Ocerus

The Ocerus project implements a multiplatform game engine and editor for creating simple 2.5D games. The main focus lies on the editing tools integrated to the engine. So, every change is immediately visible in the game context and can be tested in a real time. The engine takes care of rendering, physics, customization of game object behavior by scripts, resource management and input devices. The project was created in 2010 by Michal Cevora, Lukas Hermann, Ondrej Mocny and Tomas Svoboda as a software project for their studies at the Mathematical-Physical Faculty of the Charles University in Prague.

Main Features

• Real-Time Editing: the game can be edited while it's running
• Component Model of Entities: game objects are composed of configurable components
• Prototypes: it's possible to pre-create objects and reuse them in every scene
• Physics: the engine integrates physics as a set of entity components
• Scripts: scripting is connected to game objects using a special entity components
• GUI: game user interface is defined in XML files and is controllable from scripts

As it's apparent from the features listed above the application is targeted at small teams because it's very fast to do any change to the game and immediately test it. No more change-run-coffee-test iterations! Now every change you do to the game is done while the editor is up and running and you immediately see the results.

How To Get It

If you navigate to the files application you can download there installation packages for your platform. The package contains a sample game called cube. It is located in the samples subdirectory. After you start the application choose File/Open Project and navigate to the directory. Confirm by pressing OK. The game will load in the editor and you can run it by clicking the green arrow button in the upper toolbar.

The documentation can be found in the files application as well. There is the User Guide, which explains the basic usage of the editor and shows how to create a simple game in it. There is also the Extenging Ocerus guide, which describes ways how to extend the Ocerus engine. And finally, there is the Design Documentation. It shows the design of the software and discribes each part of the system from the programmer's view. Apart from that, there's an automatically generated doxygen reference documentation of the source code. The first page serves as a developer documentation describing the project from the perspective of a software developer. The doxygen documentation is not available online, but you can generate it by running the doxygen script at doc/doxygen at the trunk of the SVN repository.

System Requirements

The application is developed to work under 32-bit and 64-bit Windows (XP or newer) and Linux as well. To make it work under Linux it's best to build it from the source code as seen below. An extension to game consoles was intended but not realised.

The application works on any hardware younger then 2005. That requirement is here to make sure the graphic card supports unified shaders and has enough slots for texture targets (this is a requirement of CEGUI; a library used for GUI). A sample minimum configuration is an AMD 2GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, GeForce7 7100 64MB.

The computer must also have installed the latest graphic card drivers including OpenGL.

Source Code

The source code is located in the SVN repository. Note that only the content of trunk is necessary. After you download the code from there you can proceed to next step of building the application. A detailed guide can be found here.

Development Team

The following is a list of people contributing to this project:

• Michal Cevora - the GUI system and the editor
• Lukas Hermann - the scripting system and the documentation
• Ondrej Mocny - the project lead; the entity and the resource system
• Tomas Svoboda - rendering