Here’s one open source game engine for iOS4 that continues to impress me with its rich features and abilities. The Galaxy Engine is a full game development kit for aspiring iPhone and iPad game developers – complete with a 3D graphics engine – that apparantly uses OpenGL ES platform, a sound engine that uses OpenAL and game center.
One also gets access to tools that are included for level editor, terrain editor, model editor, particle editor and shader IDE. The tool kit can also be used for Mac development. It is licensed under BSD terms – which makes it pretty impressive for the zero cost price.
Below is a 10 minute video that will walk you through all the features and the capabilities of the Galaxy Game Engine –
Click here to view the embedded video.
Here is a brief extract from JAM studios Google Code site. More can be found by visiting the link at the end of this post.
What is Galaxy Engine?
Galaxy Engine is a complete game development package for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It is programmed in Cocoa and uses the OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and OpenAL libraries to give you a powerful core with direct access to iPhone SDK features such as Game Center. Galaxy Engine is designed with indie developers in mind. Which means that it is designed to be as efficient and flexible as possible. It also is one of the only Open Source game engines to include critical tools for game development such as: Level Editor, Terrain Editor, Model Viewer, Particle Editor, and Shader IDE. It also includes features such as: vertex animation, advanced lighting, dynamic shadows, vertex and pixel shaders, normal mapping, parallax mapping, and massive outdoor environments.
Why use Galaxy engine?
Intuitive complete object orientated Objective-C framework designed in the same style as Cocoa allows you to quickly write your game with a relatively small learning curve compared to other C++ based systems. Galaxy engine is extremely flexible and not based on a specific game type which allows you start on your game no matter what it is on day one. Comprehensive source code allows you to confidently configure, edit, and expand the engine right out of the box. Extensive documentation allows you to quickly understand how classes work and how you can use them. Proven stability used in several commercial products from iPhone games to space shuttle simulation software. Powerful and stable tools developed over several years with consistent and clean interfaces will save your company tons of time in programming and game content creation. Native cross platform support with graphics abstraction layer and automatic compilation of all resources to platform specific formats allowing you to develop for iPhone, iPad, and Mac all the time with minimal code and resource changes. JAM Studios and the open source community will continue to support the Galaxy engine by adding new features and updates to the base framework and all its tools so you can be sure it will remain competitive and continue to expand its feature set.
If you want to get started and download the source code etc, please visit the Google Code repository for Galaxy Game Engine.