We have just received word that developer SiberianSTAR has recently release the source codes for the LTE Game Engine v2.2 for the PSP. LTE is developer's kit built to help PSP developers create their own batch of homebrew applications and games. This latest release will enable developer to customize the engine according to their needs. More details are be available in the full article.

Download: LTE Game Engine 2.2 source codes
Visit: QJ.NET PSP Development forum

The latest version of Exophase's gpSP GBA emulator for the PSP is now out for download.

gpSP v0.6 is still a beta release, so "watch out for new bugs," says Exophase. This new version still manages to fix a couple of bugs from the initial release, and offers a few new features, and adds new games to the game_config.txt file. New to this update are (taken from the Readme file):

Bug fixes

• Fixed a nasty bug that shouldn't have made it into the initial release; a lot of games that TECM.. erm.. crash won't anymore. NOTE: This doesn't mean that no game will ever crash, freeze, otherwise not work.
• Fixed some crashes in the GUI and the ability to "go up" past ms0:/PSP. Made the "go up" button square like it was supposed to be (instead of cross).

Feature additions

• There's now a menu that you can access, by default press right while holding down triangle for the frameskip bar.
• Menu option: resize screen aspect ratio, the default is now "scaled 3:2" which makes it look more like a normal GBA. You can use "fullscreen" (what it was like before) or "unscaled 3:2" (tiny but pixel for pixel like a GBA)
• Menu option: You can now load new games while the current one is running.
• Menu option: You can now restart the currently running game.
• Menu option: Frameskip variation - this defaults to "uniform" whereas it defaulted to "random" last release. Basically, turn it on random if you find that frameskip causes flickering animations to make things disappear. Other than that it will generally look better on uniform.
• GUI and file loading now have "auto repeat" on the buttons so they're not such a pain to navigate.

Download: [gpSP v0.6 GBA emulator for the PSP binary file]
Download: [gpSP v0.6 GBA emulator for the PSP source file]
Discuss: [gpSP v0.6 Forum Release Thread]

Read on for the full changelog.

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]

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]