GLVR

GLVR is a 3D library for entertainment virtual reality. It is mostly intended for games, but I also use it to try out ideas and do personal research. The nice thing is that I can unplug and plug new components in without changing the base architecture. For example, When I went from standard texture maps to procedural texturing, it didn't require any architectural changes.

If you would like, you can download the 07.30.00 snapshot of HoverFire.

It's more-or-less platform independent although right now, I've only been using it under Windows 95/98/NT/2k. I plan on at least porting it to Linux.

Currently working features are:

• Standard 3D engine features
• Support for TGA 2D files and OBJ 3D files, plus various geometric primitives.
• Real-time continuous level of detail terrain.
• A real procedural texturing system. Some engines claim to have procedural textures, but all they do is let you write to textures. This system has true procedural textures like Maya, where you can plug different operators in to each other.
• A rather accurate flight-model. It even supports ground-effect, although turns and torque are not quite implemented.
• A widget GUI system for cockpits and heads-up-displays
• An extremely flexible 3D scene graph that allows arbitrary material types (including eventually multi-texturing), arbitrary objects (including levels of detail and procedurally generated objects), and more.
• A well-constructed data type library that lets you treat matricies, vectors, bitmaps, and other types as first-class variables

It is all written in object oriented C++. Right now I'm using GLUT to handle the windowing system, although that will likely change, most likely to wxWindows.

Want to see it?

I've created a demonstration game in GLVR, called HoverFire. It will be the first GLVR game; this is a mere demonstration of what HoverFire will be like. It already features a flight model and demonstrates the procedural texturing and dynamic level of detail features.