Which engine/libraries do you use?

[MrBozo]

I know there's already a few threads about game engines, but I think it'd be interesting to know which engines people actually use for their games.

Which engine and what libraries are you using for the game you are currently working on?
What engines did your previous games use?

[TheFakeCow]

We use DirectX, FMOD, and RakNet.

[soniCron]

Flash with a homespun framework.

[Bad Sector]

I usually develop my own stuff, but this stuff is usually based on SDL :-).

[Pogacha]

DDraw
Direct3D
DirectInput
DirectSound
OpenGL
Ogg Vorbis *starting working with
Pnglib
Libjpeg
zlib

The Mac implementation of the framework (which was made by the Lemon Team) uses OpenAL.

[zppz]

OpenGL
ODE
TinyXml
libpng
libjpeg
zlib
libcurl
+ a few of my own
Planning to use FMOD when the time comes...

[Ryan Clark]

SDL
SDL_image
FMOD
libcurl

[Christian]

Using blitzmax right now, i dont know if ill implement other libraries though, well see...

[ggambett]

My framework should work on anything. Currently I have a SDL/OpenGL/Direct3D platform driver and a PlayGround driver. I could write a PopCap Framework driver for example, or port it to consoles, or anything.

[electronicStar]

Right now, I'm using Blitz Basic 3D and it's very satisfying for what I am doing (2D and basic 3D).
for my future project I think I'll take a look at some 3D engines like c4 engine or some other, because I think I'll take the route of 3D and high performance instead of limiting myself to casual 2D games, that's just not my thing :).
And when I'm rich, I'll license the unreal engine :D

[KNau]

Aren't there some compatibility issues starting to show up in old Blitz 3D now? I moved from Blitz to Flash for 2D games but have been planning on doing a 3D "extravaganza" in my spare time. I've specifically stopped using Blitz 3D because I heard there are current issues and likely more to come.

I'm looking for a good, full-featured 3D engine with a BASIC syntax. I'm almost toying with giving DBPro a whirl, if only TGC hadn't screwed me so often in the past.

[Sybixsus]

I'm looking for a good, full-featured 3D engine with a BASIC syntax. I'm almost toying with giving DBPro a whirl, if only TGC hadn't screwed me so often in the past.

BlitzMax still has a BASIC syntax, and it interfaces very nicely with several 3d engines, including TrueVision, Irrlicht, and Ogre. It just has more raw language power than B3D. OOP, pointers, etc.

Currently using

TV3D
Newton
LibPNG
ZLib
LibXML

I'll probably add more before it's done. IrrKlang seems like a good bet for audio when the author makes a GCC build.

[KNau]

Thanks, I guess I'll have to try BlitzMax out. I was worried about how seamless the integration with those 3rd party 3D engines would really be. If there's no major issues then I'm sold!

[Sybixsus]

Well I wrote the TV3D wrapper, and I'm using it myself for a major project. I made every effort to integrate it such that you could use BlitzMax datatypes and objects, and let the wrapper do all the work so that the interface remains almost identical to how it would be if you were using TV3D in C++, C# or VB. That way, I strike the perfect balance. It's integrated completely with BlitzMax, the language, and every piece of code you see for the engine in another language can be used in BMax just by changing the core language syntax.

I don't have any experience of the Ogre wrapper, but I have looked at the Irrlicht wrapper and the author of that seems to have done exactly the same thing as I tried to do with the TV wrapper. Personally I would pick Irrlicht over Ogre anyway, but that's just personal preference, I guess.

[electronicStar]

Aren't there some compatibility issues starting to show up in old Blitz 3D now? I moved from Blitz to Flash for 2D games but have been planning on doing a 3D "extravaganza" in my spare time. I've specifically stopped using Blitz 3D because I heard there are current issues and likely more to come.

Nothing that I heard of, in the contrary, Mark Sibly keeps adding little things in the language now and then...

[Pallav Nawani]

Last Man Standing, RiotBall:
SDL + SDL_Mixer + SDL_Image

Angkor (Not released yet)
PopCap framework + TinyXML + Audiere

[princec]

A subset of Java 1.4
OpenGL via LWJGL (http://www.lwjgl.org)
and the rest all home grown. (http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/spgl)
I found it more fun writing my own stuff than using an engine. Programming can be fun sometimes ;)

Cas :)

[voxel]

Ogre3D + OIS + FMOD + RakNet + ODE/OPCODE... for quirky indie (and professional) projects.

Need to decide on a 2D framework for a casual game I want to write. I tried SDL/Pygame, but found ZERO UI support in both. I know UI work will eat 25-50% of my time... there has to be a good solution out there... PopCap?

[oNyx]

c&p *cough*
A subset of Java 1.4
OpenGL/OpenAL/input via LWJGL (http://www.lwjgl.org)
kbxm (mod/s3m)
jorbis (ogg)
and the rest all home grown (available on google code in the not too distant future).

The existing engines/frameworks weren't rad enough for my taste. So, I did my own. And now there is little to write, turn-over rates are simply stunning and its fast, too.

Now I only need to find a way to accelerate content creation... ;)

[Jack Norton]

PTK (http://www.phelios.com/ptk) for all my past and present (and probably future) projects on mac/pc.

