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Comment by valorzard | Hacker News Reader

I wish there were more standalone 3D renderers like this. This, Ogre3D[0], and Wicked Engine[1] seem to be the last of their kind

[0] https://github.com/OGRECave/ogre

[1] https://github.com/turanszkij/WickedEngine

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Wicked, fully FOSS for non-console targets, I had some fun with earlier this year, it's a great very-modern full-featured D3D-or-Vulkan renderer under active development with a lively yet cozy-sized community (including a handful of folks taking care of the Linux side). The API is easily learned and can be operated via your game code from Lua or C++ or a mix, as you see fit, with Lua scripts being executable also in Wicked's editor app (Windows/Linux).

My hunch is that by sticking to just Windows/Linux/consoles and firmly-decidedly-skipping other cross-platform platforms such as Apple's Metal, mobile's OpenGL, WebGL/WebGPU/WebAssembly, it is kept maintainable, unbuggy (not 100s of bug-tagged Open Github Issues) and capable of ongoing rapid feature iteration.

What do you mean by standalone renderers? There's Forge [0], which was used for Starfield. Also, there's nothing stopping you from taking a popular engine and using it as a renderer only. Remaster of Oblivion is running the original game code underneath and using Unreal Engine 5 for rendering. I assume Diablo 2 remaster did something similar because you can seamlessly switch between old and new graphics.

[0] https://theforge.dev/products/the-forge/

I mean yes you can do that, but it’s pretty hard since the engine expects you to work within its framework. Not saying it’s impossible of course, just annoying. Also, if I’m not mistaken, the forge is just a cross platform graphics wrapper? You still need to write a GLTF renderer and all that yourself if I’m not mistaken.

Does this one count? http://cubeengine.com/

Yeah I guess so, lol. I don't think its super updated though. Pretty sure Red Eclipse has long since forked cube engine and done it's own thing with it

There are a few .NET and Java ones still going at it as well.

LibGDX, jMonkeyEngine, FNA, MonoGame, Silk.NET, Vortice

https://hazelengine.com/ is another

Big fan of the cherno!

bgfx is another option, it's quite active and support modern 3D APIs.

Ah forgot about bgfx. Though, I thought it wasn’t a renderer? Just a high level graphics api wrapper like wgpu?

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