At TidalWare, we have not spent a single penny on production tools. Not because we are cheapskates, but because we have no need to satisfy a corporate ego that leads companies into spending thousands, even hundreds of thousands on commercial tools. It is common for companies to think that quality = money. While this may be true in many cases, the amount of investment ploughed into fancy software could be better spent in other areas of the production process.

Today, the line between commercial and free in terms of software is narrowing drastically. The introduction of open source has lead to many quality projects being produced as a result of community effort. At the end of the day, it’s the consumer that will use the software. To have the consumer develop the very software that they use leads to productive and user-friendly tools. Even you can contribute to its development. Commercial software is developed behind closed doors, and its functionality stems from a company’s own priorities. You have little to no say as to what goes into the software, and you end up waiting for new, single large releases that you can only hope has the features you want.

The use of open source software in the commercial world has grown significantly in recent years as companies realise its benefits. However, even today the number of game development businesses large or small embracing open source technology is minimal. Most continue to reinvent the wheel, developing proprietary tools that often already exist. Today, with all the technology readily available there is no excuse for neglecting areas of your game due to time wasted on unnecessary development.

So, what tools are currently available that allow for free development? Well, below is a list of some of the free and commercial quality tools, software and libraries that we recommend for game development.

Tools

Compilers

We recommend:
Visual Studio Express – Visual Studio is the most widely used compiler for games development. It’s reliable, and has everything you need to compile your application, including unparalleled debugging and streamlined programming. While the commercial version offers more bang and titivation, Visual Studio Express has everything you need to compile and debug your game.
Code::Blocks – Our recommended choice for cross-platform development. It’s solid, has plenty of great features, is customizable, and can integrate with any number of compile types from MingGW to GCC.

3D Modelers

We recommend:
Blender 3D – Blender is fast approaching the standard of commercial tools, and studios are beginning to consider Blender as a serious option for art production.

2D Graphics

We recommend:
GIMP – The best free graphics package. An alternative to Adobe Photoshop.

Animation

CharacterFX
Pacemaker

C++ Libraries

Graphics

We recommend:
Ogre3D – In our eyes, the number one free graphics engine. Many commercial games have been produced with Ogre3D. It has an intuitive interface, workflow and a fantastic community with many child projects which are also open source.

Other:
Irrlicht
Crystal Space – Rendering engine used in Blender 3D.

Physics

We recommend:
ODE – ODE is an open source high performance physics engine for rigid body dynamics. We found it great for simulating vehicles.
Newton – Newton, while not being open source, is robust and has all the features you would ever need for physics in games.
Bullet – Reasonably new physics library with a rapid development speed. Used for physics in Blender 3D.
PhysX – Free for non-commercial use. This is a commercial-quality physics engine that is great if you don’t plan to sell your game. Requires a redistributable package.

Networking

We recommend:
RakNet – High level networking library with many out-of-the-box features for networking in games.
cURL – File transfer library.

Other:
ENet – A very lightweight UDP network library.
OpenTNL – Another high level network library.

Audio

We recommend:
OpenAL – Low level cross-platform audio featuring 3D sound and more.
Ogg Vorbis – A free quality audio filetype.

Input

We recommend:
OIS – A lightweight, cross-platform input library.
SDL – SDL is a heavy cross-platform input library.

GUI

We recommend:
CEGUI – A free graphics library providing a windowing and widgets API for in-game.
wxWidgets – A cross-platform GUI library for developing software. Create editors for your games without MFC.

Other

We recommend:
Boost – Hundreds of portable C++ source libraries.
TinyXML – A small but powerful XML library.

Game Republic is an organisation which develops, funds and promotes the Yorkshire games industry. They have recently launched a brand new website which contains news, blogs, events and more. For those of you involved in the games industry living in the Yorkshire region, or simply have an interest in game development, we recommend you sign up and take advantage of the many opportunities on offer.

Visit: http://www.gamerepublic.org/

You may have heard the phrase “I’m in the wrong business”. As you’d expect, we’ve been doing some research about our industry and how it’s faring, especially considering these hard economic times.

