Techne and side projects

[dpapavas]

Hi all,

For the past years I've been working on Techne which I suppose could be called an "engine" alhtough the approach differs from most game/graphics free engines. You can read about it in more detail here: http://www.nongnu.org/techne/about.html

Anyway, in order to promote the development of Techne I've created a couple of game side-projects all simulation related since accurate simulations, being highly specialized should be the hardest to impement on a generic engine so I considered them a suitable stress-test on the engine's design. Apart from that they also required minimum art-related stuff which wasn't my forte.

These games are all playable right now and their physics models seem to be quite accurate but they're more simulations rather than games because I was mostly interested in them as simulations. I'm therefore posting this here in case there are people interested in participating in their further development. No great coding skills should be required. That's the whole point.

These are the projects so far:

• Billiards, a generic billiards simulator including eightball, nineball and carom modes. http://www.nongnu.org/billiards/
• Aviation, a flight simulation platform providing terrain and flight model and easily extensible to implement any kind of game. http://www.nongnu.org/aviation/
• Airrace, a game similar to the usual air racing sports implemented on top of Aviation. It's hosted on Aviation's homepage.

In addition to that I'm currently working on a motorcycle simulator which I began as a toy to keep me amused during the holidays but has had enough success during the first weeks of development that I kept it up. Its physics model is now more or less complete and seems to be surprisingly accurate but I'm having real trouble with the graphics. If you're interested in participating in this project let me know. It's not released yet (mostly because I can't think of a name for it) but it will be soon under the usual GPL license.

Areas of involvement in any project include game logic/gameplay which requires fairly basic scripting skills (the language used is Lua which is quite simple), game art (I only have export plugins for blender at the moment), game user interface which is implemented as a web page and is therefore written entirely in HTML, CSS, Javascript etc.

So if there are any billiards, flight simulation or bike fans out there looking for a project, let me know.

Dimitris

PS: forgot to mention that everything is released under the GPL.

[TheAncientGoat]

We wrote a blogpost regarding your engine a couple of days ago

[dpapavas]

Yeah I know and I appreciate that very much but since the post was about the funding idea I thought I'd post here with some details of the projects in case there are any people interested in the games wanting to take them over and develop them. The game types were chosen based on what would be better for the development of Techne but also on what the free game world was missing. The problem is that although most of the low-level work is done these are more simulations than games lacking in gameplay. I can't possibly find the time to work on that as well but it would be relatively easy for anyone with basic scripting and or webdevelopment knowledge and an interest in the field to take over. That was the idea at least. We'll have to see if this proves to be the case as well...