Raptor 3D is a homebrew 3D engine for the PSP. It's a 3D graphics tool for people who want to develop their own homebrew games.

Remember this is at the alpha stage, and there might be bugs, but Kojima's been pretty quick with updating previous versions.

About Version 4, Kojima had this to say: "Here is alpha 4, dedicated to QJ net for mirroring all my releases :)" Aw. Shucks. Yes, Version 4 is now at our download site (click on the link below).

Here's Kojima's description of this latest alpha version:

• An Infinitely Faster Animation System
  Optimized to the absolute brink; the previous demo which ran at 21fps now runs at over 60fps (how much over is hard to tell, with the PSP's 60fps HW limit). So now you can realistically use animated meshes within your app game.
• A Single Surface Particle System
  This is easy to use: it's a particle system where each particle is part of a single surface generated in each frame (optimized so it's fast). This means that even if you have a thousand particles, they are all rendered in one call to glDrawElements. All particles are automatically pointed towards the active camera, and can be textured.
• 3D Text Capability
  The font renderer can now produce 3D text and return them as an entity usable just like any other mesh. You can rotate, scale, and position them anywhere in your 3D world. Like the font renderer, it uses the active font as the texture for the text.
• Material Blend Modes
  Now each material has a blend mode that specifies how it is blended in with the screen. Currently supported is Mask which treats transparent pixels as see-through even on 3D meshes (perfect for fences, windows, etc.). This allows you to use simple geo with complex shapes. Also supported is Solid and Add.
• A 3D Credit System
  Using the 3D text engine, this allows you to create rolling credits (like the credits at the end of a movie or game).
  

The demo included with the code has a rolling intro similar to "Star Wars" movies (it calls for a music file called "theme1" so Kojima explained: "I use the actual 'Star Wars' theme personally but for legal reason I can't include it").

Of course, this latest alpha release also includes more bug fixes and other improvements.

Thanks to Kojima's constant updates, it's becoming a more exciting time for PSP homebrew game makers looking for 3D tools. In fact, there's also another 3D engine from LTE Studios.

Download: [Raptor 3D Alpha 4]

LTE Studios has has rolled out the latest update of 3D Engine SDK. Developed by SiberianSTAR and Ky@, this homebrew application features:

• 3D Engine
• Mixed 2D + 3D
• Powerful and customizable 2D GUI
• Character animation system
• Particle effects
• Billboards
• Dynamic Lights
• Powerful 2D with alpha, blend, etc..
• Six image formats supported
• Eight mesh formats supported
• Fonts support
• Collision and physics integrated
• Powerful terrain system

The latest version, LTE 3D Engine SDK v1.1, changelog includes:

• Fixed buffer overflow which was making PSP crash
• Improved the engine virtual mouse and keyboard
• Added three new style for the fps camera
• Added the audio driver for audio playing

Installing:
It's always good to read the readme file before installing this or any other application, you must read it especially when you're running under win32 and are planning to use this one. To use the LTE 3D Engine you must have Toolchains installed.

Run the Makefile contained in the same directory of this file, and include files and libraries will be installed in your computer.
You can find documented examples in this archive that will explain you the basic of this engine here. To run examples you have to extract the media.zip in your ms0:/ folder. Compile the example doing 'make' or 'make kxploit'.

Download: [LTE 3D Engine SDK v1.1]

Homebrew development is getting easier for newbies to get in; and I really mean it. At first, there wasn't even a toolchain to integrate everything. Then came the toolchain and it pretty much revolutionised homebrew development. This was the case with homebrew games.

Until about a month ago, there wasn't any easy way to make really good games. All the people could do is use Lua and animate a few sprites. Don't get me wrong, some of the games were really nice, but overall, the quality was lacking. Enter two new homebrew 3D engines! The Raptor and LTE engines have made game development a lot easier for people. And since they're coded and used in C++, there will always be a significant speed difference between these games and Lua games, since the fact that Lua is an interpreted language, and C++ is native.

