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Horde3D

Engine-default

Website:
http://www.nextgen-engine...

Developer:
Nicolas Schulz

Launched:
Not specified

Status:
Active

Supported Platforms:
Windows, Linux

Languages Written In:
C/C++

Languages Supported:
C/C++

Graphics APIs:
OpenGL

Rating:
  (1 review)

Editor:
None (be one!)

Horde3D is a small open source 3D rendering engine. It is written in an effort to create a graphics engine that offers the stunning visual effects expected in next-generation games while at the same time being as lightweight and conceptually clean as possible. Horde3D has a simple and intuitive interface accessible from virtually any programming language and is particularly suitable for rendering large crowds of animated characters in next-generation quality.

Supported Features

General

  • Object-Oriented Design
  • Other
  • Simple and lightweight overall design, avoiding complexity where possible
  • Clean object-oriented and platform-independent C++ code
  • Simple and intuitive C-style DLL interface for painless integration with most programming languages
  • Suitable for Augmented Reality (AR) applications
  • Collada Converter for importing model and animation data
  • Easy integration with game engines and other middleware like physics engine due to special integration library
  • Deferred Shading
  • Render-to-Texture
  • Fonts
  • GUI
  • Deferred shading implementation for rendering of scenes with many light sources
  • Optimization of geometry for GPU cache
  • Overlays for rendering GUI elements and font
  • Environment Mapping
  • Billboarding
  • Particle System
  • Depth of Field
  • Motion Blur
  • Fire
  • Explosion
  • Fog
  • Fully integrated particle systems that can cast shadows and receive other effects like motion blur
  • Post processing framework for DOF, Motion Blur and other cinematic effects

Lighting

  • Per-vertex
  • Per-pixel
  • Gloss maps
  • Anisotropic
  • BRDF Shader driven architecture with SM 2.0 compatible hardware as a minimum requirement

Shadows

  • Shadow Mapping Realtime shadows based on Parallel Split Shadow Maps

Texturing

  • Basic
  • Multi-texturing
  • Bumpmapping
  • Mipmapping
  • Projected
  • Procedural Support for almost all modern rendering techniques, including normal-mapped phong lighting and parallax mapping

Shaders

  • Vertex
  • Pixel
  • High Level
  • Shaders for materials and light source interaction
  • Vertex shader skinning for rendering hundreds of animated characters

Meshes

  • Mesh Loading
  • Skinning
  • Deformation Loading of models and animations from optimized binary formats

Scene Management

  • General
  • Occlusion Culling
  • LOD
  • Scene graph structure with hierarchical transformations
  • Optimized frustum culling on the scene graph using AABB trees
  • Level of detail support
  • Possibility to attach scene nodes to joints (e.g. for character props)
  • Access to vertex data for collision detection and interoperability with physics engines
  • Robust resource management for avoiding unnecessary loading of data
  • Garbage collection for handling resource dependencies
  • Interface for loading data from files, streams or any type of archives
  • Occlusion culling coming soon

Animation

  • Forward Kinematics
  • Keyframe Animation
  • Skeletal Animation
  • Morphing
  • Facial Animation
  • Animation Blending
  • Keyframe animation for joints and meshes
  • Skeletal animation with up to 4 weights per vertex for articulated models
  • Layered animation blending and mixing using masks
  • Inter-frame interpolation for smooth animations
  • Access to joint data for dynamic animations and ragdoll physics
  • Morph targets for facial animation and lip synchronization

Licensing

License Name Price in $US Source Code Included?
LGPL Free Yes
Free for commercial use

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

:: A Powerful Engine ::

  by Ba19f998658435b151540967e7c31c73 anchor Jun 08, 2011 at 19:44

This is a very powerful, and easy to use engine.
Its working on OSX too. And still active. The last
release came at 2011.05.31. And the forum is
very helpful.
The one competitor engine in this category is Irrlicht,
but that seems to dead some years ago.

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Last edited Oct 14, 2013 at 08:48

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