I'm new to the idea of game development but I definitely want to get learn more in the hopes to build my own. I did some research into various components of the process used to build RWR but I was hoping you could give me a brief detailed summary of how it works. Basically what software and for what purpose. The following is what I found out so far, I'd appreciate any comments to steer me in the right direction.

Blender 3D: Used to create map and vehicles/characters and animations?

Ogre: Import maps and vehicles/characters with animations into ogre game engine. Is there a type of template to create a custom game or do I have to know how to write c++?

OIS: For input handling, not sure what this means exactly.

ENet: For networking, again not sure what this means

OpenAL: for sounds which I believe you import into Ogre?

I know this question is kind of vague but I would really appreciate any pointers to guide me on what I need to learn. Thanks you truly did an awesome job with RWR!

Blender is used to create various objects in maps, vehicles and some items, these can be then imported into Ogre3D to be displayed and transformed in the game.

We use RWR Voxel Editor for character modeling and animations. There's a custom loader for this stuff in RWR that generates and handles the geometry using Ogre3D.

We use Inkscape to create the maps. Again there's a custom loader in RWR for the map files which makes 3D objects placed around the world as specified.


Ogre3D is a C++ graphics engine, so yeah, a good starting point would be to be able to write C++ to utilize Ogre3D the usual way. There are bindings for some other languages like Python if you're more into scripting. There are tutorials on how to get started http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=Tutorials. If you're new to programming in general, you might want to try Unity instead, it comes with a visual editor so you should be able to get to work with an actual game faster than with Ogre3D.

Input concerns keyboard and mouse handling. OIS C++ library provides this data for RWR. There are certainly other ways to do it, but OIS is at least cross-platform so it helps with Linux and Mac ports.

RWR supports online gameplay, so certain data needs to be sent between server and clients somehow to make them appear to be playing the same game session. ENet C++ library hides the details of handling the UDP networking to get this data sent between the computers.

OpenAL C++ library hides the details of playing audio, also it provides some filtering and 3D audio environment functionality. Ogre itself doesn't care about sounds, it's just a 3D graphics engine.

Thanks that really helps! I respect you taking the time to answer my questions.