Reminds me of gamebench...

http://www.pelicancrossing.com/index.htm

And watch the "Blink 3D Video Quick Start" http://www.pelicancrossing.com/videotutorials/Blink3DStd/GettingStartedGuide/GettingStartedGuide.html

Blink3D is one of the engines thats uses Ogre3D. Don't know how well it keeps up to date with the Current Ogre release.

At least it was listed in the Ogre3d showcase a few months back, and has the same stonehenge demo.

And they've also licenced the PhysX engine.

BTW PhysX is free on PC, Linux (not Wii or 360)etc and has been avaliable for Ogre for well over a year. It's not the best for Indies though, because you have to download the API and install it alonside your app. It's quite big and has auto update features that are kind of annoying.

It is pretty cool for physics though, considerably faster than newton and ODE.

Do you mean that you have to install it seperately for ogre or for Blink 3D?

I only know it from Unity as there it's part of the engine and you don't have to install anything on your own. You also have the licence to sell content without any further negotiations with Ageia. Downside is that not all possibilities are exposed so far but for what it does it's very stable and fast.

It usualy is installed seperately with most engines that I have seen use it. I expect you can staticly link it and ignore the updater but then you don't get the bug fixes from the updates.

The PhysX drivers installer is about 30 MB, even though the whole PhysX DLL and firmware takes only about 1-2 MB I think. The reason is the driver installer includes every previous release of the drivers for backwards compatibility.

I think you could just drag-n-drop some DLLs into your EXE folder and everything should work fine, but I'm not sure. There also may be some licensing restrictions for this, so I would contact Ageia first before releasing a game this way

I'm currently using Agea PhysX in my game engine, and it's really nice. Very fast, stable, and easy-to-use (I'm not using any wrappers - the SDK is simple enough as it is). One of the major reasons I chose PhysX was it supports large heightfields (which is essential for large terrains), and it is very very fast (unlike engines like Newton, which slows to a crawl with more than a few colliding objects).

Anyway, I looked at the video of "Blink 3D", and it looks kind of interesting. Although it seems more aimed towards simple web-based games than a powerful game engine framework.

Thanks for clearing that up somewhat John :).

@John

Logic is something which won't be this fast in Blink 3D due to the Spiderengine they use for Javascript but as long as your gameplay doesn't heavily builds on that it should be fine. Just from browsing through the site and forums it looks interesting but i suspect it also needs some more time toi be in a productive state.

If only PhysX woudl deal with proxy objects and support mesh to mesh collisions...

Havok still rulez them all!

That's not good (for me, at least). I think the most important part of a good game is AI, and with slow logic execution, this will seriously limit any high-tech AI you are using. I'm not saying that Blink is no good for making games, just that it's no good for making the kind of games I like.


In what way doesn't it support mesh to mesh collisions? From what I've seen in the included demos, it not only supports mesh to mesh physics, but mesh to mesh softbody, (rubber-like objects), inflated softbody mesh (balloon-like objects), deformable (smashable metal) mesh objects, etc., etc. To say that PhysX doesn't support mesh to mesh collision is silly.

a) I disagree regarding the AI. A good game is a good game no matter what's the reason for that and there are tons of games out there which are great without having some serious AI. I won't say Tetris now...

b) Because what's offered in Unity of PhysX is only a fraction of the rigidbody section and as far as i know Ageia had stability/performance problems with mesh to mesh collisions in earlier versions. I haven't tried it out with the latest devkit.

Havok is still the most complete solution due to several reasons. Just check out their site...

Ok, it may have been a problem in older versions. It seems to be working fine now though.


True, a game is fun no matter what makes it fun. I'm sure there are many simple yet fun games which you could easily make in Blink 3D.

Some games are fun based on simple dynamics, others are not. So unless you're game happens to be very simple in nature, Blink isn't the best choice. My current game idea is somewhat innovative (I think), and requires somewhat complex AI to acheive the effect I want.

But don't misinterpret "high-tech AI" for "smart AI" - nobody likes a game where the AI is so good it beats you within the first 10 seconds. By "high-tech" AI, I mean a highly dynamic and non-repetitive AI which is designed to make the game fun, however that may be.


Maybe, but doesn't it cost several hundred thousand dollars? It's extremely fortunate that an AAA physics engine like Ageia PhysX is available free for independent developers like us, but surely you can't expect to afford THE best. Come on.

I've never said that i expect it...

Maybe some day Havok will again flood everything and then offer a more flexible licence which also makes it possible using it in Indy products. And if they don't, others will do as Ageia is doing it at the moment because it's their chance to get into the market.