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Monster Engine

Posted: Fri Jun 01, 2007 8:45 pm
by Lurk-
Our 15 week university project has come to an end.
We decided to make an open source game engine with all the parts you need to create a good game. Such as graphics, physics, sound, AI, and much more..

This is the information about the engine from our site:
Monster Engine is a powerful open source (under the LGPL license) game engine that uses the strength from Ogre3D in graphic rendering, PhysX for advance and realistic physic, LUA for scripting, TinyXML as object defines and OpenAL to create cool sound environments in your game.

Using this engine you will be able to build impressive games of your own or by its user friendlyness the engine is perfect for using in education purpose.
What we have done to show off the engines capabilities is a first person shooter tech demo called Monkeys in the Dark. It is a fast paced action game where we show you what can be done using the Monster Engine.
Worth to mention is that we also use the deferred shading technique, and other cool graphical effects.
We also have a quite unique sound engine from which we can create dynamic sound based on information given by the physic engine.

If you want to read more, try out our engine or the tech demo, please visit: www.monsterengine.org

There's also a movie from our tech demo on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9y56AWTq2s

Screenshots
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Hope you like it!

Re: Monster Engine

Posted: Fri Jun 01, 2007 10:03 pm
by jacmoe
Lurk- wrote:Hope you like it!
We definately do! :D

Great work!
That video was scary! :)

I am glad that you decided to open source it - a lot of Ogre users are craving for an Ogre powered game engine, which is capable, easy to use, and - importantly: available for use.

When will you put the code in the CVS?
Are you going to maintain the project?

Posted: Fri Jun 01, 2007 11:53 pm
by Chaster
Hey ho! Very cool! I am downloading now! Love the screenshots and video! Awesome work!

EDIT:

Okay, have some questions/problems:

I downloaded the "monsterengine1.0withtechdemo.zip" and the "game" directory has no executable (that I can find).

Also, I tried to run the monster.exe in the bin directory in the "Monster Engine" directory, but it was missing the PhysXloader.dll - can you include that in the zip?

Chaster

Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 12:34 am
by Blackhand
Chaster wrote: Also, I tried to run the monster.exe in the bin directory in the "Monster Engine" directory, but it was missing the PhysXloader.dll - can you include that in the zip?
Sounds like you need to download the PhysX package from Ageia.

Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 1:27 am
by REiNDEeR
Looks interesting but every mirror I tried seems to be down and the only 1 that worked gave me a corrupt zip :(

Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 3:26 am
by Aiursrage2k
Seems like a neat project. When I tried to play Monkies in the Dark it was nearly pitch black, I kept getting hit until I died.

Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 5:57 am
by JohnJ
Wow, those screenshots/videos look really really good! :D Very nice work!

Unfortunately, I'm also unable to play properly, it seems. When I run the techdemo, everything is dark and fogged heavily, with what seems like a uniform color material applied to everything.

I tried the ZIP version of the techdemo, but it was corrupted.

Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 6:27 am
by Chaster
I just get a black screen/window. It doesn't seem to crash, but nothing seems to happen.. :(

Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 11:35 am
by ejevik
Ok, I will try to gives some information and answers to some question.

1. First I can say is that the tech demo game only works propetly on Nvidia graphic cards. Problems with pixel shading if remember correctly on ATI cards.

2. You find the binary file for the engine i bin/sys/Monster.exe

3. If you run the bin/exe file Monster.exe you need to run the game lua script in the console, to do that you take down the console with key "½", the key under "Esc" on a normal keybord, now when the console i down, type;

Code: Select all

RunFile("demo.lua")
And you start the game, or simple start you own written lua script by

Code: Select all

RunFile("myscript.lua")
4. The game require Ageia PhysX drivers and OpenAL drivers to work, and the engine source Ageia PhysX, OpenAL, Ogre3d SDKs

5. Problems with the download must had been that I add and remove, add and remove... last night, I find out a couple of times that what I upload didn't work like it should. And a mutch nicer version of the installer are in work.

6. For the moment the engine has some lack of tutorials and howtos, but simple one will be on the homepage today or tomorrow.

And just ask question and I will try to answer them.

Ejevik - Game Design/Scripter for Monster Engine

Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 2:11 pm
by hmoraldo
Great work, and very interesting video, congratulations!

Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 3:57 pm
by nikki
At first, I thought that this was the Monster shader set topic, and didn't check it out. After wards, I saw that the number of posts was lesser, so I clicked the link. :)

It looks really cool! Best of luck with you're project! :)

Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 5:49 pm
by sinbad
Nice work, good to see another engine popping up using Ogre.

Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 5:55 pm
by deficite
Very good work. I can see how this could turn into a really impressive game that would make some AAA games look bad, were it to have the right assets :).

