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]