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Guildford-based middleware producer Turbulenz has today made its HTML5 game engine of the same name open source in an effort to make its tech more readily available.
The Turbulenz engine provides developers with the building blocks to create quality 2D and 3D games. It has powered titles such as BAFTA award-winning Save the Day from Denki, Wonderstuck’s 3D strategy game Polycraft and Xona’s multiplayer game Score Rush.
Turbulenz has made their technology available under the standard MIT licence, and the open source project can be accessed from GitHub.
The UK middleware maker said it has chosen to release the software because it wanted to bring its technology to a wider audience, but has come into difficulty with restrictive licensing and the ease the of getting things off the ground.
By making its technology open source, Turbulenz is hoping to empower users to with the means to create WebGL and HTML5 games. And its hoping that the game development community will help improve the quality and features of the engine over time.
The exact elements of Turbulenz that are being made open source are:
• The JavaScript and TypeScript game engine libraries
• All associated engine samples, documentation, asset processing tools and a local development server
• All the technology available in the Turbulenz SDK for making HTML5 games
Turbulenz is also welcoming developers wishing to contribute to the open source project to share the ideas and git diff patches on Turbulenz Engine Google Group.
“We started developing the Turbulenz Engine a little over four years ago in early 2009, when HTML5 was still in its infancy and before WebGL even existed. We recognized that JavaScript and the web development platform offered a huge opportunity for creating high quality games and as a mechanism and market for dynamically distributing content,” said CEO James Austin.
“We initially proved this to ourselves by creating the service and engine capable of streaming and rendering the majority of Quake 4. This continues today to be a great test of the engine as it has evolved.”
The open source Turbulenz engine, and documentation about it, can be downloaded from the links below:
• Turbulenz Engine
• Turbulenz Tools
• Turbulenz Local
• Documentation
