Crystal Space
More info
- Creator
- Jorrit Tyberghein
- Released
- 1997
- Type
- 3D engine
- License
- LGPL
One of the first free 3D game engines, written in C++ from 1997 and for a decade the obvious answer to whether there was an open alternative to the Quake engine.
Belgian developer Jorrit Tyberghein started it as a software renderer built on portals: the world was sectors joined by openings, and only what was visible through them got drawn. That was the same thinking as the commercial engines of the day, except the source was open and the licence was LGPL, so anyone could build on it.
Over the years it grew into a modular plugin system with OpenGL rendering, physics and an entity layer called CEL. That made it powerful but also hard to get into, and once OGRE, Irrlicht and later Unity offered easier ways in, the community thinned out. Development stalled in the 2010s. What remains is mostly a textbook case of open source getting there first and still losing on usability.