[jankoM]

PTK (and am looking up to test some possibilities of "pyPTK" that someone on this forum made)

[mot]

same as Cas and oNyx here but using Java 1.5 features too (Retroweaver on Mac etc.) with LWJGL, jorbis for decoding ogg audio, some common Java libs for logging & http networking and my own code for everything else.

I don't want to use an existing GUI library because it would discourage me from creating custom UI behavior. On the other hand, I'd REALLY appreciate a simple 2D physics library for Java. Something like the Polycolly tutorial (http://uk.geocities.com/olivier_rebellion/Polycolly.zip)

[oNyx]

>On the other hand, I'd REALLY appreciate a simple 2D physics library for Java.

Kev ported some 2d physics thingy. See here:
http://www.javagaming.org/forums/index.php?topic=14461.0

Seems to work sorta well and I intend to use it at some point in the future. So far I simply lack ideas which would require some physics :)

[Coyote]

Torque Game Engine for the current (and next) project.

Homebrewed engine in Direct X + OpanAL + ENet (for networking) for Void War.

[Dyno Kid]

Game maker 6.1 registered, there is a new version due out soon.

Its fast, great for prototypes and suits a novice like me:)

Darren.

[MacMan45]

Ogre
CEGUI
OIS
ODE (via OgreOde)
OpenAL++
sqlite
boost::filesystem

When I do networking i'm looking at using Raknet.

[Jay_Kyburz]

Is this pyPTK a Python binding to PTK?. Is this available for mac?. Because that would be close to perfect in my opinion.

I'm not working on a project at the moment, just having fun looking around for nice tools, library and languages.

[simonh]

BlitzMax and MiniB3D (a small 3D engine written by me :)).

[Arthur_Ostapenko]

Blitz3D :)

[mot]

Kev ported some 2d physics thingy.

Brilliant.

[Mike Wiering]

- BlitzMax
- Delphi / DelphiX
- Blitz3D
- Delphi / OpenGL

[clilian]

Java 1.4+, Xith3D engine with JOGL and LWJGL openGL bindings
jorbis for ogg support
yguard, ant, launch4j and NSIS for windows deployment
JOGLAppletLauncher for 3d applet support
and many small proprierary tools...

Lilian :)

[Luis]

Delphi/OpenGL

[mot]

How's Delphi these days? Still alive? It always seemed to be a very solid product, I used it a few years ago.. then Borland got into some trouble.. I'm just wondering if it has a future.

[James C. Smith]

In the new Fall 2006 issue of the IGDA Casual Games SIG Quarterly (http://www.igda.org/casual/quarterly/2_1/) I wrote a piece about the technology used in casual games (http://www.igda.org/casual/quarterly/2_1/index.php?id=8). It contains some results of previous research, but the main focus is a new survey ( http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=265712621876) that I would enrage everyone to take. The results will be published in a future IGDA Casual SIG publication.

I would really appreciate it if you would all take the survey once for each game you have released. http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=265712621876

[Bad Sector]

How's Delphi these days? Still alive? It always seemed to be a very solid product, I used it a few years ago.. then Borland got into some trouble.. I'm just wondering if it has a future.

I used to use Delphi alot too. In fact, Nico Tuvla (http://www.slashstone.com/files/NicoTuvlaSetup.exe) - my previous game - is written in Delphi.

In these days Delphi is a little... well... screwed :-). Borland wanted to be a player everywhere (win32 native, .NET, Linux with Kylix, Java, etc) and they overbloated their products.

Things seem to become better with the new Turbo Explorer (http://www.turboexplorer.com/) editions of their products, but the IDE is a little different - reminds me alot of Eclipse (and this is not strange, because they seem to like Eclipse if you read their blogs). Since they give them for free (the explorer editions only, but their license allows you to create commercial software with them), i tried Turbo C++ Explorer. Was nice, but still overbloated. And from a negative side, you can't use more than one 'explorer' product in your machine (so i wasn't able to check out Delphi Explorer).

However, even if they were slim and nice, i still wouldn't use them because they do not support Linux :-). These days i'm messing around with FreePascal (http://www.freepascal.org/) and Lazarus (http://lazarus.freepascal.org), which provides a Delphi4-like IDE. And both of them work in Windows, Linux and MacOS X (with the X server, but a native version is under development). I made BED (http://www.slashstone.com/more/bed) with it :-).

[Emmanuel]

As already mentioned, we use ptk (http://www.phelios.com/ptk/) for rendering, sound, input and I/O since Atlantis, and snowballed game libraries on top, for GUI, particle systems, etc. Garden War and Garden Golf used a custom directdraw engine on Windows, and ggolf used SDL on Mac. The fact that we use a well-tested, no-learning-curve, windows/mac engine instead of wasting time on this already solved problem, forces us to pare it down to spending time on what the customer sees, and is more important than what specific engine it is, of course. It is much more efficient to solve the occasional problem with ptk (or popcap, playground, TGB, whatever) than to rewrite something from scratch.

Best regards,
Emmanuel

[HairyTroll]

- lispbuilder (http://www.balooga.com/lispbuilder.php3)