• July 17^th 2008
  Demos: Mushroom's Ride

  Finally, here it is: a new APOCALYX demo, Mushroom's Ride. Move the fairy through the stone blocks to collect as many mushrooms as possible. As usual, the sources are included so users can easily modify and extend the demo at will. In fact, the source is written in a "*.lua" file, that one can modify with a simple text editor, while the data is included in a "*.dat" file, that is nothing else than a ZIP renamed. Enjoy the demo!

APOCALYX is a 3D engine based on OpenGL, OpenAL and other free libraries suitable in particular for the development of Programming Games, the genre of games like GUN-TACTYX or JROBOTS, where the player programs the AI of his own team of bots to make it fight against teams written by other players.

The engine already includes features such as the rendering of sky boxes, cloud layers, lens flares, flat terrains and height fields even with reflections, infinite terrains, wavy surfaces, sprites, billboards, meshes with diffuse, gloss, environment and bump mapping, particles emitters, planar shadows, the loading of 3DS and OBJ meshes, the animation of MD2, MD3, MS3D and Cal3D models, the loading of BSP levels with collision detection and lightmaps, the support for OpenGL vertex and fragment programs and the support of the GLSL language for vertex and fragment shaders, the playback of MIDI, OggVorbis and MP3 soundtracks, the spatialization of 3D sound, the capture of sound samples, the management of compressed data and a particle-based physics engine suitable for the simulation of flags, cloths and articulated, soft or rigid bodies.
The engine also includes and provides easy access to libraries such as the ODE physics engine, the ColDet Collision Detector, the Cal3D Animation Library, the LUA scripting language to describe and control the scenes without any recompilation, the Tiny C compiler for fast compilation of C time-critical code and the C Scripting Language, the AngelScript Language and the SMALL language for fine control of bots' AI.
Then, to help the development of interesting AI, the engine also uses the MicroPather library (for A* path finding algorithms), the OpenSteer library (for the implementation of steering behaviors) and a library to define and control finite state machines.
Finally, to layout the graphical user interface, the engine includes the AntTweakBar library (for simple dialog boxes to tweak scene parameters) and the GLGooey library (for complex GUIs with a complete set of widgets).

Visit the Features page for a more detailed list.

The engine is completely scripted and no recompilation is needed to create new contents. You must simply program your scripts using the LUA language, or other languages available, and add your media files.
The current implementation of the engine supports only Win98 (or higher) with an accelerated graphic card and OpenGL drivers installed (the more recent the better).

Does this engine really work?
It's simpler to see than believe, so download it and run the demos!
How can you create your own contents?
It's simpler to do than explain, so download it and read the tutorials!
Further questions?
No problem, Send an email to leo!

• June 26^th 2008
  Editor: NsEditor V3.1 is released!

  Great news from Nout! After a few weeks from the first annoucement, another release of his game editor is available for download. Nout says:

  NsEditor is a script editor customised for use with APOCALYX plus a game framework, using entities, strongly tied with the editor. Download now the new version of NsEditor!

  In this version only minor improvements have been added and a few bugs are resolved:

  • the property editor keeps the picklists updated after changes are made to the zip file
  • Files are put in picklists selectively
  • ScriptFiles directly point to the script directory
  • A default tool directory was added
  • The APOCALYX screen starts by defualt with a larger screen size
  • A script file can be opened directly from the property window
  • etc...

  Few updates have been made to the framework and a set of new entities is added

  • HUD: to display scores, health etc... in a graphical way
  • FlipBook: To show one out of multiple pictures by index, or the run a short animation, eg. an explosion
  • Menu: Shows an array of graphical buttons. Can be toggle, click or radio buttons. Can be used, eg. as popup menu, or selection menu
  • AviToTexture: enables to use avi's as a texture for a billboard or a texture for a splash screen in just a few clicks
  • Text3D: Add a 3D text to the scene
  • And some more small improvements where added into multiple existing entities

  Thank you Nout for this great tool!

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• June 1^st 2008
  Editor: NsEditor V0.3 released!

  Great news from Nout: the last release of his game editor is available for download! Nout says:

  NsEditor is a script editor customised for use with APOCALYX + it is a game framework, using entities, strongly tied with the editor. The idea for NsEditor was born about 2.5 years ago. The main driving force was to make it easier and faster to develop a game.

  Want to give it a try? Then download the complete package at FileFront.
  For any questions or remarks, please use the APOCALYX forums, under Tools, NsEditor V03.

  In most games, quite some features that are needed repeat. Eg. you often will need a player that can walk around, a weapon, pickable objects, a menu, controllable avatars, lights, moving objects, a HUD, a conversation or text message, collision detection etc. Entities are small pieces of code that own one of these functions and the framework is the core code that makes all these entities to correctly interact. With a rich library of entities, building a small and working game takes some hours (assuming you have the media available) rather then weeks. The framework is open and allows to interleave entities and standard coding.

  The main features NsEditor brings are:

  • Script editor with multiple editor windows, syntax highlighting and function parameter list preview
  • GlGooey skinner build in
  • Media previewer build in
  • Entity property editors with picklists
  • Zip file support (adding, deleting, preview)
  • World Editor for APOCALYX (Goto, Select, Move, Rotate, Scale objects + Resize bounding box, top, side, front view, automatic BBox calculation etc.)
  • Function and variable lists for all entities, with a goto feature
  • A today still very poor working debugger (to be improved in the next release)
  • The full framework including about 40 entities, all of them open source"

  Thank you Nout for this great tool!

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• April 28^th 2008
  Engine: Version 0.9.2

  The 0.9.2 release of the engine includes improvements in the rendering of several model formats and bug fixes. To download the engine in a easy-to-get 60 Mb installer go to the Downloads page.

  • New demo (in DemoPack3):
    • TheTrenches shows how to animate MDL models.
  
  You can download the runtime of the engine and the demo packages from the Downloads page. For more detailed descriptions of the demos, visit the Demos page. Feel free to ask more about the new engine capabilities on the forums or by e-mail. Visit the APOCALYX Blog to read daily news about the engine and its development.

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• April 14^th 2008
  Movies: New Movie Available

  A long time has passed since the last movie about APOCALYX and a lot of new demos were created in the meantime, so I collected several cuts, joined them together in an AVI file and uploaded its 20Mb to YouTube.
  If you are interested, visit the APOCALYX BLOG to get a direct link to this new movie.

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• April 10^th 2008
  Blog: First Posts in the APOCALYX Blog

  Ok, I know it's boring to wait for news about the APOCALYX 3D Engine on the official site (here), so I have decided to start a blog that I'm going to update often with news about the recent developments. Visit it at http://apocalyx.blogspot.com

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• March 3^rd 2008
  Engine: Full Installer (Version 0.9.1)

  The 0.9.1 release of the engine is now available as a single 50 Mb installer for Windows: a must for those lucky enough to navigate through a fast internet connection. Visit the Downloads page to get the installer.