Urho3d Tutorial

[Tarja Rabito]

I am always excited when I hear of another game engine that allows for a lot of customization. Something that allows the user to make either 2D games, 3D games, and even a nice combination of the two. Games in the Paper Mario series come immediately to mind: 2D sprites interacting in a 3D environment.

Despite its name, Urho3D can create both 3D and 2D titles. One title that drew me in from the start was a release by a one-man team in Poland called Clinically Dead. Pretty sweet name and the visuals blow me away.

Imagine a mix of an LSD trip and a trippy dream sequence. You play as a person in the seconds before death, solving puzzles and navigating a world inhabited by extremely over-the-top visuals, as well as delivering different philosophies on death and what it means to be alive. Pretty heavy stuff for a game, and an indie game no less.

Seeing that it uses the MIT license reminds me of another engine, the Godot engine, which is a current fan-favorite among burgeoning game developers just starting to hone their craft. The MIT license, along with being very popular among developers, allows for users to have more control over their projects, with the exception that they only have to mention the terms of the MIT license in their project, and usually ends up with a more seamless distribution to the public.

I had recently done research on some other engines, like the famous RPG Maker MV, and was surprised to see how expensive the entirety of the game, (the massive amount of DLC, the base game, even tutorial books), could be. It would burn a hole in your savings really quickly.

They also state that it is not a fully developed engine that you could purchase, and as such you would need to use your computer and programming skills to perhaps fill in a few blanks. Things like Editors and additional asset conversion functionality Integration of additional 3rd party libraries, for example, a more complete UI library, HTML rendering, or additional network protocols.

A user on Slant, Endi, listed a possible grievance for new time users of the engine: To install Urho3D you need to get the archive from GitHub (be careful to download the master branch) and extract it. After that, you need to compile the engine with CMake. If all the dependencies are installed, then it should be a straightforward process, otherwise, you will need to track down and install all the missing dependencies.

Titles like Hellbreaker, Borderline, (a puzzle game for Google Play exclusively). Edge of Time, an isometric action/puzzle game that draws inspiration from the bygone days of the first two PlayStation consoles, looks so cool.

Most impressively is the extremely long list of developers for Urho3D. I perused some forums and found a very supportive community that freely shared their own cool little projects. For example, this user shared his RPG hack and slash with another user who was new to the engine.

This criminally underrated YouTube channel provides an extensive series of Urho3D tutorials for the beginning developer. Along with about 20 videos on Urho3D starting with basic development to more complicated matters, he offers a few cool little videos displaying what he himself created in the engine. Good tips and even better inspiration.

I watched him create an environment right before my eyes. It reminded me of a rudimentary Mass Effect environment but in the best way. I can see a lot of promise not only from his projects but the potential you have to make using the engine.

Aside from potential download difficulties and other possible hang-ups, the engine is ready for you to get started right away and create that game you always wanted to. Like I stated before, the user interface may leave something to be desired, but apart from that, get cracking!

A graduate of Penn State University and a Philadelphia native, Bryan has been a gamer since day one. Using his vast experience of gaming, game culture, and all things tech, Bryan aims to deliver the most up-to-date and captivating game design content to readers.

When you install Visual Studio, they promote Unity, Cocos, CryEngine and Urho3D for game development and offer to install packages along with Visual Studio.

At the Microsoft Virtual Academy they offer courses for Construct, GameMaker Studio and Unity for developing Windows Store and mobile games.

The only place they mention MonoGame is at the .NET page for Game Development.

Microsoft .NET game development on Windows, Linux, or macOSUse .NET to develop games that run on a wide variety of platforms using purpose built gaming engines. Develop games on Windows, Linux, or macOS.

If you go to the Xamarin part of the docs Monogame is there as well:

docs.microsoft.com Xamarin documentation - XamarinXamarin lets you build native apps for Android, iOS, and macOS using .NET code and platform-specific user interfaces. Xamarin.Forms allows you to build native apps, with shared UI code written in C# or XAML.

