Free Open Source 3D (Game) Engine - Apocalyx: A Review

Apocalyx 3D engine includes features like 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 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 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.

The engine is completely scripted and no recompilation is needed to create new contents. You 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).

The engine is based on OpenGL. Version 1.5 is better to access some advanced features, but 1.1 should be supported as well. The OpenGL Shading language (GLSL) is fully supported.

Check the included demo. I am impressed with the features.

Apocalyx is used to create programming game - GunTactyx.

Leonardo Boselli, lead developer of Apocalyx, has previously developed popular interactive game JRobots. JRobots & Guntactyx differ from regular games in that they are played by robots which are programmed (given AI) by their developers. While fighting the developers / players do not have any direct input to the game. Your robot has to duke it out alone (or with his teammates in team mode) without any help from you.