX, Game Dev, OpenGL, programming

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 10:28 pm and is filed under C, C++, Game Dev, Misc, OpenGL, programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.