Anyways, on with the news. Kojima has updated his great homebrew 3D engine to alpha 3. I'll remind you that this is still before beta stages, so it will not be perfect, but Kojima must be given full marks for trying and actually accomplishing this feat alone, unlike the LTE engine guys.

The latest alpha contains a lot of new features. I'll quote Kojima here:

"Most notable new feature is full boned animation support. including finally, 100% support for the b3d file format which has exporters for many apps including 3dsmax/milkshape/ultimate unwrap etc.

Included is a already compiled demo with test b3d. press select to exit cleanly back to the os.

Also includes many bug fixes and cleaned up code. No more memory leaks etc."

Now that we have that out of the way, the download link is below. C'mon guys, start making some games!

Download Link: [Raptor 3D Engine Alpha 3]

We earlier reported that LTE Studios has released their custom made free 3D engine for homebrew developers complete with corresponding documentation. In return, homebrew developers have been busy creating games using this app. TedZero is one of them; in fact, he has just released a game called Shooter, with the use of LTE Studios.

The game is pretty simple. Basically, when the dummies come out, you just shoot them. There are about five dummies for you to annihilate, you use the analog stick to move and aim the gun then press 'X' to fire away. If you still haven't had enough, press 'Start' to reset and shoot away again.

TedZero's Shooter is still pretty basic since you just shoot away at defenseless targets, plus there isn't a scoring system in this one. But as the good developer puts it, "every first program is a 'Hello world'', so surely in its next release, we could expect more things and actions that could be enjoyed by you, lucky PSP gamers. Just a little reminder from the developer: the files must be extracted to the root to be able to play this game.

With all that said, don't hesitate to hook us up with your comments, suggestions, opinions and other what-nots through your comments.

Download: [Shooter: Using LTE Studios]
Discuss: [Forum Release Thread]

Update: Just a day after the first alpha was released, Kojima has updated his homebrew 3D engine to incorporate a few new features.

Here's what he had to say:

"This version adds visualizers. Visualizers are a plugin based(I.e to create one you inherit the base visualizer class) and each surface has one.
A visualizer's job is to take and sync data, bind it's resources, then render.

Currently there is one visualizer, VL_VertexArray which as the name suggests adds vertex arrays to raptor, so you should see a big speed up from the last release.

The source is still engine/demo all in one, not separate yet. (I don't have a great ide so it's easier for me to keep it all in one atm)"

The updated engine can be downloaded below.

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Just the other day, we had the LTE studios people releasing their custom-made 3D engine for homebrew developers. And since I wasn't quite expecting it, I was pleasantly surprised.

And again, I wasn't expecting any other engines. At least not so soon! Well, it's nice to be surprised once in a while. And considering the fact that it's another 3D homebrew engine for the developers, it does sound great. This time, it's Kojima from the PS2DEV forums with the great accomplishment.

Here's what he had to say:

"Here's the first alpha of raptor 3d. It's a hybrid engine that is a port of MiniB3D by simon harris, and my own engine Trinity, both of which are open source PC GL engines. It's written against the latest svn version of PSPGL and as such requires you have it installed before using this. Currently the project is a single file containing a small demo and the engine, by alpha2 maybe 3, it will be organized into separate files for each class."

Like the other engine, this one also offers great features:

• SceneGraph with child/parent relationships.
• Multi-texture material (Only 1 one texture supported atm, need to do multi-pass stuff)
• Full suite of entity maniuplation functions, including position/rotate/lookat/scale etc.
• Matrix class.
• 2D Engine using pens for fast orthogonal 2d rendering of rects/lines 2d textures.
• 2D Gui, with windows, buttons, plugin styles and more, including full mouse cursor emulation via the nub, dpad and action buttons, sliders, canvas etc
• Full support for static b3d files made popular by the blitz3d Application.
• Font renderer.(Uses texture based fonts)
• Logger (Create text logs and log output via Logger->Log())
• And some other stuff.

The next version, alpha2 will most probably also add in boned animation and multi-pass texturing.

We've made a forum thread where all the interested developers can discuss. Kojima has also written a small coding guideline which we've pasted in our forums. Good luck with your homebrew games!

