Crystal Hammer

⏱️Overview

Somewhere around 2006 to 2007 I was learning OGRE in practice by forking an existing project. It was Walaber’s Stunt Playground, original video looked quite different. Is on website, but the sources aren’t available anymore (he’s gone fully commercial).

📜History

OGRE was very popular at that time, had many plugins, so it was the best choice of engine for me. Its version was 1.2.1 (Dagon) then.

GUI was made using CEGUI and physics with Newton Dynamics through OgreNewt. Both of which I didn’t continue to use later since their limitations.

📊Features

The game had few cars, dynamic objects, an editor for placing and moving them, loading/saving maps, replay and sound systems.

Tracks were exported just like objects, which posed a big penalty having no level of detail on them. Plus tedious editing in 3D modellers (not in own editor) and lastly not allowing an optimized terrain, grass or trees.

✍️Motivation

Back then it also had open sources, great to learn from and not too big (180kB total). Compiling them was also not too difficult for me at that time. I learned a lot by modifying the game and it was a perfectly fitting experience that moved me forward in the direction I wanted to learn, without too many obstacles.

➡️Next

The static tracks got me into looking for terrain editors next. And I eventually developed my own track editor years later.

Now, if you know Stunt Rally 😉, you can probably already start spotting something similar. Well the camera system is greatly based on this one. And particles like sparks and dust I developed then are nearly the same.