There hasn't been a better time to develop games for the PSP. We've had a couple of gaming engines already (LTE, Raptor3D), and now, SG57 and saulotmalo from our forums have released a library which can aid game developers in a big way. In saulotmalo's own words, "[We] have created a library to help with all those repetitive and quite difficult things that you won't need to copy and paste entire chunks of functions just to have the same thing in your new project, that you used in your last."

Currently, it allows you to work on the actual gameplay, while the library does the 'dirty-work' of implementing the actual processes like text rendering, model loading and other parameters of development.

The first release contains a handful of features:

• MD2 Model Rendering
• MD2 Model Animations Supported
• MD2 Model Texturing Supported (skins)
• Font Rendering (Text Printing)
• PCX, TGA and BMP Texture Loading Support
• FPS Counter
  

What's great is that the upcoming versions promise a lot more. Count in more 3D formats support (ASC,MS3D,3DS), and more texture formats support (PNG,JPG).

Download Link: [3D Game Development Set]
View: [Forum Release Thread]

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]

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]