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Forum: New Apocalyx FORUMS Available! (September 13th 2008)
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Engine: Version 0.9.3 (August 31st 2008)
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Demos: Mushroom's Ride (July 17th 2008)
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Editor: NsEditor V3.1 (June 26th 2008)
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Editor: NsEditor V0.3 released! (June 1st 2008)
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Engine: Version 0.9.2 (April 28th 2008)
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Movies: New Movie Available (April 14th 2008)
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LATEST NEWS
September 13th 2008
Forum: New Apocalyx FORUMS Available!
Thanks to Tom, the official forums related to the APOCALYX 3D Engine has been hosted at xfuj.com for a long time. Now SourceForge.net has provided phpBB support to their users, so I have decided to free Tom's server and move to the new phpBB server. Thank Tom for you great service!
The new APOCALYX Forums are divided into the usual sections:
GENERAL SUPPORT
This section is devoted to questions about the general usage of the engine, such as, but not only, the use of a particular feature or library, report strange behaviors in your own code, or ask for help in the development of tricky algorithms. Also questions about the Lua scripting language are welcome, because Lua is the main language used in the development of APOCALYX-based demos and games.
GAMES DEVELOPMENT
This section is devoted to questions about the development of games using THIS ENGINE (not games development in general), such as, but not only, the application of particular features or libraries to realize a certain technique useful for your game, report strange behaviors in a large project, or ask for help in the development of the game itself.
Remember also that I post daily news about the development of my own games on the APOCALYX 3D Engine BLOG.
ENGINE DEVELOPMENT
This section is devoted to questions about the LGPL C++ sources of the engine, such as, but not only, the included source code of a third-party library, report strange behaviors in C++ code that you have modified, or ask for additional built-in features. Questions about the C++ language are NOT welcome, because the modification of existent code requires a very good knowledge of C++.
TOOLS SUPPORT
This section is devoted to questions about the third-party tools that you may used to develop your APOCALYX-based demos and games, such as, but not only, the use of a particular source editor (there is a very good one, currently in development, known as NsEditor), the use of certain resource editors (like the BSP editor GtkRadiant), or the other tools listed in the Tools page of the official APOCALYX site.
In this case, I can't guarantee to help you much with my answers, because my knowledge of those tools is not advanced, but I'll try to answer anyway.
I hope that these new forums are going to be a useful tool for all the APOCALYX users.
Feel free to post frequently! I'll answer as soon as possible.
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INFO
APOCALYX is a 3D engine based on OpenGL, OpenAL and other free libraries suitable in particular for the development of Programming Games, the genre of games like GUN-TACTYX or JROBOTS, where the player programs the AI of his own team of bots to make it fight against teams written by other players.
The engine already includes features such as the rendering of sky boxes, cloud layers, lens flares, flat terrains and height fields even with reflections, infinite terrains, wavy surfaces, sprites, billboards, meshes with diffuse, gloss, environment and bump mapping, particles emitters, planar shadows, the loading of 3DS and OBJ meshes, the animation of MD2, MD3, MS3D and Cal3D models, the loading of BSP levels with collision detection and lightmaps, the support for OpenGL vertex and fragment programs and the support of the GLSL language for vertex and fragment shaders, the playback of MIDI, OggVorbis and MP3 soundtracks, the spatialization of 3D sound, the capture of sound samples, the management of compressed data and a particle-based physics engine suitable for the simulation of flags, cloths and articulated, soft or rigid bodies.
The engine also includes and provides easy access to libraries such as the ODE physics engine, the ColDet Collision Detector, the Cal3D Animation Library, the LUA scripting language to describe and control the scenes without any recompilation, the Tiny C compiler for fast compilation of C time-critical code and the C Scripting Language, the AngelScript Language and the SMALL language for fine control of bots' AI.
Then, to help the development of interesting AI, the engine also uses the MicroPather library (for A* path finding algorithms), the OpenSteer library (for the implementation of steering behaviors) and a library to define and control finite state machines.
Finally, to layout the graphical user interface, the engine includes the AntTweakBar library (for simple dialog boxes to tweak scene parameters) and the GLGooey library (for complex GUIs with a complete set of widgets).
Visit the Features page for a more detailed list.
The engine is completely scripted and no recompilation is needed to create new contents. You must simply program your scripts using the LUA language, or other languages available, and add your media files.
The current implementation of the engine supports only Win98 (or higher) with an accelerated graphic card and OpenGL drivers installed (the more recent the better).
Does this engine really work?It's simpler to see than believe, so download it and run the demos!
How can you create your own contents?It's simpler to do than explain, so download it and read the tutorials!
Further questions?No problem, Send an email to leo!
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank all the people who helped in developing this engine.
First of all, I must thank Matteo "Fuzz" Perenzoni and his Apocalypse demo written for the NeHe's 2001 Apocalypse Contest: The sources of his demo were the starting point for the APOCALYX 3D renderer and many nice effects.
Then, I must thank a lot of great internet resources about game programming:
News Portals, such as GameDev, FlipCode, CFXweb, OpenGL.org and Game Programming Italia,
Game Tutorials Sites, such as NeHe, Game Tutorials, SULACO
and Newsgroups, such as the italian it.comp.giochi.sviluppo.
