13 Open Source Game Engines That Developers Can Use

Game Engines are software frameworks that are used by developers for game development. Open source alternatives in this domain are a plenty and many of them are based on the best of games. Here are 13 such game engines that you can use.

1. Syntensity-NG

This is an experimental project to port Sauerbraten/Syntensity from C++ to the web, using Emscripten.

2. Sauerbraten

Sauerbraten is a free multiplayer FPS game by a group of PC (freaks). Originally a conversion for Cube, this has turned into a much better conversion.

3. Panda3D

Panda3D is a game engine, a framework for 3D rendering and game development for Python and C++ programs.

4. FIFE

FIFE is a free, open-source cross-platform game engine. It features hardware-accelerated 2D graphics, integrated GUI, audio support, lighting, map editor supporting top-down and isometric maps, pathfinding, virtual filesystem and more.

5. ScummVM

ScummVM is a program, which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed.

6. DarkPlaces

DarkPlaces is a Quake modification I have built over the course of 6 years on and off experimenting, it got somewhat of an overhaul when the Quake engine source code was released, and I began developing a custom OpenGL-only engine for it and other mods, which supports Windows WGL and Linux GLX, and has greatly improved graphics and image quality.

7. Crystal Space

Crystal Space is a mature, full-featured Software Development Kit (SDK) providing real-time 3D graphics for applications such as games and virtual reality. It is free (LGPL) and cross-platform (Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X).

8. GemRB

GemRB (Game engine made with pre-Rendered Background) is a portable open-source implementation of Bioware’s Infinity Engine.

9. Spring

Spring is a versatile 3D RTS game engine. Using extensively Lua for scripting game-specific code to make nearly every aspect of the engine customizable, from GUI, to unit AI, to pathfinding.

10. Cafu

The Cafu Engine is an all-purpose, modern 3D graphics engine and game development kit, feature complete to get you started quickly.

11. OGRE

OGRE has grown to become one of the most popular open-source graphics rendering engines, and has been used in a large number of production projects, in such diverse areas as games, simulators, educational software, interactive art, scientific visualisation, and others.

12. Delta3D

Delta3D is a game and simulation engine appropriate for a wide variety of modeling and simulation applications.

13. Castle

This is an Open-source (LGPL) 3D game engine for FreePascal/Lazarus.

source: http://www.efytimes.com/