This time I intend to write a short text about the indie spirit and a new game engine I just found. In the 60's the philosopher Alan Watts emerged with the idea that the educational system practiced was not practical at all, and most of time it only educate us with abstracts conceptions instead of practical ones like cooking, repairing cars and the like... The critic is very profound as we can easy come to the conclusion that we rely on specialized people to do most of tasks that could be simply solved with we we had it tryed before (Think about your house pipes for example). This kind of thinking evolved to a social movement in the late 60's and beggining of 70's known as "Do It yourself".
The first time I read about it was referring to the Sex Pistols and Ramones musical attitudes and everything made sense to me. But sometime back, maybe 2 or 3 years ago, I read that the blogs was like a re-edition of this movement and since then I didn't stop to think how internet is a "prolific" environment. Discovering Linux was great in that sense because every little thing is open and as anyone can understand and cooperate, it's possible to make an even better OS. Well, the last thing that was missing was "what" to do "myself" and that is the motivation of this post.
Since I was kid (It wasn't that long ago like you, pseud-reader, are thinking, it was just like yesterday... lol) I have this passion for games... More by games story. I loved every tale and every character and every plot that made me feel like I was part of some quest! It was like I could interact with a movie! And from watching movies, and playing games, and reading books, and playing games, and enjoying art, and playing games. I've decide to do it myself! I'll create a game!
So I studied enough to know the basis... It took me nice 4 years of programming and data structure studying to know a drop of enlightenment from an ocean of knowledge... and the next step was to choose a game engine! It should have some particularities. First one, I prefer OpenGL (because it's open and it's wider) over DirectX. It should have some nice Graphics but graphical perfection was not my goal since I want to tell a good story. It should be free since I have the Linux collaborative spirit and have no money (haha). It should run on linux for the motive previously cited and it should be of easy understanding... Considering Irrlicht Engine, Ogre3D, CrystalSpace and OpenSceneGraph as graphical engines I've chosen CrystalSpace... But the time I would use reading the documentation I could create my own engine! (I read this in some place I don't remember and it's true...) but it was the closest of what I wanted if wasn't by the numbness of the project (stuck in the 1.2 version since ever) I would have sticked with it... Then I decided to move to OGRE but ogre wasn't purely openGL and everything in Ogre seemed a lot "ready" I didn't want just copy and copy and copy! I want to contribute too and well, OGRE is not a Game Engine... I considered Irrlicht but the graphic capacity was really bad... And I experienced slowness with my applications... I found OpenSceneGrap which happen to be a very nice C++ OpenGL wrap but exactly by this motive I had to abandon the idea. I was about to decline when I found The Zen Engine!! It was like it came directly from heaven!!! Everything attends to my expectations! It's flexibility for using Lua as a script language, the way that the core and the system are split and hey! They even use Ogre to render! And want more? They are very concerned about the indie spirit! With a collaborative ideal and are in full developing! I will try my best to help the development of it and to divulgate as well!!!
I will end this post with the engine links I cited
Cheers My Pseud-Readers...
Zen Engine
CrystalSpace
OGRE
Irrlicht
OpenSceneGraph
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