I'm not that keen on Irrlicht although I haven’t really followed progress this last year. Initially we looked at ogre and irrlicht. Back then I got the impression that although there was a lot of enthusiasm in irrlicht the development wasn't very organized, no strict plan, or overal design focus. A lot of things being patched in and fixed later. Kind of what you expect in a lot of open source projects.
Back then different media formats used different animation systems and you had to use a different one depending on what rendering features you required. B3d if you wanted multiple UV's, but no animation support,If you wanted baked lightmaps that was the only format that supported it. Another format if you wanted bone anim etc. And different formats used completely different functions for animation to work. The whole thing seemed like a mess.
Ogre was quite different with a mature, experienced and disciplined core team, a consistent design plan, and very strickt approach to developing and supporting features.
Flow has three developers. Lina, an exceptional C++ fanatic, who's very disciplined and works in a very structured methodical way, picked up Bmax very quickly and thinks its a great prototyping language.
Cygnus who has been using Blitz languages since the beginning, he's a veteran blitz coder with a lot of talent.
I've been the technical artist, having worked in teams on commercial games my role has been more of a producer, and with flow I've mostly been involved with high level stuff like scripting, UI, and assisting in the design and development of flowed and a CAD visualization tool that brought about our requirement for a modern render engine in Bmax.
Initially all our efforts were aimed at a lucrative contract job, so flow as a game dev tool got a back seat. But we spent most of the last year working part time, focusing on turning what we had into more of a game development framework. Primarily for in house use, but feel that its also very useful tool for the Blitz and Ogre community.
We have had a lot of swings and roundabouts, the biggest hurdle has been finding a good C++ coder that also sees enough value in Bmax to stick around and put the effort into developing something like flow. Some of you remember the bad experiences we had early on which have largely been responsible for us not releasing anything sooner. After working together for 2 years now were confident in our teams ability to work together. Were mostly making flow for ourselves to use for contract work, we already had some success and that has been our primary motivation for developing flow. We do think that it’s a valuable asset for both the ogre and b3d communities.
To be honest if Gabriel is in a hurry to get his game out, Flow after 2 years is still in beta which means we think that in a lot of situations it will see you through. But there are still areas that need attention. I do think it's worth Gabriel looking at if he has time over the next couple of weeks. It's likely to remain in beta for a few months yet, once the beta is released we will be upgrading to Ogre 1.6 which was just released, and Newton 2.0 which is itself in beta.
Back then different media formats used different animation systems and you had to use a different one depending on what rendering features you required. B3d if you wanted multiple UV's, but no animation support,If you wanted baked lightmaps that was the only format that supported it. Another format if you wanted bone anim etc. And different formats used completely different functions for animation to work. The whole thing seemed like a mess.
Ogre was quite different with a mature, experienced and disciplined core team, a consistent design plan, and very strickt approach to developing and supporting features.
Flow has three developers. Lina, an exceptional C++ fanatic, who's very disciplined and works in a very structured methodical way, picked up Bmax very quickly and thinks its a great prototyping language.
Cygnus who has been using Blitz languages since the beginning, he's a veteran blitz coder with a lot of talent.
I've been the technical artist, having worked in teams on commercial games my role has been more of a producer, and with flow I've mostly been involved with high level stuff like scripting, UI, and assisting in the design and development of flowed and a CAD visualization tool that brought about our requirement for a modern render engine in Bmax.
Initially all our efforts were aimed at a lucrative contract job, so flow as a game dev tool got a back seat. But we spent most of the last year working part time, focusing on turning what we had into more of a game development framework. Primarily for in house use, but feel that its also very useful tool for the Blitz and Ogre community.
We have had a lot of swings and roundabouts, the biggest hurdle has been finding a good C++ coder that also sees enough value in Bmax to stick around and put the effort into developing something like flow. Some of you remember the bad experiences we had early on which have largely been responsible for us not releasing anything sooner. After working together for 2 years now were confident in our teams ability to work together. Were mostly making flow for ourselves to use for contract work, we already had some success and that has been our primary motivation for developing flow. We do think that it’s a valuable asset for both the ogre and b3d communities.
To be honest if Gabriel is in a hurry to get his game out, Flow after 2 years is still in beta which means we think that in a lot of situations it will see you through. But there are still areas that need attention. I do think it's worth Gabriel looking at if he has time over the next couple of weeks. It's likely to remain in beta for a few months yet, once the beta is released we will be upgrading to Ogre 1.6 which was just released, and Newton 2.0 which is itself in beta.