read me.txt

小型的3D游戏引擎

Welcome to the Gimcrack engine.
							
Gimcrack started out as a very ambitious project. We were going to make a 3D Tank Shooter as our special project in the final year of high school. However we soon realized that that would not be possible due to the time limit (less than a year) and decided to concentrate on making a terrain engine. That we succeeded with.
 
Gimcrack is a more or less complete 3D terrain engine, it does not support any physics (although bounding boxes collision detection are present) but as a terrain rendering engine it's fully working. It render the terrain out of a 2D height map and populate it with		
objects (models). The rendering of the terrain is speeded up by the use of a quadtree and frustum culling, and it also uses a technique that'll place the vertices on the graphic cards memory on nVidia cards for further speed improvements.										
Gimcrack is probably not the engine for the hardcore game programmers, but rather for the beginners. If you get confused by the code of Quake 2 but still want to	know how a engine works, this is for you. Gimcracks code is much easer to understand than other engines code, this is because it's not as heavily optimized as other engines. Of course, it means a bit less performance, but in return it's easier to understand how the engine works. Gimcrack is written for beginners, by beginners.	
		
It is written in C++ using OpenGL as rendering API and is roughly 13.000 lines of code.	

During development tutorials from gamedev.net,	gametutorials.com and nehe.gamedev.net was used. A big thanks goes to them for thier help in the development of this engine.										


This is the complete complete soruce code to the Gimcrack egine. You may use this code as you see fit under the GNU GPL licence. This means pretty much that you can do whatever you want with it as long as you always give the source code for free and give credits where it's due.
If you, after experimenting, comes up with someting you absolutely do not want to release the source code for then mail us, and we'll most likely be able to work something out.

In order to compile this code you need to add the egine and framework dir to your Visual Studio default dirs (or change the includ paths).
In order to run after compile you'll need to have the data dir with all the graphic/models in the "test game" dir. You can get the data dir from the binary package found at the same page you found this.

If you want to ask any kind of questions concerning this code and/or give feedback to it you're welcome to send a mail to [e-mail] and/or charliec at-sign-here home.se


This code was written by:
Leon "Spearhawk" Ljunggren
Carl "CharlieC" Johansson

Misc coder:
Jan "triple" Sahlin

Other persons involved in the Gimcrack project:
Patrik "Sputnik" S鰀erberg


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THIS CODE/ENGINE IS PROVIDED AS-IS. THE AUTHORS IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE OR LOSS CAUSED DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY BY RUNNING THIS CODE/ENGINE.