Horde3D

Okay, I know I may be flamed hard for this, and I'm not trying to be rude. but I have a question.

My brother and I are trying to work out a rather big project. We're not looking for the greatest graphic at first. mainly place holders to start with and replace as we go along. However we are looking for our many Graphical/Game engine. I know Horde3D Like OGRE is really just a graphics engine that can made into, with modular coding, a game. This is ideally what we are looking for.

The thing is, the game requires a fairly large, Open, sandbox style fictional city that the player can roam with out seeing a loading screen while outdoors.

Much like oblivion (Using the Gamebryo Engine by Emergent) Basically We want then to see across the town with varied degrees of Level of Detail and as the move along outside, what they head towards gets more detailed while what they move away from get lower details.

The only loads we really want a player to see is when for instance they pass from the outdoors areas into indoors areas and in reverse.

The game we are planning wont be quite as big in scope. One Mission/Quest to follow (Plan on Python for the scripting for that end) at first and maybe more added as we go on.

I am not the programmer for this project, that would be my brother and his friends department, I am the art department really. but we have been looking around a lot of engines that are in the Freeware/Open Source realm.

This project will take forever and won't look professional for a very long time, we're just making it for our own benefits, we may never really distribute it at all even. We just want to get some practice in and have some where we can show our work and what we know.

This is not an MMO, it is a big project, but for our own enjoyment.

we've looked into OGRE, Crystal Space and a few others so Far, but I'm impressed with the large group of animated Characters Capability my self as that one of the things we'll need to bring the fictional city to life.

We just want to know if with the right amount of tweaking we can get a sort of Combination of Resident Evil/Gears of War Style Perspective in an life sized City with few loading is any while walking about in the outdoors areas Like in Oblivion. Keeping it very explorable.

The type of game we're making is an Investigative Adventure Game with very little combat.

The Programs we're using are:

Myself - Adobe Photoshop CS4, Adobe Illustrator CS4, Maya Unlimited 2009 and Zbrush 3.12b
Brother - Code::Blocks and Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Blender 2.49a
Friend - Visual Studio (Not sure which) Gimp 2.6.6, Blender 2.49a and Inkscape 0.46

We all use Open Office for our documentation needs.

Thanks in advance.

Horde implements a level of detail system, so you can use this to achieve this.

Horde does not implement file-loading by itself -- it asks the application to load data for it. This means that you could do your file loading in a 'background thread' and then give the data to Horde once it is fully loaded. This would allow you to get rid of most loading screens.

The perspective can be done in any engine the life-sized city depends on how well you can construct well-LODed art assets, and how well your programmers can implement background loading. But in theory it should be all possible.

@Dark Angel: Thanks, that good to know.

We had planned on just making our Project as a sort of mod for Oblivion. and so I started making much of the building shells and the what not's for the project. when my brother told me that while the Locations would look like the 1950's era Arkham Massachusetts. It would pretty much still act like Medieval Fantasy world of Oblivion. and that while he could work it out, it would be far better to start with a clean slate that can be made to function much like Gamebryo.

So, I'll pass this along.

As far as Art assets goes, this is my department. We've all agreed on our storyline. the City design, looks and feel, is all up to me.

I'm fairly sure my brother is well aware of "Background Thread" concept. He's spoken of that before many times. it's slowly loading up whats needed for the next map over while the player is getting closer to it till finally it switches from LOD to the area itself.

If all the Patches are 4096x4096 this can happen really fast so long as he can optimize the loading routine I guess is what he said. Plus that give us a measuring unit for our city.

If i keep the building shells rather simple as much as possible, this should be a quick thing to do.

Sorry I'm typing this all out more for my benefits then for the forum.

Okay well thank you for the info. I need to talk with my brother and his friend.

Oh, one last thing, Are there any more tutorials about how to use Horde3D's editor? I really could use that. Thanks...

Unfortunately I'm still a bit stuck with updating the editor to beta4. Apart from the video tutorial I can't offer any additional tutorial but if you have questions just post them into the Tools section of this forum.

Gamebryo and Horde are similar, in that they are both graphics engines and a collection of supporting tools. Both require other libraries to create a game (e.g. Oblivion uses Gamebryo graphics, Miles sound system, Bink video, Speed tree, etc...).

To get a full game engine out of Horde, you'll also have to 'collect' some other free (or affordable) libraries such as Bullet, OpenAL, Theora, RakNet, etc... I'm sure others here could tell you which libraries they use for audio/physics/networking etc...

Seeing Gamebryo costs a fortune, and Horde is free, you would expect Gamebryo to have a larger and more polished set of tools. Horde has similar functionality, but you'll have to work a bit harder to get everything set up the way your project requires
Ok, cool. So horde supports this kind of loading, but it doesn't implement the threading-part. You guys will have to use another library with thread support (e.g. Windows, Boost, pthreads, GLFW, SDL...) and use it to make your own background thread.
As Horde is single-threaded, only your main thread can 'talk to' horde. So your background thread should pass fully-loaded data files to your main thread, which then passes them to horde. Your main thread can also get a list of required files from Horde, and then pass the list to the background thread for it to load.

A commercial library like Gamebryo would be slightly simpler, as they could provide you with sample-code of how to implement all of this It's not too difficult to implement by yourself though