Cube: open source FPS games engine soon on your iPhone?

Posted by John on October 27th, 2008 at 09:44pm Comments

First person shooter games are some of the most exciting games out there. Unfortunately there aren’t too many of them out for the iPhone (with the exception of Quake unauthorized port and a few other games).

That’s why it’s noteworthy that pretty soon an open source first person shooter game engine could become available for the iPhone. Its graphics are on the level of Quake 2, which is rather good for such a small handheld device like the iPhone.

Cube is an open source multiplayer and singleplayer first person shooter game built on Cube Engine, which is a landscape-style engine that pretends to be an indoor FPS engine, while combining very high precision dynamic occlusion culling with a form of geometric mipmapping on the whole world for dynamic LOD for configurable fps & graphic detail on most machines.

Cube allows in-engine editing of geometry in full 3D (you fly around the map, point / drag stuff to select it / modify it), which can even be done simultaneously with others in multiplayer. It has simplistic but effective fine grain vertex lighting that looks like lightmapping and can do dynamic lights & shadows. Cube doesn’t need any kind of map precompilation, even lighting is done on the fly.

Cube features very simplistic quad-tree world structure that can do slopes (heightfields with caps) and slants, water, does decent collision detection & physics, has client/server networking that goes a long way in giving a lag-free game experience, and features a Doom/Quake-style singleplayer (2 game modes, savegames) and multiplayer (12 game modes, master server / server browser, demo recording) game with some uncompromising brutal oldschool gameplay.

Cube was already submitted to AppStore. If approved by Apple it can be on your iPhone in the coming days. But in the meantime you can already see video demonstrations (1 , 2) below.

You can visit the official Cube website for more information.

Thanks to Pocket Gamer

Related posts:

1. Unity engine to bring 3D games to the iPhone - beta support program now open
2. Oolong (formerly iGDK) iPhone games development engine now closed source
3. Quake, Quake 2, Quake Arena classic id Software games coming to the iPhone
4. Quake 3 Arena on iPhone?
5. Java ME tools for iPhone games developers. Private beta registrations now open!

Care to rate this iPhone World article? Current news rating:

Filed Under: News+ iPhone Games+ iPhone Programs

comments