We are making a 3D game...
So we need to decide if we use one of the many existing 3D engines out there, like Ogre3D, or the Irrlicht Engine... Both are open source, and I have already used Ogre... Alternative is to create our own engine... Tim has done this in the past, and I could use the expreience...
We decide on making our own... We will know the workings, and can put in exactly what we need, nothing more... And, one of the more important considerations, make sure we build it cross platform...
Physics is the next consideration...
Havok looks awesome, and is free to use these days... The main issue Tim has with Havok is that it is not Mac compatible, and his laptop is an old Mac...
So we look at alternatives...
We consider the Newton engine, which a friend of ours used with Ogre and didnt like much... We thought it sounded ok, being compatible with various platforms... ODE was another though, but I guess I have a prejudice against it, as I used it in Ogre and took it out quickly...
The Bullet Physics Engine is what we ended up with... Written by a former Havok employee, it is compatible with various systems, including the latest PS3 and XBox 360... We have hopes of getting into XBox Live, so this cross platform aspect was important... Also, it was recommended by a friend of ours...
After delving through the physics demos and looking at the various pieces of code, we started planning our renderer... We have already discounted the need for a Scene Graph, and have found a lot of the necessary Data Structures in the physics engine...
We have begun abstracting interface classes for display, rendering, and input, and have successfully set up 2 development environments : Visual Studio on my Windows machine, and Tim is trying out NetBeans on his Mac...
We currently have a resizable window that Draws nothing, and event calls are printing lots of useful information to the console... The information is incorrect, but at least it is there... It is my job to get this sorted out...
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