It may not be surprising to hear that in recent years, the growth of the game software industry has been astonishing. Video games are now the most popular form of entertainment in the world, and it’s growth doesn’t look set to slow any time soon. To shed a light on the extent of this, below are a few interesting facts and figures for the UK.

Facts and figures for the UK

• Sales of video games between 2003 to 2007 increased 40 per cent.
• In the same period sales of movie tickets fell by 6%; the number of hours of TV watched dropped by 6%; sales of recorded music slumped 12% and purchases of DVDs remained flat.
• Sales of videogames in the UK hit an all time high of 82.8m in 2008.
• Consumers spent £4.04bn on video game hardware and software in 2008 in the UK alone.
• The Nintendo Wii made up almost a quarter of all software sales, which is more than 20m games sold. An increase of 112% on the previous year.
• A quarter of British homes now contain a Nintendo Wii; that’s 28 million consoles, and rising.
• Handheld games for the Nintendo DS sold 19.1m copies.
• Sales of software for the Playstation 3 console rose by 145%, selling 10.4 million units – more than double the 4.2m games sold in 2007.

Sources:
“Video games are poised to “eclipse” all other forms of entertainment”
“Sales of videogames in the UK hit an all time high”
Video games ‘more popular’ than film and music”

Well, it’s been quite a while since my last post. Let me jump straight into saying that I have added two new teaser screenshots of our new game codenamed ‘Project Utopia’ on the homepage. I simply couldn’t resist. :) I’ve been working on the game only since June, pretty much by myself while concurrently steaming away at Project Velocity. As explained in the description on our website, it’s a huge undertaking. Developing a MMORPG is pretty much the most difficult piece of software engineering. Crazy? Probably. Achievable? Definitely.

We have huge plans for PU (I’m thinking I shouldn’t use that acronym). It has required many dozens of plans and documents to explain its direction. Unfortunately I’m not going to reveal too much at this moment, but maybe a little more than you already know. There’s one thing I’d like to clear up, however. It is NOT a pretty fantasy/medieval turn-based RPG. I could count all the grass blades in my sight and the amount of games in such genre will still outnumber them. Project Utopia will be a futuristic game with nothing more than what is scientifically possible. You won’t be playing humans, either.

That’s enough for now. ;) I’ll reveal more as time progresses. Not to alienate your hopes (NPI), but Project Utopia is still in very early stages. The screenshots may look nice, but graphics are only a tiny fraction of the battle. Also, progress will be extremely slow unless we can find more people. Even then, I’m not working on it full time. What will see the project to its finish is our sheer amount of determination.

On a different note, I’d like to remind everyone about the next Game Republic event. It will be held in Leeds on the 12th of January, the subject being “The future of AI”. Unless my plans get screwed somehow, I will be attending the event. So if you’re into that kind of stuff and live in Yorkshire, I recommend you pop along and check it out. More details to follow.

This extremely useful tool allows you to search masses of open source code. It’s nothing new, but I only stumbled upon it the other week and have been using it ever since.

http://www.google.com/codesearch

One of the many cases I find it handy is when I’d like to know how a function is used. For example, search “wxtoolbar(” including quotes to instantly find out how to add a toolbar with wxWidgets. It saves wading through documentation (or lack of it) to learn how to perform simple tasks. You can also enter a string of text describing what you are looking for. Or, if you’re familiar with regular expressions, you can find some very specific code examples.

It’s a must for programmers looking to improve productivity.

I have already written my Christmas list for the jolly man himself, and on that list is the iPod Touch. I’ve been meaning to get my hands on one for a while, in fact, ever since the second generation version was launched back in September.

A few of the new features it boasts is 3D graphics acceleration, built-in speaker, accelerometer, and the App Store through which you can download thousands of games. As a game developer, I’m not going to miss out on an opportunity like this! Ever since I bought my PDA six years ago, I have always loved creating small-screen applications (obviously it was far more primitive than what you can achieve with the iPod). There’s a certain satisfaction to carrying around your own software on the move.

In the meantime I’ll be doing some research. Cross fingers I’ll be able to port TIDE. Because I’ve abstracted OpenGL, it might indeed be possible to create an OpenGL ES wrapper. I’ll just have to wait until the big day to find out.