Following Elephants Dream and Peach (to be released in April), both open-source movies sponsored by Blender, Blender, an open-source 3D modeling application, and CrystalSpace, another open-source project relating to 3D graphics, are starting out a new project - a 3D open-source professional game.

Apricot is the newest project from the Blender Institute with the goal to build an open-source game instead of a Blender video this time. The characters used in the game are from the Big Buck Bunny movie, the last free movie developed using Blender under the name Project Peach.

Blender (everyones favorite GPL 3D modeling application) also has a build in game engine. And what would be nicer than having a nice competition for game creation?

Burster is an initiative by iTechnologie and Blender Project to bring 3D gaming to the web browser. Burster web browser 3D plugin uses the Blender Game Engine to integrate the fascinating world of 3D into a web page.

One of my projects this fall is to take advantage of online "Open Courseware" classes, for personal and professional development. In setting up my own curriculum, I came across a very nice find: a class on 3D modelling based on the (free software) Blender 3D modelling application.

"While one half of the developers were busy with the 2.5 project, the other half happily continued working on directly usable and useful features in Blender. Especially advances in the Game Engine justifies having a well tested, bug fixed and stable 2.49 release..."

Microsoft has just approached the Blender guys, and I would assume have or will approach other FOSS projects since we learn that Microsoft has assigned a guy to work with Open Source projects, with a request for information on how to make Blender run better on Windows. Here's part of what Microsoft emailed to Blender

Kris Occhipinti is currently in the middle of creating a 2D game created using the Blender 3D game engine. The game, called Pissed Off Penguins, looks similar to the popular “Angry Birds” game most of you have likely heard about. I wanted to outline this open-source project and expose some of the unique techniques Kris is using to both fund this project and create the game itself.

While there are many open-source games available (just see the recent discussion about the most advanced GPL-ed FPS), most of them are based upon the ioquake3 game engine that in turn is based upon id Software's open-source id Tech 3 engine. There's also games like Nexuiz that use the DarkPlaces engine and then also Warsow that uses QFusion.