Hi, I thought I would ask two questions together to save time and they are kind of related.

First question: Me and an friend want to make a dawn of war type of game to expand our portfolio. My friend is a very competent 2D and 3D artist and I am able to do Input, Sound, AI, UI and general game play programming. The area I lack knowledge in is in rendering (slowly starting to teach myself). Can anyone recommend any good (and preferably free) C++ open source engines that comes with rending capabilities built in. My artist friend would like to be able to use normal and specular maps for his models so having this feature in the engine would be helpful.

Second Question: As mentioned above I am starting to learn rendering and I came across this http://www.escapemot...ents/flame/#top a while back and wanted to try and make my own version (just for fun). Firstly what would people recommend for learning rendering (both 2D and 3D) openGL or directX? And secondly has anyone got an idea how the particles attached to the cursor in that program move, from what I can see it seems to be some sort of spring system, but thought I would ask in case someone happens to have done something similar and I’m going in the complete wrong direction.



Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

If you want an already made engine, I suggest to head to devmaster engines database.
if you want to attempt to build your own, then real time rendering book 3rd edition is great, you learn all the theory from it.
Then books like shaderx and gpu pro cover more advanced shading techniques.

Also, READ THIS.

Also, READ THIS.

ok after reading this, i can see what it means and very true I would be able to write the majority of the code for the game. nether the less i still don't have enough rendering/graphical knowledge at the moment to be able to make the game me and my friend want to do, so any suggestions for the graphical side of things?

A popular and open source 3d graphics engine is Ogre3D.

If you want to learn graphics programming you should learn DirectX (unless you want to publish your game in Linux or Mac).

This is a really good book covering the basics of 3d game programming with Directx 10.

I also recommend Ogre 3D, it does all you are after and a hell of alot more. It also looks after OpenGL and DirectX support.

The community over there is also second to none. If you have a question, you'll usually get the right answer back within minutes.