Urho3D published games?

[Noé Falzon]

Hi all,

I've been looking for the a cross-platform FOSS 3D engine and came across Urho3D, which has a very impressive feature list. One thing however, I can't seem to find any example of real-world uses of the engine, which is apparently not very famous (yet?). Is there any showcase or community exchange place other than this Google group?

And hoping not to start a flame war, has anyone had any experience with the Gameplay3D engine, and has an idea of how it compares to Urho (it seemed more accessible at first, but I'm not sure about their mandatory conversion of assets to internal binary format)?

Thanks!

[Lasse Öörni]

This is not an actual game, but a 3D app nevertheless, that uses Urho:
https://itunes.apple.com/app/id588996561

Goblinson Crusoe is a work in progress using Urho:
http://www.gamedev.net/blog/33/entry-2258811-catching-up-shadows-and-other-stuff/

I don't want to flame Gameplay3D either, as it's a well-accomplished package, but one downside that comes to mind is that it does not support multiple dynamic lights or shadowed lights out of the box, rather you must work on the shaders yourself to allow that.

[Paweł Mogiła]

And Urho3d also has WYSIWYG editor which is very nice. I didn't find any information about editor for Gameplay3d

[Chris Friesen]

Gamplay3d has been working on an editor.  Their next branch has things that are not in master.  

I am personally worried about the relationship Gameplay3d has to blackberry.  They were recently acquired/sold, they are not very profitable, and their platform is bleeding market share.  You never know who/what project is on the chop block at these big companies :(  But what I am saying is unfounded paranoia!

Urho does require its own format also for models/animations. The editor may make it faster depending on how well you work with mouse/interface.  The editor is written in Urho's scripting language and runs in Urho so its pretty easy to adapt your needs if you don't mind getting dirty.  The editor itself is the best documentation on the UI system.

Urho has a working navmesh which is cool.  AngleScript is pretty cool too.  Urho has a WIP of luajit.  Urho has deferred/prepass renderers. The component system resembles Unity.  I am not good with dx/opengl but from what i can tell Urho will run on the very old intel gfx cards which seem to have saturated the market.

Presently the wiki is down which sucks for starters.  This is probably the best place for documentation at the moment. http://cadaver.homeftp.net/urho3d/

[Noé Falzon]

Thanks for all your comments!

After going through documentation, source, and building out-of-the-box on Mac, Linux, and Android, I am convinced that Urho is technically fit for my purpose. All that is left to do is to try deploying on the Ouya, as it is my ultimate goal, but since regular Android APKs run there, it shouldn't be an issue. Wrapping controller and store access with JNI is all that should be necessary to have a complete package.

Paweł: although an editor is really nice, I would use mostly procedurally generated content on my foreseeable projects, and it might be so that an in-game editor would be more adapted to my use, depending on level structure and/or data organization. But it's definitely interesting for UI.

Chris: yes, I noticed after a while that Urho also requires conversion of models, animations, scenes, etc., although it does seem that Assimport has a great number of input formats. I really like the fact, however, that most of the formats are text based, which makes it a tad easier on the version control. One of my biggest grudge against Unity (which I "have to" use at work), is that the scene files that are binary, modified even by just opening them, and unmergeable. Of course, even big text files can be difficult to edit concurrently, especially if they are produced by program (eg. the WYSIWYG editor), but it mitigates the issue for small ones at least.

Sinan: concerning SDL 2, I noticed that Urho doesn't expose the new game controller API. Even though it's built on top of the regular joystick system, it seemed pretty convenient to have a ready made mapping of common gamepads, with button and axis names instead of numbers. But I suppose it's not a critical feature anyway.

I didn't know of AngelScript before, and shall take a look, but I intended to use the Lua wrapping. It's true, however, that I've been looking for a strongly typed "scripting" language for a while. Maybe this is the one.

This is, all in all, very promising, and I'll start experimenting as soon as possible.

Thanks for your quick answers!

Noé

[Chris Friesen]

Bad control of my source was one of my reasons for leaving Unity.  The xml serializers are consistant, and believe they always go in the order the attributes were specified by the class definition (i could be wrong and often am) when saved by the Editor.  Default values are omitted.

From what I have found the only source for angle script documentation is the official: http://angelcode.com/angelscript/sdk/docs/manual/doc_script.html.  A wierd thing I have found is that the class variables aren't smart enough to know if you are trying to change by reference/value so I would read slowly through the Object Handles section.  And you have to pass an object into a method call to get an interface or memory address  Otherwise it feels like any other curly brace language.

If you get your code working on the Ouya and wouldn't mind sharing later I am interested.  I own an Ouya but haven't dug in yet.  I am really curious to see the performance aswell.  Urho seems to aggressively batch draw calls, which among filtrates were early bottlenecks for the ouya.

I also am interested in helpful criticism of the Editor and finding easy low hanging fruit in the usability.  If you have something constructive you can post it in my editor thread https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/urho3d/cWZiFk4r-rs.  It is worth noting that I am not very fast and can't move mountains with my skillz so don't get your hopes up :)

[Lasse Öörni]

I recommend submitting the missing game controller API support as an issue to github so we don't forget it. It certainly looks useful.

As for using SDL2, GamePlay3D implements its own lowlevel layer, and that can actually be an advantage, as debugging possible problems will be more direct, assuming they have the manpower and skill. To Urho SDL2 is somewhat of a black box, so if it doesn't work, it is harder to understand where it is actually going wrong. SDL2 also contains several abstractions that Urho doesn't need, like its own blitters and texture surfaces, which makes it a bigger blob of code to go through, so compared to that GamePlay's lean system abstraction is enviable.

There once was an item on Urho roadmap to also implement own lowlevel support instead of relying on SDL2, but it turned out too ambitious / too time-consuming at least for now, so it was removed.

[Lasse Öörni]

Btw. just a sidenote, at least Unity Pro allows you nowadays to switch to text scene & prefab assets, and theoretically you can merge work from different people. The format does include a lot of cryptic number-based references to assets & other objects though.

[Noé Falzon]

Lasse: added the issue in Github about the Game Controller API.

Chris: Urho succesfully ran on Ouya! I'll start another thread about it.