Re: Monster Engine

Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 1:32 am
by irishlostboy
this looks interesting. i have a few questions? i am trying to access if this is suitable to my needs. let me explain;
i am a 3d modeler/ texture artist/ sound engineer, with no ability with programming whatsoever. i am barely passing programming modul on my games design course (with much help from friends) i have a lot of experiance with the doom3 engine (designing levels, making and importing assets etc.) and with unreal tournament 2004. in essence, i am looking for an engine that is pretty idiot-proof for an artist to mess with, to see what ogre can actually do. i have not seen your video, or downloaded your tech demo as i dont have broadband here. from your screenshots i see you have the potential of some nice shaders. (vital for me)
in essence i want to know if i am going to be faced with the task of programming things just to get anything to work, or will this operate more like the "already built" games engines i am used to. i would like to get away from the "just modding" end of things, but to be honest, from an artists point of view, i find it quite difficult.

am i making sense?

Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 1:53 am
by Quall
I don't think you will find a game engine using Ogre that is a complete toolkit like you are looking for. I have not looked at the source, but this looks like it integrates many different libraries and offers some way to manage them together. It would still require a lot of programming to create the game logic itself.

The only thing that I have seen which comes close to what you are asking is NeoAxis, which looks good as well, but looks like it will be commercial also. For an off-Ogre engine, Cube2 looks nice but is also GPL, which I do not believe works well if you plan to go commercial. You are asking for something that is very rare if you want the visuals that come close to 2003+ games

Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 2:02 am
by ahmedismaiel
nice engine ,just tried the demo ,
how can i view some statistics about the FPS and #poly ?

one more questions ,your engine is under GNU Library or Lesser General Public License (LGPL) ,does that mean i'm only allowed to use the shaders in the engine in noncommercial games only??

Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 10:59 am
by ejevik
The engine is very easy to work with from a scriter and game desginer point of view. But yes for the moment we got no direct tools that makes the jobs simpel, but if you got some code or script habit it wouldent be to hard to make simple apps just to test graphic capabilities or games.

The goal for the engine is that it would be simple to work with but got advance capabilities. And create a engine that fits every sot of games from frenetic fps to puzzles, but that just in theory we have only done a fps, but it took us five weeks, so its a simple to use engine from my point of view, hehe.

To show to rendering statistics just type in console

Code: Select all

showfps(1)
And to hide it

Code: Select all

showfps()
And its ok to use our shaders.

Ejevik Game Design/Scripter Monster Engine

Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 1:10 pm
by Murmandamus
Looks cool! Downloading right now :D

Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 3:50 pm
by Quall
The demo crashes on my ati card, but I cannot find any log to see what fails. Did the material scripts look odd on ati cards or rather do they fail to run?

Anyways, I am looking over the framework now and it is looking pretty sweet. PhysX is hell to get a hold of. Their registration is not automatic so I am waiting on that, but I am looking forward to stepping the sample through and seeing how it is all put together. :)

I am glad you used VS 2k3 as well. C++ in 2005 sucks, poo on their garbage collection extentions as it makes coding annoying. Maybe that is just CLR though, never used it for anything else.

Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 4:10 pm
by Murmandamus
Quall wrote:The demo crashes on my ati card, but I cannot find any log to see what fails. Did the material scripts look odd on ati cards or rather do they fail to run?
There is a separate log folder where I found a whole bunch of logs, including the ogre.log (I assume that's what you were looking for). Anyway I can't run it at all because I don't have the PhysX libary yet :D

Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 4:20 pm
by ejevik
I notice that the installer dosent create the log directory, and by this no log output. I will upload a new installer that fix that small problem, but a quick fix is to just create a directory name "log" in the game map.

Ejevik Game Design/Scripter Monster Engine

Posted: Tue Jun 05, 2007 1:09 am
by Quall
ello mate

What version of the physX library did you use for your SDK? I have downloaded the newest version (2.7) and it seems that all the NX_ enums mentioned in the PhysicModule::convertFlag method are missing. This is where the compile fails for me :(

Edit: The build requires PhysX 2.6.4 ;)

Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 8:55 am
by ejevik
I wounder why we use version 2.6.4 of PhysX , when its not the newest one, I will ask the physic master in the project if he got a god answer to that question.
I am sorry if that cause some problem. But I am totaly happy that you succeed to compile the engine.

Ejevik Game Desing/Scripting Monster Engine

Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 9:08 am
by Murmandamus
I don't even see a 2.6.4 on this page: http://www.ageia.com/developers/sdk_rn.html :o

Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 1:29 pm
by Quall
Hmm, you are right. But it is listed in the downloads section of their site. Maybe a spelling error on their site? They list
-PhysX SDK 2.6.2
-PhysX SDK 2.6.4
-PhysX SDK 2.7.0
and no 2.6.3 :p

Looking over the engine, I will need to start learning lua and memorize your lua namespace documentation, as it seems to rely on it very heavily.

I must say, I am very glad for that basic application example you have listed in the wiki. It helps a lot and explains the XML format as well as loading objects (graphics and physics).