Greetings, i'm Ed although most of you know me as Crumply. Over the next few weeks I'm going to be investigating and experimenting with different game engines and game making environments and filling you guys in on the details whilst trying to throw in some interesting trivia here and there.

3D games are at the forefront of gaming technology, powering the games industry into a recognisable sector in the economy. In the three months leading up to Christmas in 2006 EA games made profits of £146m_[1] (that's $259m), producing games of extremely high production value for a growing market of consumers.

In the real world I sit in my room and consider the indie gaming community which appears negligible in comparison. In my spare time, which I admit - it's dwindling, I'd quite like to experiment with 3d games design to get some onto the portal but at first look it appears impossible for someone inexperienced in C/C++ to reach such a goal.

Fear not,



Lite-C is a free engine (free when watermarked) but about £35 to buy. It contains a large number of the pre-defined functions from bigger brother Gamestudio A6 which costs around $200 if you want a decent copy, and even more if you want to develop as a team.

I've used Gamestudio before but have never been able to publish any content online due to the bounds of my student loan and the limits of the demo. Now that they've released Lite-C it is much easier for indie gaming enthusiasts to create their own 3D games and engines and publish them online as freeware. This is great news for RPG Makers that aspire to create 3d environments without having to learn a full scripting language such as C/C++. Lite-C utilises C-script syntax - A easier-to-understand watered-down version of C.

Creating your first level in Lite-C is pretty easy. You can load a terrain or level file (there is support for the Quake 3 map format) and fill it with dynamic entites that respond to user input and each other. Adding effects such as sky is one of the Acknex engine's built in features. Dynamic lighting and shadows can be configured with extra coding, as can shaders (Reflections, bump mapping, multitexturing) although some of these features require third party dlls (dynamic link libraries) due to being omitted from Lite-C (but included in Gamestudio A6). Lite-C also employs some of the inbuilt physics functions of Gamestudio making more fluid entity production easy as one line of code.



On top of that you can manipulate external data and strings. You can render information and images onscreen really easily with panels. If your game requires multiple viewports (Say you were to create a rearview mirror) then that can be done just as easily.

This might sound all very complicated, but Lite-C comes with 24 workshops (sample files included), a giant help file and AUM (Acknex User Magazine) is updated regularly with Gamestudio tutorials to help you get to grips with the engine.

I've attempted to use many 3d engines in the past and ended up scratching my head wondering how to get it to print "Hello World!" on the screen. Finding the right engine is a lot like looking for a condom machine in the Vatican. Very difficult indeed. If you're thinking of taking up 3d game production, personally I would recommend you try Lite-C, Gamestudio A6 Demo or perhaps, try modding an existing engine (Someone say Cryengine2?). Just goes to show you don't have to be a multinational corporation to develop impressive 3D applications.

Next week:
Using actionscript and Flash to make games playable by everyone!

Useful Links
The homepage for Lite-C
Gamestudio and Lite-C downloads
Useful A6 tutorials and resources

Sources
[1] BBC News Friday, 3 February 2006, 10:59 GMT
[2] Lite-C Workshop