- ORX
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ORX 
Developer(s) orx-project.org Stable release [1] / 15 May 2011 Platform Cross-platform Type Game engine License zlib license Website http://orx-project.org/ Orx is an open source, portable, lightweight, plugin-based, data-driven and easy to use 2D-oriented game engine written in C.
It currently runs on Windows (MinGW and Visual Studio versions), Linux, Mac OS X (10.4-10.6, PowerPC & X86), iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad and Android.
Contents
General information
Orx provides a complete game creation framework including a 3D scene graph, hardware accelerated 2D rendering, animation, input, sound, physics and much more.
Its main goals are to allow fast game prototyping and creation.
Orx is published under Zlib license.
Features
Despite being written in C, Orx has an object oriented design with a plugin architecture.
This allows its kernel to be cross-platform and delegates hardware- and OS-dependent tasks to plugins.
Most of these plugins are based on other open source libraries, such as SFML, SDL and Box2D.
Build files are provided for GCC makefiles, Visual Studio (2005 & 2008), Codelite and Xcode.
- Orx currently contains most of game engine "common" features
- automated sprite rendering using 3D hardware acceleration allowing: translations, anisotropic scale, rotation, transparency (alpha blending), coloring (multiply, add and subtract blends), tiling and mirroring
- camera/viewport system allowing multiple views on one screen with camera translations, zooms and rotations
- 3D scene graph used for object positioning, allowing grouped translations, rotations and scales
- sound and music with volume, pitch and loop control
- collision detection and rigid body physics and joints
- animation system
- event management
- fragment (pixel) shader support
- unicode support
- custom bitmap font rendering
- real time CPU profiler
- It also provides more unusual features[1]
- object creation is data driven: managing resources requires very little code, everything is controlled through configuration files.
- a clock system: this allows the user to keep time consistency everywhere, giving him the ability of doing local or global time stretching.
- an animation chaining graph: animation transitions are defined in a graph, this allows the code to request only the final target animation; all transitions will be automated depending on the starting animation.
- a custom animation event system: allows easy synchronization with parts of animations
- a visual FX system: config-based combination of curves of sine, sawtooth and linear shapes that can be plugged on object properties: color, alpha, position, translation or rotation.
- an automated differential scrolling: depth scaling and differential scrolling is controlled through config files, allowing differential parallax scrolling on any number of planes.
- a powerful configuration system: featuring inheritance, direct random control, encryption/decryption, filtered save and history reload. This allows the user to tweak almost everything without having to change a single line of his code.
- a spawning system: this allows the user to easily create weapon bullets or, combined with the visual FX system, elaborate visual graphic effects.
- an easy UI object positioning system: helps supporting different aspect ratio and provides easy picking/selection framework.
- a generic input system: allows to use any kind of controllers (mouse, joystick, keyboard, touch, accelerometer, ...) through an abstract layer. The user asks for input status using plain names, bindings being done in config files or on the fly for user input customization, for example.
- The current list of WIP features that will be added in the future
- scripting support: this allows access to all orx kernel code and user-defined plugins.
- a package system: this will allow the use of separated resource files for development builds and packed ones for release versions with no code change.
- network support.
History
A brief history of Orx:
- Around 2002
- a community of French gamers decides to create a point-and-click adventure game named "La guerre des pâquerettes" (Daisy War). This project will be Orx's cradle.
- End 2005
- Sourceforge project registered under the arcallians collective.
- July 23, 2008
- orx-project.org becomes the new project maintener.
- September 1, 2008
- Orx v0.9.0b, fully working on windows and linux, is officially released.
- May 17, 2009
- Orx v1.0rc0, the first release candidate for the v1.0 is released.
- September 4, 2009
- Orx v1.0 final is released.
- January 26, 2010
- Orx v1.1 is released.
- April 11, 2010
- Orx for iPhone v1.2 beta is released.
- July 19, 2010
- Orx v1.2 is released.
- May 15, 2011
- Orx v1.3rc0 is released.
See also
References
- ^ "About Orx". http://orx-project.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3&Itemid=8. Retrieved 2009-03-08.
External links
Categories:- Free game engines
- Free software programmed in C
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