I did find this course a little difficult to follow with my limited C# knowledge but I did go through and learned very useful concepts about game programming in general. I can also recommend this but only to those who has some experience with programming, if not C# but any other language.

I also just thought of something. Microsoft is the one that gave up on XNA. MonoGame is the unofficial continuation of XNA. Perhaps Microsoft just does not think XNA/MonoGame is the way to go and so do not focus on it as much as other options. I hope that is not the case since I would love to see more MonoGame on Channel9 and other Microsoft dev channels.

I guess I never really explained in my videos (maybe a comment here or there), but my tutorials were based on the assumption that the viewer has a good concept of C#, and are trying to get there head around game dev.

Though I have selected a very difficult project to begin game development with, the lack of resources that details how to use the API functions it provides made research extremely difficult. It was only through the kindness and the responsiveness from the people on these forums that made it possible for me to accomplish as much as I did.

How about a complete tutorial series where we are making a complete game, implementing all the common features we can expect in most games today and then make the necessary changes to compile to all popular platforms.

The character controller physics of the Quake 3 Arena game engine are responsible for handling the movement and collision detection of the player character. These physics are designed to simulate the movement of a first-person shooter (FPS) character in a 3D environment, and are based on a combination of kinematic and dynamic physics.

The character controller physics in Quake 3 Arena are designed to create a fast-paced and dynamic gameplay experience. The physics allow the player to perform a variety of movement techniques such as bunny hopping, strafe jumping and circle strafing, which is a set of techniques that allows players to move and dodge in a very fast and precise way. Overall, the character controller physics of the Quake 3 Arena game engine are designed to provide a smooth and responsive movement for the player character, allowing them to navigate the game world and interact with the environment in a believable and realistic way.

In this code, a new CharacterController component is created and added to the scene in the Application class's Start() function. In the Start() function of the component, a capsule collision shape is created and set to the character's rigid body, and a KinematicCharacterController component is created and set to the character's collision shape. The max step height, which is the maximum height that the character can step up, is set to 0.5f.

In this code, the Update function gets the move direction from the input and normalizes it to ensure that the character moves at a consistent speed. The kinematic character controller's Move function is called and passed the move direction multiplied by the time step. This moves the character's position based on the move direction and time step.

It is important to note that the move function of the kinematic character controller uses the character's collision shape and the collision information from the physics world to move the character. This way, the character will respond correctly to collisions with the environment.

With this tutorial, you have the basic structure for a first-person game with a playable character using Quake3 physics in U3D. You can add more features such as jumping, crouching, shooting, and more by adding more functionality to the CharacterController and the environment.

So in my quest to find an open source 3d game engine for my project i've finally decided that i need to choose between either Torque3d or Urho3d. Both seem quite capable and torque has great tools and a lot of shipped titles which is a huge plus IMO for any engine as it shows it isn't just some fancy toy. Urho does not have any shipped titles that i'm aware of and the tools are either lacking or just not very good. However, urho is pretty straightforward to program as it follows the entity-component paradigm and since i have a programmer background it feels even better because urho is very programmer-centric. Torque has torquescript, which is fine but i still don't get the whole client/server thing everywhere. For a game that is supposed to be single-player only, it's quite confusing what needs to be server-side and what needs to be client-side.

So for people who are much more familiar with the engine, how difficult is it to make a game with torque that is NOT a multiplayer first person shooter? I ask this because looking at torque, i like almost everything about it except for the way it's supposed to be scripted/programmed. Programming is a significant portion of every game but it seems kind of foolish to make a decision based on that alone since there are a lot of other important parts to making a game as well. The game i have in mind is first person with little to no shooting and mostly taking place in one persistent but small level/world. I'll be the only person working on this project but i might involve other people in later stages for better models/music etc. I've made small games/demos before in other engines and dabbled with opengl a bit as well but never shipped a commercial title which is why i still have a lot of holes in my knowledge. :P

3a8082e126