Ogre Forums

Hi everyone,

We are excited to introduce Cyberix3D to this community — a 3D game maker aimed at people who have never written a line of code. You build a game from visual blocks, press play, and it runs. No compiler, no setup.

This is the first time we are showing it here, and it felt like the right place to do it: the engine underneath it is now Ogre.

It has been around for years, and people have published games made entirely inside it. That existing library is also why this post is here: we recently finished rebuilding the whole thing on Ogre, and every one of those games had to keep working.

The rewrite

The original engine was ActionScript 3 on top of Away3D, in the browser plugin era. That road ended, so we rewrote the engine and the editor from scratch in C++ — and picked Ogre to render it.

• Ogre 14.3.1 (Tsathoggua) for rendering, with the components that ship with it: Terrain, Overlay, RTShaderSystem, Paging, Bites, the Octree and PCZ scene managers, ParticleFX, and the Assimp and STBI codecs.

• Bullet through Ogre's own Bullet component, for physics and collision.

• Dear ImGui 1.91.2 for all 2D — not only the editor's own interface, but the 2D layer of the games themselves: buttons, labels, images, HUDs, menus.

• Lua (via sol2) as the runtime. The visual blocks are stored as XML and compiled to Lua, which drives the engine. Nothing is interpreted twice at frame time.

• Emscripten for the browser build — the same engine and the same editor, compiled to WebAssembly and running on WebGL.

It runs in two places, from one codebase

The editor is 100% online: open the site, and the full editor is there in the browser, with your projects stored in your account. There is also a Windows version if you prefer a desktop app — same editor, same projects, and it updates itself.

Finished games can be exported to Windows, the Web and Android and shipped on their own, or simply published on the site and played in a browser by anyone.

What you can build with it

• 3D scenes with terrain, water, sky, fog and lighting, including volumetric light and shadows.

• Physics and collision, characters, vehicles, triggers.

• Skeletal animation, and imported models in a wide range of formats.

• Particle effects — fire, smoke, explosions.

• Custom shaders, written in the editor, on a material or over the whole screen.

• A 2D layer for menus, HUDs and buttons, and sound and music.

• Multiplayer, and an optional AI assistant that can build a scene from a plain-language description.

We tried to keep the surface simple on purpose: most of the depth lives behind sensible defaults rather than in front of you, so a scene is quick to put together and still has somewhere to go.

Links

Site: https://www.gamemaker3d.com
Editor (runs in the browser): https://www.gamemaker3d.com/editor
Games made by the community: https://www.gamemaker3d.com/games
Download for Windows: https://www.gamemaker3d.com/download/windows

A genuine thank you to the Ogre team and to everyone on these forums. A lot of what made this rewrite possible was already sitting in the box, and a lot of the rest we found in old threads here.

Happy to answer questions about any part of it.

-- Cyberix3D Team

Impressive!
What tech are you using to play Ogre apps in web browsers?
S.

Thank you Coming from someone who built SHMUP Creator, that means a lot.

It's Ogre itself. Ogre builds for the web through Emscripten: the same C++ codebase compiled to WebAssembly, rendering through the GLES2 RenderSystem on WebGL2. No wrapper, no second engine.

Notes from doing it on a real-sized project:

• Bullet, Lua/sol2, Dear ImGui and the Ogre components all compile to wasm without special-casing. The editor runs in the browser too, not just the games.

• SDL2 comes from Emscripten's ports, so Ogre Bites works and you get input and the main loop for free.

• No blocking main loop. Anything that used to wait has to become a frame-driven state.

• Custom shaders work, but only in GLSL ES. The desktop dialects and the newer GLSL versions don't carry over. Ogre's OgreUnifiedShader.h is the way around it: write the shader once and it compiles for both desktop and web.

I wrote about the build side here a while back, in a post with a CMakeLists that targets desktop and Emscripten from a single configuration.

Hope it's useful, and good luck with SHMUP Creator.

were the currently available games carried over from your previous implementation or did you create them anew?

Carried over. Almost all of them were made in the old AS3 editor, years ago, and nothing was recreated.

The new engine also adds things the old one never had: shaders and particles built dynamically from the code blocks, volumetric lights, true water reflections. We built those on the foundation Ogre provides.

Ogre is also a far better base than Away3D ever was: much more advanced, faster, far more stable, and we no longer spend our time working around renderer bugs.

Same games, same links, Ogre underneath.

Cool, thanks for sharing