[lisp-game-dev] Announcing Blackthorn 3D, a new game engine for Common Lisp

[Elliott Slaughter]

Hi everyone,

This spring I was lucky enough to be able to spend time working on something
I've wanted to do for a long time--work on a full-blown 3D game engine in
Common Lisp. As a part of CSE 125 at UCSD <http://pisa.ucsd.edu/cse125/> (a
senior design project course in video game), I worked a team with 4 other
people to create a 3D multiplayer video game in 10 weeks. The result is
Blackthorn 3D, and an accompanying demo game named LKCAS.

The game engine uses cl-opengl (with lispbuilder-sdl) for graphics, and
supports particle effects, portals, skinning and animation (with a loader
for the Collada <http://www.collada.org/> format). The custom-built, pure-CL
physics engine has support for swept sphere collisions against the static
environment, allowing us to do things like have the players walk on all the
walls in our levels. The network code was written with usocket and userial,
and easily supports 4 players over a LAN, or even over the internet (albeit
with the latency of your connection). See the following video for an example
of what the engine can do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz1OFjVLvcc

The course is now over, and I am transitioning Blackthorn 3D into being an
open source project. I am planning on being the primary maintainer for the
engine, and am looking to see whether anyone in the community is interested
in helping out. At this point, I am still working on extracting
game-specific code from the engine, but I am hoping that the engine will be
usable in 3rd-party games by the end of the summer.

For more information, source code, and binaries (for Windows), see the
project page:

http://code.google.com/p/blackthorn-engine-3d/

-- 
Elliott Slaughter

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict
the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay
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