Engines based on Cube

[Inogord]

What engines are based on Cube engine?
What are the differences, advantages and disadvantages?

[cdxbow]

There have been literally hundreds of Cube derived games, most of which have gone nowhere, and in most cases involved predominately content changes. Most are not worth looking at. Syntensity and Platinum Arts sandbox were interesting and probably 'did the most' to the engine, but they always felt a bit cheap and were somewhat flawed, like myself. Moddb has a list of some of the more active games in development: http://www.moddb.com/engines/cube-2/games

There used to be a list at Quad or the Cube forums, but I couldn't find it after a quick look. Commercial games I know of are Blood Toll http://www.quadropolis.us/node/439 and Flock (ps3/xbox), which needed a BIG rewrite - see http://quadropolis.us/node/3340 and the thing with the vests (sorry forgotten the name)

The best, most advanced and most actively developed is Red Eclipse, which is why we are building MekArcade with it. It also has the best community (suck, suck), so stick with it, you don't need to look elsewhere.

Bananabread, octaforge and the android port are the ones to watch in my opinion.

PS if anyone knows the link to list of engines let me know.

[hulk]

Not really an "engine", but there is IronFist which has a better particles system than most cube 2 engine games: http://www.moddb.com/games/iron-fist

I think it uses the new 'Tesseract' engine too.

[Evropi]

Marble Arena 2 is awesome. Like, really, really awesome. Absolutely love it. Anyone should play it.

[ballist1c]

id Tech tree FTW

[Inogord]

What can you say about Torque 3D?

[Evropi]

What can you say about Torque 3D?

Still Windows-only, and it still depends on proprietary technologies like PhysX. And it's obviously not derived from the Cube Engine. It's been around a lot longer than Cube 1 or 2, in fact.

jMonkeyEngine is the only open source 3D game creator (like Unity for instance) I'm aware of.

[Inogord]

Operating system: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_%28game_engine%29

[Evropi]

Operating system: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_%28game_engine%29

Please don't get your facts from Wikipedia. The current version of all of the Torque engines (including the recently open-sourced Torque3D) does not allow for games to be built for Linux. Simple as that. Go look at the official documentation yourself if you don't believe me.

[Inogord]

The engine supports PhysX, but its not necessarily. Can work without it.

[Evropi]

The engine supports PhysX, but its not necessarily. Can work without it.

PhysX is available for Linux (albeit without hardware acceleration).

DirectX is not. That's what is blocking Torque3D from working for Linux. Now please end the ignorance. Go to their Github issue tracker, see the relevant information. That will be all.

[Inogord]

Support OpenGL/Linux will be in the future.

[Inogord]

Exist are many open alternatives for PhysX, example Open Dynamics Engine, Bullet and etc.

[Julius]

There are already Torque3D forks with in development linux support and bullet physics... lets wait and see

jMonkeyEngine is the only open source 3D game creator (like Unity for instance) I'm aware of.

There is also the Blender game engine, which is really improving by huge leaps.

[quintux_v]

In general I wouldn't say that the Cube engine is the base for a other engines, after the original Cube Engine came Cube 2, which then had a royal ton of mods or spin-offs that you can't quite say went and completely remade the engine. Sure, RE is an "overhaul" (and likely the closest to truly something new other than Tesseract), but it didn't quite change the engine itself, but a lot of what's in the engine.

Depending on the actual mod, each variation of the cube engine, in terms of advantages or disadvantages, is more suited toward what the player wants or likes. I know that RE is a lot more efficient in terms of commands and such while editing, but Platinum Arts Sandbox used to (before 2.8, which complicated quite a bit of things) be really nice in having menus that are easy to navigate and edit with; it's supposed to go more along the lines of the editing engine portion of Cube 2 optimized for children's use.
There's also the gameplay edge: Sauerbraten or RE? Any mod of Sauer vs. the original? In most cases, however, gameplay is the same from mod to mod, it's just that different variables in regards to graphics and options and content are added in and the engine gets rebranded as being new and somehow improved.

@ Inogord and Julius:
actually, there's a lot more open source engines, to list:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

Blender
Cube 2 (and spin-offs)
Irrlicht Engine
Ogre 3D
Gamekit (based on Irrlicht or Ogre)
Maratis 3D
Massive Engine (based on Ogre, may not be actually OS, sounds like it from a description)
Grit Engine

and even then: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines#Free_and_open_source
Seriously, though, why are we attempting to promote another engine here?

@ Ballistic: this tree? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Quake_-_family_tree_2.svg

[Inogord]

Julius, this was written by Evropi.

[Inogord]

quintux_v,
About your other "open" "game engines":

Ogre, Irrlicht,... - not a game engines, its just graphics engines for rendering 3D graphics.

