Given the great new graphics processor in the n900, there's really a great opportunity to create a lot of nice-looking games for it. Bounce Evolution is a great example of this potential. Right now, we don't have any really excellent OpenGL 2.0 engines ported to Maemo 5. This makes it much more difficult to write a 3D game, since you would need to use openGL to implement your own graphics engine.

I would suggest we port an existing 3D engine to Maemo with support for openGL ES 2.0. There are a number of existing engines for linux that may or may not have support for ES 2.0.

Candidates include:
OGRE
Irrilicht
Horde3D

Let's get started figuring out how this community can get a 3D engine on the n900 by exploring our options for 3D engines!

Ogre is nice, good bindings for other languages too. Though it's quite a big project.

Well I'm game for helping out though I am just going to start on ES. Should there be a brainstorm on this one to gather like minds or possibly a garage page for the project?

Purely from past exposure I've seen more mention of OGRE than the others.

I've been following ogre for years, makes sense to me.

From what I can tell OGRE has a *massive* community. It can get quite complex though and may (or may not) take significantly more effort to port.

IIRC OGRE already has an OpenGL ES backend, but was fairly incomplete and only 1.1 when I last checked (~6 months ago). It's not pretty (whatd'ya expect from an ogre ? ) but quite usable.

Unfortunately, the ES 1.1 backend will not be of much use on the n900.

Why not? It supports Ogl Es 1.1 .

be a bit of a hsame not to use the shadery goodness of OpenGL 2.0 ES........................

i've used irrlicht in the past and it seemed quite nice (I've tried to get into ogre, but gave it up because of the complexity (for my use-case) - could be even bigger problem for usage on mobile devices)..

A year ago, there already was some opengl es 2.0 support (and 1.1 even sooner) - they are probably working on polishing it right now...