Game engines that could potentially be used to spark a FreeBSD gaming revolution

A

A. D. Sharpe Sr.

These are some of the engines that I briefly checked out. The links lead to the part of the codetrees that contain OS specific support, not the root of the codetrees. There're many other engines, but I left out engines who either did not have code repositories online, were for specifically for mobile games, were not primarily coded in C/C++, or did not have any Unix support.

Torque3D engine: https://github.com/GarageGames/Torque3D/tree/development/Engine/source/platformX86UNIX
Has at least some FreeBSD support, but I'm not sure how well it's been exercised.

GoDot engine: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/tree/master/platform
Doesn't have FreeBSD support, but has Haiku support. How'd we get beat by an OS that doesn't even have a real release???

Ogre3D (rendering ONLY): https://github.com/OGRECave/ogre/tree/master/OgreMain/src
Has some support for GLX. It might actually work great.

Panda3d engine: https://github.com/panda3d/panda3d/tree/master/panda/src
Has some support for GLX. It might actually work great.

Irrlicht engine: https://sourceforge.net/p/irrlicht/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/source/Irrlicht/
Has some support for GLX. It might actually work great.

Delta3D engine: https://sourceforge.net/p/delta3d/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/delta3d/src/
Has some X11 support. Not sure of how functional it is.

Quake2 engine: https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-2
Has native Linux & native Irix code, but doesn't have native FreeBSD code. Has generic Unix code, so maybe that could be used as a basis for creating native code for FreeBSD.
 
games/openmw. From their FAQ:
Do I need Morrowind to use OpenMW?
[...]
No, OpenMW is a complete game engine. It is possible for other projects to use OpenMW and OpenMW-CS to create their own game game. There are several projects currently underway such as:

OpenMW-Template: A bare-bone template “game” with everything necessary to run OpenMW. It can be extended, improved and further developed using OpenMW-CS.

OpenMW-Example-Suite: This uses the OpenMW-Template as a starting part and is OpenMW’s first official “game”, used to show off the OpenMW engine and give content creators an idea on what they can do with the engine.
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tingo said:
Cool. Now you only need to find a few hundred game developers who think that getting games working under FreeBSD is a nice thing.
Click to expand...

Or, the community can prime the well & show them the way by developing a few games within our community (itself) & heavily promote them. There are already 2 such sites that may actually be able to help with promotion:

http://www.bsdgaming.com/
http://www.gamebsd.com/
 
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SFML examples, from https://en.sfml-dev.org/forums/index.php?topic=17188.0:
6WLISme.png

FOvhHxb.gif

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nkYLW.jpg
 
Shameless plug:
Mutiny! (https://github.com/osen/mutiny)

Unfortunately, for 3D games, kids and other game makers only really want to use consumer products like Unity and Flash. This is because they have big chunky editors where kids can make games to show their parents and then immediately discard them. Because Unity and Flash will never be ported to FreeBSD, this has pretty much prevented the vast majority of games from appearing on these platforms.
The marketing budget for Unity is immense and they are present at *every* GameJam, and *every* indie industry event so people immediately jump on the bandwagon and get completely locked into a non-innovative and unflexible platform. I find it very difficult to rip my students away from Unity so that they can actually learn something.

Epic (Unreal Engine 4) is starting to understand the "allure" of a kid friendly GUI editor and so have made a good attempt with their indie-friendly (non-AAA toolchain). The fact that UE4 is not open-source (i.e not BSD or GPL) but the source is available for free after signing a license agreement, it can be ported to FreeBSD and also there is some hope that once Unity and Flash have died, that UE4 can take over.

I know this post was semi-ranty but crap like Flash and Unity does annoy me quite a bit haha. It also allows "pretenders" to swank around telling people that they are 3D graphics developers because they can drag and drop a cube into Unity and press play. I hate working with these people!

sidetone
For 2D games, SDL is certainly the standard these days and works very well on FreeBSD. However, I actually recommend SDL 1.2 (https://www.libsdl.org/download-1.2.php). The reason being is that 2.0 is largely swayed by Valve and portability to platforms such as homebrew, retro, Amiga, RISCOS, DOS, UNIX etc... is very low on their agenda. As such 2.0 is not very portable to anything that isn't a 2012+ desktop operating system, unlike 1.2.
 
Flash not being supported on FreeBSD was a blessing in disguise. Flash being touted as so great, yet being insecure and a failure reminds me of what Systemd is. It is also irrelevant for all intents and purposes, especially in FreeBSD. (That was my rant about Flash).

SDL seems to be limited in it's graphical appearance. While SFML examples look nicer, I've read that SFML is not a low level language like SDL is.

Why not try Godot for 3D?
 
