What is up? Not much by the looks of it. I'm finally starting to go out and dig up the various game engines written in .NET that I can leverage in the project I'm revisiting (as I'm not really in the mood to reinvent a wheel that has already been re-invented like a hundred million billion times by various college students out there (here's a theory: I think there are more game engine projects out there than hamburgers McDonald's has sold in the entire history of their company)).
So, what did I find? Sadly, not really anything to write home about. I found several projects, they were just in several stages of disarray. Several of them even have had a good amount of effort spent on them in the past. Some of them even show some progress and potential if only they were still active. Let us review ladies and gent's.
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Axiom: practically dead from what I can tell (the source forge project's home page isn't even functional and there are no binary or source files available for download).
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Realm Forge: somewhat active. There hasn't been _any_ news on the main page in quite a while when I visited the site. On top of that, there is very little documentation of any redeemable quality. Sure, there is some auto-generated documentation on the API but actually usage documentation is several lacking. From what I saw on the wiki, there is but one "real" tutorial posted. The extent of the tutorial is a single C# source file where the "tutorial" is embedded in C# comments. Not exactly what I would call a "quality" tutorial.
Sure, I could go and figure it all out myself. I may even still do that. Just call me spoiled. After working with the numerous .NET libraries and products I have at work, I like to be using a product that is supported and can at least point me in the right direction when things go astray.
To be fair, I'm not entirely disappointed. Realm Forge is looking to put itself forward as "the entire package" and not just a pretty renderer. I think it has some potential in that regard too. It wraps up a bunch of different components in order to package itself as a complete game engine. I just think it has quite a bit of "maturing" to go through until it reaches that point.
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Haddd 3D: it looks pretty and looks like it has potential. The drawback for me? All tutorials and help docs that I could find were written in Spanish. I know that the code should be enough, but I'm on a sojourn to find the "complete package" (or as darn near as I can find to it) and would like to be helped along in the process. Once again, I know I'm a lazy bones so telling me so won't provoke me in the least bit.
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Maybe I've just been out of the loop for that long now (how depressing). The next ones on my list to investigate are Irrlicht and Purple#. I'm hoping they will be a little more promising than the ones investigated so far. Have any of you come across some good .NET-based game engines or 3d engines that you like using?
In the meantime, I think I'm just going to go dink around with Ogre3d in C++ for a while and see what kind of fun I can have. Ciao!