Great news from the Ogre ecosystem: One of the most advanced game engines using Ogre for rendering has finally reached their 1.0 milestone release. Below they assembled some key points and we are happy to spread the word here.

What is NeoAxis?
NeoAxis Group has finally released NeoAxis Engine 1.0. It took over six years for NeoAxis Engine to grow from a project being developed by a single enthusiast into a most innovative 3D development tool with an international team working on it. NeoAxis Engine is an all-purpose, modern 3D graphics engine for 3D simulations, visualizations and games, which uses OGRE as low-level rendering engine.

What can it do?
Any stuff a good should have:

• NeoAxis Engine includes unique software environment used for creating project’s game logic. NeoAxis Game Object System is an integrated system including Game Object Editor, Map Editor and built-in networking support which enables game object synchronization on high-level.
• NeoAxis has a powerful .NET based API. The power of NeoAxis Engine and .NET enables you to concentrate on development of the project logic and to obtain greatest speed and quality of development. Internally, the engine uses the power of unmanaged C/C++ components such as rendering, physics and audio for maximal performance.
• Full-featured set of tools covers all areas of asset development. Toolset includes World Editor, Terrain Editor, Game Object Editor, GUI Editor, Effects Editor, Physical Model Editor, Material Editor.
• Support of all major IDE’s including Microsoft Visual Studio, SharpDevelop and MonoDevelop.
• Advanced physics simulation includes support of two physical engines (NVIDIA PhysX and ODE).
• Ability to create windowed and non-game applications. The SDK includes examples of WinForms and WPF applications.
• Rendering components include most of modern advanced features such as 64-bit HDR Rendering, Parallel-Split Shadow Maps, advanced animation support, post effect framework, realistic water shading, and more. NeoAxis is also optimized for a wider range of video cards. In addition to the support of modern video cards, NeoAxis supports integrated cards and laptop video cards.
• Ready to marketplace deployment. NeoAxis powered games are already being sold on Steam, Impulse, Mac App Store, GamersGate.

Why NeoAxis?
The keystone of NeoAxis engine is its unprecedented functionality that may save you incredible amount of time and money. NeoAxis provides you with a complete toolset with which you can develop all aspects of your application without having to deal much with programming.

NeoAxis also enables you to create cross-platform applications. Your projects can be easily run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. This saves you a great deal of time, removing the necessity of transferring your application to different platforms.

To even further speed up the development process NeoAxis Group has included a set of already accomplished various game types (including First-person shooter, Third-Person Shooter, Real-time Strategy, Arcade) in the SDK. This enables the developer to avoid the process of creating project’s mechanics from the scratch, instead just modifying the existing game type according to developer’s requirements. Thus, you can concentrate on game design instead of having to write megabytes of code.

And the last but not the least: developing with NeoAxis is free! You only pay for commercial use and only once.

Read more about NeoAxis on www.neoaxis.com.

Yet again, we have the great opportunity to share some information about one of the latest notable games created with Ogre3D. This time the guys over at Hammerware were kind enough to give us some technical insights about the development process of their new game called FamilyFarm.

After their previous project – a rail-shooter named Top Gunner developed for a coin-op machine manufacturer from Asia – the studio decided to also use Ogre3D for their next project. That was then tackled with a small team of only 10 members, but the core team only consisting of three people: one producer/programmer, one pure programmer and a 2D/3D artist. So bottom line: Coding, modeling and texturing was done internally, only artistic work like animations, music, sounds and game design were covered by externals.

The project itself is programmed in plain C++ without the use of any scripting language. They used a data-driven approach where logic is provided by XML data and SQLite databases. As the author of the game mechanics is a board game designer, they received an Excel file full of tables representing the game rules ready to implement. This file is parsed within initialization of the game (easy thanks to MS Excel 2003 file being just simple XML) and another source of data is the content database. Related to that, they highly recommend using SQLite for such data models as you can dump the DB to text file and rebuilt it after commit/update, create views to analyze content during game balancing (item prices, unlocking and other attributes). Also it is fast, easy to use, etc. Scenario definitions, animals and other not so orthogonal objects are however loaded from XML.

In terms of GUI solutions, they were not able to find a perfect fitting match. They had bad experiences with Flash speed using Hikari in one of the previous projects, but needed something smooth and cute. So they decided to implement their own GUI layer to be able creating animated widgets.

As sound library, they relied on irrKlang, but since there is no binary for 64bit Linux (anytime soon), they used OpenAL-based cAudio for this configuration.

Other libraries they used: Boost (serialization, threads), TinyXML, OgreMax, ParticleUniverse, cURL and Google’s Breakpad (crash dumps). The application is autoupdated on Windows with wyUpdate.

The game runs on all major PC platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac), although they had some hard times regarding X server related issues under Linux.

Tools that were involved in the cretion process include: Olifant (localizations editor), CMake, Subversion, Trac, automatic building by Bitten module, unSigned’s GraphicalInstaller and lots of own Python scripts.

The game can be bought either directly through their website or via a variety of merchants, all listed on the same page. So head over there and check out the demo and if you like it, support this indie studio by buying the whole game.

That’s it for this time. For more questions, please post in the corresponding forum thread.

We leave you with this short quote from the developers at Hammerware:

And respect to community! Almost no bugs in Ogre were sent to our server. It could not be said about Intel developers and GMA drivers…