Horde3D

Hi Horde3d-Community!

A friend of mine and i always want to create our own game. So about half a year ago, we formed a team of 4-5 Members to finally start with the project.

I will do most of the programming part. I have experience in C++, but it has been a while since i used it the last time .

The most important question for me was the decision for one of the Game-Engines you can find.
So i downloaded and tried lot of code and tools and in the end, my favorite was horde3d-Game Engine.

Other good candidates were panda3d (Which has no scene-Editor and most tutorials and examples are for python, not C++) and Unity (which has a very difficult license-method, the free version doesnt support lot of assert-imports, etc.)

I recognized, that there are only a few tutorials for the game engine and i have no idea how to implement a menu or an inventory ingame but im willing to learn these things.

So this is our project-environment and project-planning:
-> Single-Player-Roleplay-Game with tactical battles (like the typical japanese RPGs, but no round-based Battle-System)
-> 4-5 people
-> Time: About 3 Hours per week (unfortunaly there isnt more time for the project )
-> Finishing the first chapter of the game within the next 3 Years

So I ask for your opinion:

- is this a realistic project / timeplan?
- is horde3d - Game Engine the correct game engine or should i look for another one? As i said, i have basic skills in C++ and advanced skills in programming itself.

Thanks in advance!

Greetings,
Kelzama

Well, first of all, Horde3D is not a game engine, it is a graphics engine, and more than that, a quite minimalistic one. Both Panda3D and Unity do much more than Horde3D, e.g. sound, networking etc. Horde3D just renders 3d graphics, that's it.


Not supported by Horde3D, you have to use sth different on top of Horde3D, e.g. CEGUI, guichan, librocket, etc etc


Might get difficult to manage anything playable within this time frame if you don't have that much experience, but possible. Gets even more difficult if you don't know the engine you are using. How many programmers are in your team? Only you?

Horde3D is a great graphics engine, but judging from your post, it might not be what you want.

Hi,

thanks for that answer!

I know horde 3d is only a graphics engine, but i was talking about the horde 3d Game Engine:

http://mm-werkstatt.informatik.uni-augs ... .php/start

(as far as i know, both are developed by people of the same university?)

I didnt found another Forum, so i thought this one is used by the same people. If i was wrong, i'm sorry!


normally we would be 2 programmers, 1 game designer, 2 graphic artists, but the second programmer has rejectet the project

to the time-problem:
4 Years ago, we were a team of seven people, and we designed/programmed a little RPG (Characters, Monsters, fights, Inventory / Equipment system, leveling and Stats) with Database-connection and Text-based UI (it looked really funny ) within 4 months during a school project. Time was only about 7 hours per week and person.

I know its harder to program a 3D-Game, but i think 4 Years is a doable goal. We plan to increase the team, if we have a basic version of the game.

thanks!
Kelzama

Hi Kelzama,

I'm also looking into using the horde game engine for my purposes in future and it sure beats making something from scratch! It is still currently supported by the university but expect to do slight modifications to suit your needs (currently I've got an on/off project to allow the engine to work well for mobiles, which involves making it more posix compatible & removing the dynamic lib mechanism). There's also slight breakage whenever there's a new horde release as the game engine tends to lag behind the releases slightly.

The plug-in system is quite good though, you'll be able to make components easily and adapt these to your entities/events in no time. For a menu like phoenix64 suggested, you might want to use something else as the overlays mechanism in horde3d is really basic and only designed to display debug stuff or simple 2D graphics (however extending it with your own code is definitely an idea). Personally I'm really liking the look of librocket and you could use either the opengl or derive your own rendering backend which uses horde3d.

Good luck Kelzama on your rather large project!

_________________
-Alex
Website

In my own opinion, I would look into implementing your own entity framework on top of other libraries in addition to Horde3D. I personally set myself up a nice little framework using Horde, Boost, Bullet, libRocket, GLFW, and soon Frictional Game's OpenAL wrapper.

Nice find Orm on the openal wrapper, how does this wrapper compare with c-audio?

_________________
-Alex
Website