Cs345-2008

Open Source Game Engine Reviews

Items to cover:

What are the capabilities and features - physics, rendering, sound, 2D/3D, scriptable or libraries.
Source langage(s), build language(s).
Maturity - how long has it been around? Are there lots of outstanding bugs? Are bugs getting fixed?
Are people using it? Do they cite examples? What does a Google search yield? CiteSeer?
What tutorials or sample programs are provided?

Jig is a set of Java-based libraries designed to make it easy to incorporate game design and construction into undergraduate CS courses. One of the design goals was to make the abstractions such that it could be adopted at all levels of the undergraduate curriculum. This is an NSF funded project lead by two computer science professors and it appears most of the code was written by their students. It was first used in a class during the Fall of 2007 so the paint is still wet in a few places. They plan to publish a suite of curricular modules for professors to use when integrating JIG into existing courses.

2D, library, Sprite Repository, Wiki with examples. No on-line mechanism to browse the library and no on-line call-level documentation so it's hard to tell exactly what capabilities it has.
Written in Java, callable from Java, built with NetBeans but it looks like Eclipse is supported too.
Not very mature, first and only release Fall, 2007. I could find one paper that referenced it, the one by the project leaders describing it.
The only people I can find using it are the authors.
Two tutorials, SpaceFrenzy and SuperSpaceFrenzy.

MotorEngine is in it's infancy. It has been publicly available for a week and has a status of pre-Alpha. It is the work of a single developer and is not in wide use. Sourceforge lists zero downloads so far and the largest application available that uses the engine is Hello World. According to the project's website: "MotorEngine is a 'work in progress' thing, so don't expect any outstanding features and be ready to deal with bugs (at this moment, at least). Also don't expect good documentation and cool tutorials. Don't expect anything... just use it :)"

As this is our first experience in integrating a game engine into a project, I am under the opinion that we should choose one that has a larger community, better documentation, and has been around long enough to become usably stable. This project doesn't offer us much.