Introducing the Cool Thing of the Week

 

 

In the process of scouring the net, either out of my own interest, as research for possible articles or as part of my own development process, I come across tons of absolute gems.  This new weekly column is going to be showcasing these various sites of interest, I hope you find them as interesting as I do!

 

I spend a lot of time on the web, but I can’t be everywhere!  So if you came across a really cool site, project, game or something else that you think will be of interest to a bunch of game developers, let us know and it may be featured as a future cool item.  This is all about raising exposure to items that might be of interest to your fellow developer!

 

 

 

 

Now, let me introduce the first ever Cool Thing of the Week!

 

EbonyFortress.com – List of free game development libraries

 

 

 

There are an absolute ton of free libraries out there covering all facets of game programming.  One of the biggest problems is a matter of finding them!  Often times, Google provesEbonyFortress completely useless and forum links you may come across have long since been abandoned, leading you to page after page of dead links.  Today’s entry really isn’t all that much of an exception, as it hasn’t been updated in close to a year.  That said, it is still perhaps the most timely and complete list of free game related libraries I have ever found.

 

 

This site breaks entries down into their general category ( 3D Graphics, 2D Graphics, Sound/Music, Networking, Video, Compression, Artificial Intelligence, Math/Physics, Scripting, etc. ), each entry contains a link to the library as well as the license it was released under ( such as GPL, MIT ).  There are a ton of entries, well over a hundred and from my own experiences I would say it is pretty comprehensive.  All the libraries I could think to look up were represented on this list, although in a few cases things weren’t where I initially expected them ( such as SFML being under general purpose instead of 2D graphics, although that location makes perfect sense as well. )  There are some entries in there I would probably prune due to their age ( such as Hexen 2 or Genesis ) and I would love to see an indicator to show if thee libraries are still under active development.  These small quibbles aside, the list is nearly perfect.

 

 

So, if you find yourself looking for a free library for just about any aspect of game development, this page is a very good place to start!  I can only hope the author continues to update it, to keep it the wonderful resource it currently is!


Stay tuned for next weeks CTotW! Again, we look forward to your recommendations so let us know!. We will be keeping an active archive here, which admittedly is a bit empty now. Comments of course are open on this post as well, let us know your opinion of the sites we choose! Got another similar recommendation, found it useful, didn’t find it useful? Let us know in the comments below.

Cool Thing of the Week


Scroll to Top