GPL - not a real open license, you can not use the GPL with proprietary software in one project. And the GPL is not compatible with many open licenses (can not use in one project). id Tech family - not a real open engines.

Cube, Gamekit... - just a little toys for kids. This is not serious and unprofessional engine/editor. They are not suitable for high quality professional project.

Lua scripts are very slow.

[raiden]

Maybe a bit off topic, because it has nothing to do with the cube engine or fps, but what is about the spring rts engine? It's open so far as I know and has some impressive features. Right it's a realtime strategy engine, but not without reason so many games are based on it. So I just wanted to mention it.

[ballist1c]

@Julius: Yep. id Tech 1, legendary for it's games and the movement exploits that it's crude physics allowed

Undoubtedly spawned more forks/projects than any other engine; Nexuiz/later Xonotic, Warsow, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 are all distant relatives off of the id Tech tree.

[cdxbow]

I once made the mistake of printing the list of quake (idtech) derived games, without checking how long it was. The printer ran out of paper at 42 pages, so it has got to be the most used fps engine. I have looked at a lot of the game engines as a base for MekArcade, and the only one that has seriously tempted me is Unity. I know it's not open, but it is wonderfully cross platform, and now gets listed in the list of top 10 cross platform development environments, if you want to take a tablet. It has nice asset mangement and I had models loaded and animated in seconds. It was then I nearly lost the faith and changed teams. The main reason was I stayed true to the cube was map editing. I just couldn't stand the time it took to compile and test a map. I don't know if it's improved since then but it was very slow. Editing in the cude engine spoils you, forever.

[Evropi]

Inogord: the GPL complies with the open source definition. But it is very restrictive indeed. I personally license everything I do under either zlib or MIT. They are wonderfully simple licenses. They are the first software licenses I actually read through. I always clicked through EULAs and stuff normally, but their sheer simplicity is what actually introduced me to open source software.

Also, Irrlicht is a complete game engine. It comes with its own library for networking and stuff. OGRE is not, nor does it intend to be more than a really high-tech but at the same time easy-to-use (in comparison to DX/OGL) graphics library.

cdxbow: You'd also have to implement your own custom map editor, which would almost certainly be much more unfriendly than Cube's. Good on you!

[quintux_v]

Cube, Gamekit... - just a little toys for kids. This is not serious and unprofessional engine/editor. They are not suitable for high quality professional project.

Really? So you just posted a map that you made with the second iteration of the Cube engine, which you believe to be unsuitable for "high quality professional project" and isn't serious? The Cube engine also happens to be the base for Red Eclipse, which is an absolutely phenomenal game. Like I've said before, why are we even talking about other game engines in any kind of manner? The topic's called "Engines based on Cube", not "All game engines that we can talk crap about and spam". Sure, we could have a friendly discussion about which game engine has made the most progress on the original Cube engine, or which game engine overall seems to be the best to get a various genre done with. But no, you just have to come in, talk about how there apparently aren't any "real" engines out there, that openness absolutely must be required for the earth to spin, and that the Cube engine apparently seems to suck and that it's a first person shooter that seems to be only a little toy for kids. Do I smell hypocrisy?

@Evropi: thanks for the backup, I've always assumed the licenses were complicated as to cover all the bases and loopholes in legal code and such - kind of like the European moral laws that the US doesn't have or whatever I read the other day on here.

@Ball1stic: Of those games, warsow and xonotic both happen to be open source, I've experimented with some of the warsow textures before.

@Raiden: see, that's what we should be talking about on here.

[TheLastProject]

@Ball1stic: Of those games, warsow and xonotic both happen to be open source, I've experimented with some of the warsow textures before.

I could be mistaking here, but aren't the Warsow assets fully copyrighted (no Creative Commons or whatever, just plain old copyright) by the Warsow team? I don't believe they're open to use.

[Evropi]

That's true, though I think they do allow non-commercial distribution by 3rd parties, which is why it is available in so many mirror sites and Linux distributions.

[ballist1c]

@Ball1stic: Of those games, warsow and xonotic both happen to be open source, I've experimented with some of the warsow textures before.

I could be mistaking here, but aren't the Warsow assets fully copyrighted (no Creative Commons or whatever, just plain old copyright) by the Warsow team? I don't believe they're open to use.

Yes, it has it's own proprietary license which allows noncommercial redistribution, and use of Warsow contributions in your personal portfolio. However it is NOT open-source by any means.

Xonotic is, however, licensed as , which is great news for modders and mappers. A lot of the people who have been saying they have seen textures from Xonotic/Warsow in RE have probably seen TRaK's textures, found here: http://trak.mercenariesguild.net/node/3
They are used widely throughout Xonotic and Red Eclipse since they are so good.