Open Source Maratis 3D Engine that supports Blender natively

Found this new open source 3D engine called Maratis 3D by accident...



"Maratis is a portable, simple and visual game development tool designed for artists and developers.

The Engine has been tested on Windows, Mac and iPhone, and can be virtually used on every platform.

Maratis is Free and Open-source.
Use a simple Lua scripting langage or have access to the full Engine in C++."



Main features

- Editor based environment
- Light and powerful Engine (MCore + MEngine), portable, both previous and next generation (Fixed pipeline and Shader based pipeline)
- Per pixel lightning, custom shaders (glsl), normal map, dynamic shadows, animated meshs…
- Multilayered uvMaps (custom multitexture, baked light map, etc)
- Bullet physics, 3D sound, Font system (can load TTF)
- Standard image and sound format (TGA, JPG, PNG, WAV, AIF, OGG…)
- Lua scripting language
- C++ SDK








Editor

- Simple and intuitive editor, what you see is what you get
- Plugin system (dll for windows, dylib for mac)
- Scene and objects edition
- Undo / Redo system
- Play testing (play the game inside the editor)
- Very powerful Behavior System
- Project managment with dynamic Game plugin (Each project load his own Game.dll)
- Automatic assets updating (for meshs, textures, shaders, sounds, etc)
- Powerful mesh format with animation (materials, textures, shaders, armatures)







Engine

- Simple and clear C++ code, portable
- Used as the Editor SDK
- Virtual contexts and loaders (graphics, sounds, file formats)
- Virtual Renderer System (Editor integrate MFixedRenderer and MStandardRenderer by default)
- Data managment (Static and Dynamic)
- Virtual Game class System (to focuse on game code or to cutomize the game pipeline)
- Support embedded systems (OpenglES, iOS…)
- and more…










Looking at the features - its got some incredible looking screenshot in particular it supports dynamic shadow in iPhone. Automatic assets updating sounds pretty good too (like they took a page right out of Unity!)

 

Thanks for the info!, i like lua... will test it now =)
http://www.maratis3d.org/

 

Lua is easy to use. It's like python but simpler. But i think if one need the power will have to use the underlying c++ codes. The interface looks really cool though. Thanks for sharing.

 

Shadowmapping on the iPhone isn't impossible with Unity. I mean if you got some shading knowledge and know some matrix maths, how RT/buffer works, etc, Isn't a hard task. They are however intensive (even for simple scenes). Obviously Maratis shadows demos are done on tiny (almost-empty) scenes. Now putting all that in a real game workflow, is a different story. ^^

 

Wow, an open source Unity! Thanks, ike

 

Looks like this engine can use radiosity normal maps?... or i haven´t understood it very well.. but looks very fine..!

 

not really. It's extremely well performing to use soft shadows on ipad2. You get about half your framerate killed if you offload it to a thread, so 30fps where it would have been 60 or so.

With hard shadows, it's even quicker - but has to be coded natively - ie in unity. It's a myth the device can't do shadows well.

Obviously this is sort of sane scenes - about the polygon count of shadowgun. I know all this because a friend who works on this stuff is prepping it for their next game. It's not done in unity though, sadly.

I think we'll be seeing plenty of competition re: shadows on ios soon enough. I wonder though, if its worth sacrificing half your framerate for. Mostly, it saps fill rate like hell apparently. But thats something ipad2 deals with really well.

It's not that you can't use soft shadows or even just shadow maps, it's more: why do you want to? The vast majority of mobile games aren't doom3.

 

Wow, the screenshots are amazing, but what really gets me is that the engine uses lua. I wish unity would integrate lua into the engine!

 

Looks really good, I might try it out. How easy is Lua in relativity to UnityScript?

 

Lua is not hard to pickup, once you wrap your head around table / metatable in lua which seem the big part of it ( and the way to mimic OOP through use of table ) you should then ready to rock in Lua ^^

 

This is nice. Native Linux support intrigues me very much. I might just have to check this out because of that. Open source too huh? Wow.

 

This is actually one of the cooler things I have seen in a while.

 

Very nice looks like a powerful engine the only thing that's bugging me is its interface looks confusing.

 

It isn't confusing actually. Try it out and see.

 

And the C++ source code is really clean. Just saying that cause having the source is one thing being able to actually use it is another.
Looks like it's even been used for a commercial iPhone game already!
http://www.maratis3d.org/?page_id=155

This guys deservers a big pat on the back for giving this away!


