Horde3D

The recent days I spent some time updating the documentation, especially the Tutorial and FAQ which are linked directly from the main site and also the usage guide. It contains more basic information now, some advanced topics and information on how to bring content to the engine. Although one could write a complete book to cover all the information required to become an expert in (using) graphics engines I hope that it will help people to better get started with Horde. Since it is hard for me as an "old" graphics programmer to judge the quality for less experienced users in this domain, notes and criticism are really welcome!

Although I'm getting more and more pleased with the features the engine can offer (0.11 will add some nice stuff ) our community here is still pretty small. One reason for this could be that it is hard for people to dig into the engine since there is not enough information available. I hope that this will become better with an improved documentation and might be some more demos.

Edit: The new docs are online now.

this sounds really nice and i am franticly waiting for the 0.11.0 version.

in romania there is a game devs competition coming up, and im thinking about partnering up with a friend and possible enter it with an horde3d-made project (but this is not actually my decision, hes the programmer). if we do, this could help make horde3d more popular, at least in romania.

ps: studying for the exams is going well, first exam in june 25th

Thanks Nic for all the extra info. It is much appreciated. I'm greatly looking forward to the next release. Is particles still looking good to go? Will there be new sample code?

Good luck with the study and the exams and with your demo competition entry Paul

Mark

I have been on a workshop in Paris so I couldn't reply any sooner.

Thanks for your positive comments so far!

Paul the competition sounds really great. I hope that it will work out! And good luck with the exams, I will also have mine at the end of the month (it is my final term before the master thesis)

The particle system is already working quite well, what I still want to add now is some fancy stuff like lit particles or particles throwing shadows, might be some simple physics. Currently there is quite a plenty of work for me with other Horde-related projects so progress on the core is slower than I would like it to see. Nevertheless I will do my best

if you add physics hope that you will use physX

and regarding the competition, we are now running some benchmarks to figure out exactly witch engine to use, we need one that can cope with large words 150k+ poly, pp lighting and some sort of mapping (normal/parallax). plus we need a way to play some cut scenes. and all of that with a decent speed on medium-level hardware (nvidias 6 and 7 series like). will horde be at that level any time soon? are you planing to include occlusion culling in the 0.12.0 release? we will start our project in july

nevertheless i still cant wait for the next release

I thought of some simple physics just for particles which usually doesn't require a physics engine. But might be I will defer that to another release due to time issues. Rigid body physics are already possible with 0.11 and I hope that we can even offer a demo for that.

The Chicago sample does all you need: 100 characters with 2000 polys each (static geometry will be much faster of course) and perpixel normal- and parallaxmapping on the floor. Cutscenes are also possible by exporting a single animation sequence for your scene (we tried this with a fire effect following a spline with the shape of the character 'm' modelled in 3dsmax which looked quite cool).

I know that the demo is really awfully slow on your FX5200 but you will have the same problem with any engine as soon as you start using shaders. Nevertheless doing benchmarking and checking what is suitable for your needs is a good idea. Don't forget to enable geometry optimization when exporting models for Horde and keep me on the current how Horde performs compared to other engines

Sounds great!

My 2cents though: I think anything beyond "simple physics" (acceleration/velocity/position) should be left up to the application. I think the best way to do this would be to let the application update the particles itself.
You could do this by letting the application traverse a scene-graph to perform updates on particles, or allow the application to specify a call-back function which Horde will call in order to update each particle.



I disagree. I think Horde's power comes from focusing only on graphics, and doing a good job because of that limited focus.
If you start trying to make Horde do everything, then it won't be a nice lightweight engine anymore and could potentially be of less quality.

However, I fully support the addition of integration with other engines (like physX) in a layer above Horde3D. E.g. Horde3D remains the graphics layer, and HordeUtils (or a new HordePhysics library) contains some code to link with physX.