Happy with Urho3D

I had this engine in the pending tasks list since a couple of months (couple>4, really), but at some point I was motivated by a project I saw in FreeGamedev forums. Urho3d is a young project, and the first time I took time to look at it, I wasnt too kind with it. The editor was ugly and non intuitive, from my point of view, I didnt spent time looking at the samples, and also experienced troubles when trying to compile it.

Cant say that all the problems are gone, but in the last weeks I have learned to appreciate Urho3D, despite the lack of certain features, like terrain edition tools. Or (I really miss this) having the editor integrated into the engine itself, like Unity3D and most ocmmercial engines. Being able to run the game, see how it looks, and go back to edit the scene is something really useful.

But something in Urho3D got my attention: it is really easy to learn. Even when I still far from mastering all the engine, I have achieved in a week much more than I had with any other engine.

In the previous images you can see my usual test prototype in action. The rendering quality is not good, but consider that I dont have a decent graphic card, what you see is running on an Intel GMA 4500 gpu, under Linux, with OpenGL 2.1. Currently, it implements isometric like camera, with rotation, scrolling and zoom, character movement with path finding using navigation mesh and probably will add animation support today or tomorrow. All that, in a week, just asking in the forums and studying the samples.

Considering this fast rythm, I can start working seriously on my next project next month, instead of January as I expected.

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A Writer's journey into game development

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