Pascal game development engine using Lazarus and Free Pascal

Castle Game Engine
Website: https://castle-engine.io/

It's probably the most powerful Pascal game engine. It is a game framework not a game builder, you have to integrate it into your Lazarus/FPC to use it. Learning the Castle Game Engine is much harder than ZGameEditor and the resulting binaries are much bigger too. I wish I had more time so I could explore or even use it. Castle Game Engine is really an interesting project.

Multi platform support: Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, Android, iOS, Nintendo Switch
 
The Extensible, Non-Interpreted, GameMaker Augumentation, (otherwise abbreviated ENIGMA), is a free and open source alternative to the popular software GameMaker, which is even compatible with existing GameMaker project formats ranging from GameMaker 6 to GameMaker Studio 1.4, and with support for GameMaker Studio 2 projects in the works.

Currently supports editing and compiling games on and for Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. macOS and Android support are near finished but not entirely useable yet.

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(Screenshots taken on NomadBSD, a FreeBSD-based BSD distro)

Official Announcement:

Announcing FreeBSD Support

enigma-dev.org enigma-dev.org

Example game:
samuel-venable.itch.io

Key to Success by Samuel Venable

samuel-venable.itch.io samuel-venable.itch.io

Note: currently the install instructions require you to DELETE your existing make executable and replace it with a symlink to gmake; please be aware of this before attempting to install. We are looking into a better solution in the meantime. Also, I am the one who ported ENIGMA to FreeBSD, (you're welcome)!
 
I think the key would be to have linux ports of GoG games and steam games working properly due to wine's issue of no wow64 yet
which is very limiting
 
If nvidia keeps sucking or drops their FreeBSD driver support, perhaps something like this will allow us to keep 3D games working on FreeBSD ;)

I hacked this software rasterizer together during a ~24hr games jam at work. I was on a laptop with an old nvidia GPU meaning no 3D acceleration. In hindsight I probably should have just used OpenGL and LLVMpipe, however I guess NIH syndrome struck XD.

ss1.png
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C++ Renderer, Engine and Game: https://github.com/osen/software-3d-renderer
C89 Renderer: https://github.com/osen/rend-c

So if you ever find yourself on a server or VM with no real GPU and still fancy making some 3D games. Feel free to give this a try!
 
People in the BSD community that are talking gaming engines def a great plus for all younger gen... I looked at some of the popular gaming engines (due to success of roblox which is engine as a service = how I look at their business) and many don't even have BSD instruction set to install... Found this little heart-wrenching but anyways their loss.

Once I finish a 2 step immersion system with some blade server I am building for fun will offer some test Jail VM with some engines install... Will be a nice testbed for performance and temp testing when pushing hard on some 16-64 Core processor with some gaming engines on BSD... The test will have to be with NO GPU for now :rolleyes:, processor + ram + ssd or we can test on nvme.
 
I must be crazy. I thought starbound an terraria could be played on any platform with but apparently that is very incorrect, I seem to remember someone getting it to work natively on linux..
Anyone remember something like that? maybe im thinking of stardust valley.
 
isseeder96 said:
I must be crazy. I thought starbound an terraria could be played on any platform with but apparently that is very incorrect, I seem to remember someone getting it to work natively on linux..
Anyone remember something like that? maybe im thinking of stardust valley.
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All these games have native Linux ports, this not at all difficult to verify. Terraria and Stardew Valley in particular are using XNA/FNA, so you can swap the engine for the native FNA build if you so desire. (There is this OpenBSD-centered shopping guide, which is largely an FNA game list: https://www.playonbsd.com/shopping_guide.) For lazy people we also have Linuxulator, it should work as well.
 
what is the point of all this? I have >320 games in steam and for that I have win10 drive and I dual boot with FreeBSD (starting out with FreeBSD and want to port some EDA work there).. but games..I mean each stuff has its own tool/environment. Gaming is dominated primarily by non-technical crowd who do not even know what is command line...yet running FreeBSD... and game dev. community is not going to switch gears in order to support small niche called FreeBSD (or even Linux; Linux gaming is a failure as well)

change my mind.
 
r2com said:
what is the point of all this? I have >320 games in steam and for that I have win10 drive
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For me it is lifespan. You will get to a point in ~10/20 years where a game will only run on i.e an older Windows (i.e 10) but Steam only supports the very latest Windows. So far we seem to have gotten away with it because Windows has fantastic backwards compatibility. However this cannot be kept up indefinitely, especially one the world progresses onto newer architectures. When it happens, things like Linux / FreeBSD / Wine will be in place to pick up the slack.

r2com said:
change my mind.
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Not necessary. The future will come and you will likely adapt to it gradually. Things don't happen over night (luckily).
 
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