Quote:Original post by Structural

Quote:Original post by guyver23
Your experience may not be the same as mine, but every time I've tried to study a complete, working game of that magnitude, all I've ever gotten out of it was increased confusion. :(

Try to focus at one certain aspect of the engine. I took Torque and peeked at the networking/ghosting/SIM part for half a week (trying to figure out a problem I had with syncing objects) and learned a lot of that. Also digging through the animation part of Torque (to take control of one specific bone from script) taught me a lot about how skeletal animation is implemented.

Aimlessly looking at an engine will indeed not help you a lot.

I should put out, that just becouse these guys are professionals doesnt mean that know everything they are doing, so reading the source code will show you how they did it but it may be riddled with bag codeing, hacks, and may not be the fastest way of doing it. The fact that they are professionals means that they normaly are under time constraints and normaly will try and speed up the coding by using these speed hacks which are not the best way of doing things..

Yeah, game coders often like to claim that "the best coders work in games", but all the evidence I've seen is that in general, game development has little to do with good software development. The idea that "if it works it's a success" is NOT how software development/design should be, but games are quite an extreme branch of software.

Quote:Original post by Alpha_ProgDes
are there any other 3D games/engines that are fully GPL?

Id is the only game company that I have heard of releasing source. Panda 3d is open source, it is used in Disney's toon town MMO game. There are a few open source engines that as far as I know have never been used in commercial games, such as crystal space and ogre.