Horde3D

Greetings from Seattle.

I am looking to give Horde a try and wanted to get the latest recommendations for getting started. I know that things change over time and what I may have read in the past might not be useful now.

Programming is something I do for a living, but not so much graphics-wise. I work with Visual Studio and Monodevelop, and have a lot of experience with C++, Java and C#.

I have programmed graphics projects before. Back in 1997 I converted a C++ game engine to Java. This was back in the "old days" when the 586 and Pentium 1 computers reigned. Graphics was not easy in those days. We had to do our own matrix operations (unrolling the loops for speed) and mode 13 in the DOS system to get the screen handle.

Sometimes a dinosaur would eat the keyboard.

I managed to get my Java version to work (I give the source code for that away if anyone wants it) with a FPS of 6! Yeah slow but the code is so depricated now I cannot compile it.

Currently I am checking out the various game engines. The Torque Game engine seems impressive and already experimenting with C4 and Virtual3D.


This game engine here looks interesting because it does not seperate me from the code as much as the others do, and it appears very new, meaning there should be far less confusion. Perhaps it will grow.

So what I have is Visual Studio, professional edition at work and the free version at home. I also run Solaris and Ubuntu as test platforms and am wondering if Horde works on systems other than Windows.

In particular I would like to know how the internal system is structured as pertains to the world model and the objects within it.

Any information would be appreciated.

Hello,

yeah graphics programming wasn't easy some years ago. Many things have changed now but you are still facing a plenty of challenges (shaders, complex animation algorithms, shadows) these days. I think graphics will never become a simple task since you always want more effects and quality and you are always working at the edge of what is possible.

The current version of Horde is Windows only, but I know that another university has successfully ported the code to Linux. So it is well possible that the engine will become cross-platform quite soon.

The best way to get started is to have a look at the documentation, especially the usage guide, which gives a rough overview of the main components and of course the tutorial which was extended with the last release. Another good start is to play around with the samples and experiment a bit.

Well so far I am being told by the demo programs that I need OpenGL 2.0. So once I get these adaptors updated I can see how well the computers handle it.