RECENT NEWS
August 31st 2008
Engine: Version 0.9.3
The 0.9.3 release of the engine includes some improvements and bug fixes. To download the engine in a easy-to-get 60 Mb installer go to the Downloads page.
New features:
Added MDLModel functions: setTransition(), setTransitionTimer(), getStoppedTransition()
Added IM (Imaging Toolkit) support in IUP GUI
Added primitives: Cylinder, Disk, PartialDisk, Sphere
Added setPointerVisible(), isPointerVisible()
Added string.pack(), string.unpack()
Fixed bug in collisions between ODE objects and BSP geometry
Added support for Arbitrary Precision Math (MAPM)
Added support for Video Capture functions (experimental)
Added support for MySQL databases
Added support for SQLite databases
Removed AngelScript language support
Removed SMALL language support
Removed CSL language support
New demo (in Full-Installer):
Mushroom's Ride shows some of the engine features at work.
You can download the runtime of the engine and the demo packages from the Downloads page. For more detailed descriptions of the demos, visit the Demos page. Feel free to ask more about the new engine capabilities on the forums or by e-mail. Visit the APOCALYX Blog to read daily news about the engine and its development.
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July 17th 2008
Demos: Mushroom's Ride
Finally, here it is: a new APOCALYX demo, Mushroom's Ride. Move the fairy through the stone blocks to collect as many mushrooms as possible. As usual, the sources are included so users can easily modify and extend the demo at will. In fact, the source is written in a "*.lua" file, that one can modify with a simple text editor, while the data is included in a "*.dat" file, that is nothing else than a ZIP renamed. Enjoy the demo!
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June 26th 2008
Editor: NsEditor V3.1 is released!
Great news from Nout! After a few weeks from the first annoucement, another release of his game editor is available for download. Nout says:
NsEditor is a script editor customised for use with APOCALYX plus a game framework, using entities, strongly tied with the editor. Download now the new version of NsEditor!
In this version only minor improvements have been added and a few bugs are resolved:
the property editor keeps the picklists updated after changes are made to the zip file
Files are put in picklists selectively
ScriptFiles directly point to the script directory
A default tool directory was added
The APOCALYX screen starts by defualt with a larger screen size
A script file can be opened directly from the property window
etc...
Few updates have been made to the framework and a set of new entities is added
HUD: to display scores, health etc... in a graphical way
FlipBook: To show one out of multiple pictures by index, or the run a short animation, eg. an explosion
Menu: Shows an array of graphical buttons. Can be toggle, click or radio buttons. Can be used, eg. as popup menu, or selection menu
AviToTexture: enables to use avi's as a texture for a billboard or a texture for a splash screen in just a few clicks
Text3D: Add a 3D text to the scene
And some more small improvements where added into multiple existing entities
Thank you Nout for this great tool!
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June 1st 2008
Editor: NsEditor V0.3 released!
Great news from Nout: the last release of his game editor is available for download! Nout says:
NsEditor is a script editor customised for use with APOCALYX + it is a game framework, using entities, strongly tied with the editor. The idea for NsEditor was born about 2.5 years ago. The main driving force was to make it easier and faster to develop a game.
Want to give it a try? Then download the complete package at FileFront.
For any questions or remarks, please use the APOCALYX forums, under Tools, NsEditor V03.
In most games, quite some features that are needed repeat. Eg. you often will need a player that can walk around, a weapon, pickable objects, a menu, controllable avatars, lights, moving objects, a HUD, a conversation or text message, collision detection etc. Entities are small pieces of code that own one of these functions and the framework is the core code that makes all these entities to correctly interact. With a rich library of entities, building a small and working game takes some hours (assuming you have the media available) rather then weeks. The framework is open and allows to interleave entities and standard coding.
The main features NsEditor brings are:
Script editor with multiple editor windows, syntax highlighting and function parameter list preview
GlGooey skinner built in
Media previewer built in
Entity property editors with picklists
Zip file support (adding, deleting, preview)
World Editor for APOCALYX (Goto, Select, Move, Rotate, Scale objects + Resize bounding box, top, side, front view, automatic BBox calculation etc.)
Function and variable lists for all entities, with a goto feature
A today still very poor working debugger (to be improved in the next release)
The full framework including about 40 entities, all of them open source"
Thank you Nout for this great tool!
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April 28th 2008
Engine: Version 0.9.2
The 0.9.2 release of the engine includes improvements in the rendering of several model formats and bug fixes. To download the engine in a easy-to-get 60 Mb installer go to the Downloads page.
New demo (in DemoPack3):
TheTrenches shows how to animate MDL models.
You can download the runtime of the engine and the demo packages from the Downloads page. For more detailed descriptions of the demos, visit the Demos page. Feel free to ask more about the new engine capabilities on the forums or by e-mail. Visit the APOCALYX Blog to read daily news about the engine and its development.
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April 14th 2008
Movies: New Movie Available
A long time has passed since the last movie about APOCALYX and a lot of new demos were created in the meantime, so I collected several cuts, joined them together in an AVI file and uploaded its 20Mb to YouTube.
If you are interested, visit the APOCALYX BLOG to get a direct link to this new movie.
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