Terra Engine is a project to create a game engine for home developers to use. There are hundreds of game engines out there that differ greatly in complexity, however I have never found one that provides enough flexibility to create an impressive 3D game and is still simple enough to use without spending hours (that most hobby game programmers dont have) setting the whole thing up. Thats where Terra comes in. Through the use of DirectX access to 3D, sound, input and network hardware is provided in such a way that a basic 'game' can be set up extremely quickly. Once a nice structure has been developed one can then go through and use the more advanced aspects of the engine to do more impressive effects. To get Terra Engine use CVS to download it from the sourceforge website - you can find instructions on how to do this via sourceforge.

Terra Builder

In addition to the engine, another program called Terra Builder exists that converts Microsoft X files to '.arc' files that can be loaded up using the in game file system. This is an extremely useful feature as most 3D applications can export to X files (check out the Panda exporter for 3DSMax) and the flexibility of the file format allows for new types of information to be defined. Currently Terra Builder can compile 3D models (meshes and instance hierachies), materials, textures and game fonts into a single archive using a combination of the standard Microsoft X file template and some new ones specific to the engine. This easily expandable program will eventually be used to compile all data (including sounds) into a single format.

Features so far...

Graphics

• Optimized 3D rendering of meshes with textures, exported from 3DSMax
• All rendering done using vertex / pixel shaders
• Object instance hierachies
• 2D engine featuring rendering of materials using bill-board technique
• Game fonts
• Diffuse and ambient lighting effects
• Very basic camera system

• Keyboard/mouse input
• Built in graphical cursor
• Console mode

• Asset compiling using Terra Builder
• Archive system to load data and retreive materials/meshes etc
• Syncronous loading (Async streaming to come)

• Initialisation of whole engine with 1 call to 1 function!
• Game loop controlled using callback functions for physics and render frames
• Lots of fun debug capabilities!

• Full matrix and vector engine
• Quaternion support in progress
• Many more handy math functions

• Multithreaded network system (all multithreading hidden behind a single interface)
• Client / Server objects to host and connect to sessions
• Server hosting and messaging
• Automatic handling of player connections
• Client host enumeration,connection and messaging
• Asyncronous send/receive message functions

Helping

I'm going to keep plodding on with this engine by myself if necessary, but I would welcome help from people who want to contribute. As I said earlier there are still things to add, which would mostly require fairly competent C++ programmers. However if you aren't quite up to writing on the engine, it obviously needs testing, so if you want to try it out and make a game then please let me know! Terra Engine can be downloaded using CVS with sourceforge. Go to the project page at https://sourceforge.net/projects/terraengine/ for more info, and click on the HELP WANTED link to join the project.