PS. And if it wasn't enough the engine is even released under zlib/libpng License. Meaning "Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it freely"

 

Looks pretty nice. Cheers.

 

Lua is a very easy language to use and very powerful... it uses tables (maps/hashtables) as its core data structure and you can implement OOP through the tables and meta tables (including operator overloading). It is one of the fastest scripting languages and there are JIT versions that make it close to the speed of C (probably not what they use in Maratis). The garbage collection is extremely efficient (unlike say the version of mono inside Unity). Lua was made to be an embedded scripting language so the interface to C/C++ is clean and easy to extend.

I fell in love with Lua when I ported it to Flash using Alchemy (project LuaAlchemy)... keep wishing Unity would make use of Lua and I'm often distracted from Unity by other projects that use it.

I took a look at Maratis and it seemed pretty easy to use... not as far along as Unity but since it was made to work with Blender I didn't have to remap my growing blender interface memorization like I do when working in Unity.

Not as easy to use as Unity nor does it have the same level of community support but definitely a project to keep an eye on... much like the Ogre GameKit (which has a similar approach of using Blender and Lua).

 

Lua is great. Here's an example


-- rotate left
if isKeyPressed("LEFT") and (coll > 1) then
rotate(Player, {0, 0, 1}, 5)
move = 1
end

-- rotate right
if isKeyPressed("RIGHT") and (coll > 1) then
rotate(Player, {0, 0, 1}, -5)
move = 1
end

-- move Sheep
if isKeyPressed("UP") and (coll > 1) then
move = 1
end

 

Unity will beat it at every turn except shadows if you're doing anything remotely ambitious.

 

This topic is seriously not "Unity-related". If I were a "Volunteer Moderator" I would totally close this thread immediately.

 

It is actually. It is comparing the two engines.

 

@killer1390 I was being sarcastic. I think this is a valuable thread, and worthy of discussion.

 

Sorry, I didn't see any sarcasm. :/

 

Eric5h5 you need to close this thread right now since it off topic!

 

dbryson is making a joke because of the threads he has seen closed by the mods. The threads closed were not Unity related. I assume this attitude is based on the confusion of what the Gossip section is allowed to have because the clause "must be Unity related" is not stated in a place where it is readily readable (at least as far as I have seen, the only way to find out is to dig through old threads or get a thread closed/locked).

Back to the topic, I am sure after a while the engine will contain more features to better battle Unity. Will it ever match? I wouldn't bet on it. But if they make it as solid as Unity for only Desktops, I would be all over it.

 

His silly topics (all 4 or 5 of them) have been closed. I agree this is a valid topic with decent comparison in it. That's always useful for unity to have a look at what people are saying and what engines they're using.

 

Key to this engine is that there giving it all to you for free.

 

I started this topic to share the information about this engine, also hoping UT would be serious now to look at implementing dynamic shadow in the mobile platform. I know its not entirely Unity related, but given a FREE solution is able to "out-do" Unity on certain feature (and one of the most coveted feature too), it makes sense to bring this topic into Unity's attention. That's all my intention were when I posted this topic.

 

So again, how is not anti-unity?

 

Because this is for Unity in a way to see that a smaller company is doing what they haven't and with Unity being heavily competitive the thread creator felt it necessary to share to better make Unity developers understand.

 

Sooner or later, shadows will have to be added to iOS and Droid versions of Unity because graphics technology there is advancing in leaps and bounds. I would bet you get your wish for shadows in mobile development within the next 2 years or so, as long as tablets and phones keep advancing as fast as they have been. Don't the high end tablets have enough power to run shadows for a few objects now? Or have I fallen to Nvidia's marketing for droid devices?

 

While this engine has a lot of potential i dont see it as real competitor at the moment. It has very small community, rendering power is quite poor (only for mobiles it might look good enough), editor and tools seem a little wierd and alien. But if more features are added here and there it could be very good option i guess.

 

Yes, not much of a competitor yet, but if the opensource community picks up on it, it may become as useful and stable as blender is to 3D modeling. That I would like to see.

 

Wouldn't something 'anti-unity' be unity related? How can you be against something but not have some kind of relationship with it? Logic fail.

Anyway, the engine looks nice. I downloaded it and their exporter as well. Last I programmed in LUA, I remember it being kind of a pain to use in complex scenarios. I'll have to take another look. Also, since source code is available, it would actually take very little effort to allow C# libraries to do the lifting instead of LUA, which is a project I may embark on.