1.10 Genesis of Crystal Space

The Crystal Space project was initiated by Jorrit Tyberghein. Here are a few words from Jorrit, himself.

I created this project by accident. I was always fascinated by games like Doom, Hexen, Duke Nukem 3D and later Quake and I wondered how one would write such a game. My first effort was a Doom like engine. It had some nice features (like static lighting with shadows and sectors above other sectors) but it was very slow! I abandoned the project (it became a bit clumsy) and forgot about 3D for a short while. But the urge was still there. Every now and then I would think about 3D engines. But I wasn't thinking about Doom anymore. I wanted something more. After months of thinking I still wasn't planning to start writing code. But then I read an article about portals. I wasn't sure what they were but from the little explanation in that article things started to become clear. Portals were the perfect way for me to write a 3D engine quickly. It was a very easy technique with which I could achieve real 6DOF 3D! At that point the knowledge I gathered during the past few months had to get out of my head. In a bit more than one month I wrote the first version of Crystal Space (during my free time). At that point I had a portal engine with 6DOF, colored static lighting with shadows, primitive scripting, mipmapping and moving objects. Since time became a precious resource I decided to release Crystal Space to the general public and put an announcement on the newsgroup ‘comp.graphics.algorithms’. And this was the start of the Crystal Space project.

I must say that I didn't expect the kind of response that I got (I received mails from hundreds of people and all were very positive). Many thanks to all of you.

Jorrit can be reached via email at jorrit.tyberghein@gmail.com.

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