• July 18^th 2014
  Tutorials: You Dev .it

  The Apocalyx 3D Engine is adopted as the main development tool at You Dev .it a new site devoted to tutorials about apps and games programming. There are sections about 3D Games programming, 2D Games programming, Text Games programming and more.
  
  The 2D section adopts the TooDee Engine, while the tutorials about text adventures (interactive fiction) use the Inform 7 IF Design System.
  
  To visit the site, follow this link: http://youdev.it

  

• July 1^st 2013
  Engine: Version 0.9.3

  The 0.9.3 release of the engine includes some improvements and bug fixes. To download the engine in a easy-to-get 60 Mb installer go to the Downloads page.

  • New features:
    • Added MDLModel functions: setTransition(), setTransitionTimer(), getStoppedTransition()
    • Added IM (Imaging Toolkit) support in IUP GUI
    • Added primitives: Cylinder, Disk, PartialDisk, Sphere
    • Added setPointerVisible(), isPointerVisible()
    • Added string.pack(), string.unpack()
    • Fixed bug in collisions between ODE objects and BSP geometry
    • Added support for Arbitrary Precision Math (MAPM)
    • Added support for Video Capture functions (experimental)
    • Added support for MySQL databases
    • Added support for SQLite databases
    • Removed AngelScript language support
    • Removed SMALL language support
    • Removed CSL language support
  • New demo (in Full-Installer):
    • Mushroom's Ride shows some of the engine features at work.
  
  You can download the runtime of the engine and the demo packages from the Downloads page. For more detailed descriptions of the demos, visit the Demos page. Feel free to ask more about the new engine capabilities on the forums or by e-mail. Visit the APOCALYX Blog to read daily news about the engine and its development.

APOCALYX is a 3D engine based on OpenGL, OpenAL and other free libraries suitable in particular for the development of Programming Games, the genre of games like GUN-TACTYX or JROBOTS, where the player programs the AI of his own team of bots to make it fight against teams written by other players.

The engine already includes features such as the rendering of sky boxes, cloud layers, lens flares, flat terrains and height fields even with reflections, infinite terrains, wavy surfaces, sprites, billboards, meshes with diffuse, gloss, environment and bump mapping, particles emitters, planar shadows, the loading of 3DS and OBJ meshes, the animation of MD2, MD3, MS3D and Cal3D models, the loading of BSP levels with collision detection and lightmaps, the support for OpenGL vertex and fragment programs and the support of the GLSL language for vertex and fragment shaders, the playback of MIDI, OggVorbis and MP3 soundtracks, the spatialization of 3D sound, the capture of sound samples, the management of compressed data and a particle-based physics engine suitable for the simulation of flags, cloths and articulated, soft or rigid bodies.
The engine also includes and provides easy access to libraries such as the ODE physics engine, the ColDet Collision Detector, the Cal3D Animation Library, the LUA scripting language to describe and control the scenes without any recompilation, the Tiny C compiler for fast compilation of C time-critical code and the C Scripting Language, the AngelScript Language and the SMALL language for fine control of bots' AI.
Then, to help the development of interesting AI, the engine also uses the MicroPather library (for A* path finding algorithms), the OpenSteer library (for the implementation of steering behaviors) and a library to define and control finite state machines.
Finally, to layout the graphical user interface, the engine includes the AntTweakBar library (for simple dialog boxes to tweak scene parameters) and the GLGooey library (for complex GUIs with a complete set of widgets).

Visit the Features page for a more detailed list.

The engine is completely scripted and no recompilation is needed to create new contents. You must simply program your scripts using the LUA language, or other languages available, and add your media files.
The current implementation of the engine supports only Win98 (or higher) with an accelerated graphic card and OpenGL drivers installed (the more recent the better).

Does this engine really work?
It's simpler to see than believe, so download it and run the demos!
How can you create your own contents?
It's simpler to do than explain, so download it and read the tutorials!
Further questions?
No problem, Send an email to leo!

• June 30^th 2013
  Forum: New Apocalyx FORUMS Available!

  Thanks to Tom, the official forums related to the APOCALYX 3D Engine has been hosted at xfuj.com for a long time. Now SourceForge.net has provided phpBB support to their users, so I have decided to free Tom's server and move to the new phpBB server. Thank Tom for you great service!

  The new APOCALYX Forums are divided into the usual sections:

  • GENERAL SUPPORT
    This section is devoted to questions about the general usage of the engine, such as, but not only, the use of a particular feature or library, report strange behaviors in your own code, or ask for help in the development of tricky algorithms. Also questions about the Lua scripting language are welcome, because Lua is the main language used in the development of APOCALYX-based demos and games.
  • GAMES DEVELOPMENT
    This section is devoted to questions about the development of games using THIS ENGINE (not games development in general), such as, but not only, the application of particular features or libraries to realize a certain technique useful for your game, report strange behaviors in a large project, or ask for help in the development of the game itself.
    Remember also that I post daily news about the development of my own games on the APOCALYX 3D Engine BLOG.
  • ENGINE DEVELOPMENT
    This section is devoted to questions about the LGPL C++ sources of the engine, such as, but not only, the included source code of a third-party library, report strange behaviors in C++ code that you have modified, or ask for additional built-in features. Questions about the C++ language are NOT welcome, because the modification of existent code requires a very good knowledge of C++.
  • TOOLS SUPPORT This section is devoted to questions about the third-party tools that you may used to develop your APOCALYX-based demos and games, such as, but not only, the use of a particular source editor (there is a very good one, currently in development, known as NsEditor), the use of certain resource editors (like the BSP editor GtkRadiant), or the other tools listed in the Tools page of the official APOCALYX site. In this case, I can't guarantee to help you much with my answers, because my knowledge of those tools is not advanced, but I'll try to answer anyway.

  I hope that these new forums are going to be a useful tool for all the APOCALYX users.
  Feel free to post frequently! I'll answer as soon as possible.

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• June 17^th 2013
  Demos: Mushroom's Ride

  Finally, here it is: a new APOCALYX demo, Mushroom's Ride. Move the fairy through the stone blocks to collect as many mushrooms as possible. As usual, the sources are included so users can easily modify and extend the demo at will. In fact, the source is written in a "*.lua" file, that one can modify with a simple text editor, while the data is included in a "*.dat" file, that is nothing else than a ZIP renamed. Enjoy the demo!

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• April 28^th 2008
  Engine: Version 0.9.2

  The 0.9.2 release of the engine includes improvements in the rendering of several model formats and bug fixes. To download the engine in a easy-to-get 60 Mb installer go to the Downloads page.

  • New demo (in DemoPack3):
    • TheTrenches shows how to animate MDL models.
  
  You can download the runtime of the engine and the demo packages from the Downloads page. For more detailed descriptions of the demos, visit the Demos page. Feel free to ask more about the new engine capabilities on the forums or by e-mail. Visit the APOCALYX Blog to read daily news about the engine and its development.

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• April 14^th 2008
  Movies: New Movie Available

  A long time has passed since the last movie about APOCALYX and a lot of new demos were created in the meantime, so I collected several cuts, joined them together in an AVI file and uploaded its 20Mb to YouTube.
  If you are interested, visit the APOCALYX BLOG to get a direct link to this new movie.