Download Link: [Raptor3D Alpha2 Opensource 3D Engine]
View: [Forum Discussion Thread]

Just a few days ago, LTE Studios had taken the wraps off their custom made free 3D engine for homebrew developers. Although it was just a demo, it did show a lot of promise.

Today, we've just realised that they've released the first version of their SDK, and the corresponding documentation. I've checked out the online documentation and I can say that it is just awesome. All you C/C++ devs will feel right at home checking out the docs generated by doxygen.

Since the SDK is still in its infancy, you can expect a few bugs here and there. Here's an official list:

Known Bugs:

• Software clipping algorithm is slow
• Collision detection is slow and buggy
• Terrain data generation takes too much memory, i've to decrease details

Even then, the creators have sucessfully ported almost all the functions of irrlicht. In case you've just joined us, here's a list of features of the LTE 3D Engine:

• 3D Engine
• Mixed 2D + 3D
• Powerful and customizable 2D GUI
• Character animation system
• Particle effects
• Billboards
• Dynamic Lights
• Powerful 2D with alpha, blend, etc..
• Six image formats supported (.bmp, .png, .jpg, . pcx, .tga, .psd)
• Eight mesh formats supported (.md2, .bsp, .x, .3ds, .obj, .dmf, .dae, .ms3d)
• Fonts support
• Collision and physics integrated
• Powerful terrain system
• and much more...

You have to note that the 3D engine is released under its own license. Although nothing much of a problem, I suggest you guys have a look at it here.

Download Link: [LTE 3D Engine SDK v1.0]
Link: [LTE 3D Engine Official Documentation]
Link: [LTE 3D Engine Official Forums]

This just in! A small team called LTE studios, headed up by SiberianSTAR, have been working on a free 3D engine for the Sony PSP. And today's the big day! They've just released the first demo of their product, which they've been working very hard on.

So you might not be a developer, and you might be wondering what the big deal is... Well, for starters, this will encourage a lot of developers to venture into making games. Until now, if you wanted to make a proper homebrew game, you would need an engine to handle everything. In case of 2d beat 'em ups, it was pretty simple. But if you wanted to create a proper 3D game, you'd need to program everything to handle all the data/models/sounds using an engine. And trust me, making a game engine is one of the hardest programming challenges.

Apart from finding a way to load/handle all the stuff, you also need to program the physics and a lot of other really technical details, just so that the separate objects can interact just the way you want. If you want an example, how about I give you one about a racing game. Suppose you're one of the guys behind Need For Speed; apart from building the cars, tracks and other things, you'd need to build an engine to actually make it possible to implement all that art and beauty into a game. Another example would be the Source engine made by Valve, or the Doom3 engine made by iD Software.

By now, I'll assume that you know quite a bit about making games. Which brings us back to this great piece of news. These guys have been working for months, to bring us an engine which almost any C/C++ homebrew game developer can use to make a fully fledged game. The talk gets a little technical now...Don't worry if you don't understand all the mumbo jumbo. If I were you, I'd expect a lot of great homebrew games coming out in a few weeks.

For the programmers, here are a few technical details/features:

• 3D Engine
• Mixed 2D + 3D
• Powerful and customizable 2D GUI
• Character animation system
• Particle effects
• Billboards
• Dynamic Lights
• Powerful 2D with alpha, blend, etc..
• Six image formats supported
• Eight mesh formats supported
• Fonts support
• Collision and physics integrated
• Powerful terrain system
• and much more...

Read through the list and you'll notice a lot of pretty awesome stuff in there. There's features in there which are mirrored around in a lot of paid and pretty expensive engines. I'm sure everyone here is curious to see the engine working. You're in luck! The LTE studios guys have been kind enough to provide a demo of the engine; a kind of a proof of concept, if you will... The final version, or the SDK will be released soon.

SiberianSTAR would like to thank Ky@ for his work on the editor, Jeremy Fitzhardinge for PSPGL, and PSMonkey. Oh, and by the way, thanks to PSMonkey for the heads-up too!

Download Link: [LTE 3D Engine Demo]