For Developers: Free Tigre 3D Engine

November 17, 2009 | By Phippu

Do you think Windows Mobile has no 3D Power? Then you should try some cool Tigre Demos!

Tigre (Tiny Graphics Engine) is a free rendering library for Windows Mobile 5, 6, 6.1 and 6.5 that provides you realtime and interactive rendering. Its fully written in managed C# for the .NET Compact Framework and is able to use hardware acceleration for fluid and stunning graphics.

Features

easy to use, fully object oriented
based on .NET Compact Framework 2.0
Windows Mobile 5, 6, 6.1 and 6.5 support
OpenGl ES 1.x (support for 2.0 with shaders comes later) support
full featured camera and lighting model
advanced material handling (multiple textures, render to target, alpha transparency, advanced texture filtering,…)
scene graph
wavefront obj support
2d and 3d rendering
open source

Requirements

Windows Mobile 5, 6, 6.1 or 6.5
.NET Compact Framework 2.0 or higher (mostly pre installed)
OpenGl ES 1.x enabled device or software renderer

For more information and to download see www.PhilippeWechsler.ch/Tigre.php

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Tagged 3d, c#, opengl, Tigre

Lame

Able? Sure,also with basic WM is a lot able, even 3D with OpenGL, unfortunately WM manufactures/ developers give it a crap, so why should it be better with this? And afaik .net compact framework, on which direktX for WM is also build, is a software based lib, that replaces floating-point calculations with CPU conform fixed-point algorhythms
I don't give it a chance
http://intensedebate.com/people/JKingDev JKingDev

Will games written in .NET really perform well? Especially 3D ones?
http://www.avianwaves.com Parrotlover77

Lame’s comment is lame, alright. How FP calculations are performed by the CPU is irrelevant when the calls are hardware accelerated, which is what this will presumably do, if it is available.

JKingDev – That’s a major .Net misconception. The .Net languages are fast. They are as fast (likely faster) than any Java app. Indeed, Java has plenty of graphical applications that run great on WM.

The performance issues related to .Net comes from a poorly optimized implementation of WinForms. Developers can make them perform quite well, but it requires knowledge more than just “out of box” then you currently get in Visual Studio. It isn’t terribly hard though. I’m writing a heavy graphics application right now that has quite a few visual effects and UI components similar to (and inspired by) TouchFlo 2D. It scales to any size screen at runtime. It’s 100% managed code, too.

Microsoft is hesitant to do much to fix the out-of-box performance optimizations (I presume) because they are going all in on XAML/Silverlight for WM7. That’s probably pretty smart at this point, as any optimization to WinForms will cause delays on WM7, which they can’t really afford at this point. Plus, XAML will provide a very, very rich UI experience — moreso than WinForms can provide on the mobile platform, which demands less rigid UI controls than Big Windows.

Don’t forget too that a lot of the bad WinForms performance are due to poorly implemented — aka non-existent — 2D acceleration, despite excellent 3D performance, on high resolution devices (hello, Diamond/Touch Pro — I’m talking to you!).
http://ninjarabbits.blogspot.com/ nicholassimon

If you are interested in 3D modelling software for free then check out this post here for a comprehensive list of free software for working with 3D:
http://ninjarabbits.blogspot.com/2009/11/do-some-…
http://www.philippewechsler.ch Phippu

Well, my idea was to make it easyer for other developers to use opengl with the popular .net runtime. If you think its too slow you just did'nt test my demo, its quit fast for a mobile device and there's a lot i can do for more performance(its just a early demo!). In the case of tigre "able" means that it runns hardware accelerated by default if the device does support it, and trust me use Tigre ist much easyer than call opengl directly. 2d UI's will be possible too, even combined with 3d scenes.
Lame

@phillipu
Lame

@phippu
So Does tigre come with bundle of opengl framework drivers included? If not wouldn’t it be just another direktXmobile?
http://www.philippewechsler.ch Phippu

Im not sure what you mean. The only thing Tigre needs is a dll called "LibGLES_cm". This is the opengl driver, provided by htc or any other vendor. This file is diffrent from device to device. If your phone does not have this file, it seems that the manufacturer didn't depoly a valid driver, so you have to use a software renderer like vincent 3d (more on my site). And no, its not directX mobile, its totaly different (the engine would basicaly support this api). So opengl and directx (mobile and desktop) are apis to access the graphics hardware directly. So if you want to render a geometrc object like an teapot you have to to a lot of api calls and itse very complex. With Tigre or and other rendering engine you can do this very easily:

Tigre.Renderer r = new Tigre.Renderer;
Mesh m = Renderer.SceneManager.Add(Wavefront.load("teapot.obj");

Tigre then initializes the display, loads the file, does texturing, lighting etc.

With open gl you would need to write more than 100 lines! If you use Tigre you do not need to know much about opengl, so it's really easy to develop 3d games with tigre…
Lame

Im not a developer, just bothering.
with bundle i meant if tigre will support at least popular GPUs out of the box, but afaik GPUs are IPs and there is no framework for opengldrivers yet, which tigre is supposed to be, as far i understand it correctly, but don’t u have to purchase the OGL driver for your software directly from the Gpu vendor?
http://www.philippewechsler.ch Phippu

Yes, Tigre will work out of the box with any GPU that supports OpenGl. For example if you buy a Touch HD as i have one, you can download the Tigre demo and it will work without any other software installed. This is because HTC has deployed the required driver already. This is the same on the desktop: it doesn't matter which gpu you have to play a game (mostly). So imagine that not every GPU is the same, but every GPU that has OpenGL ES implemented will offer a driver (LibGLES_CM.dll). This driver accepts common inputs that are specified by the opengl api. Tigre then can use those api calls to execute code on the GPU. Please note that not every driver does execute the code the same way. For example if you render the demo with vincent 3d it does not looks as good as a native driver. So what phone you have, does the demo not work on your device?
Lame

Ok thanks for your explanation.
Currently i have an HTC iolite with MSM 7225 and thinking to get a Samsung i8000 Omnia2, is this also supported?
http://www.philippewechsler.ch Phippu

I think Omnia 2 has OpenGl, probably even 2.0. Does the demo run fluid on the Iolite, i don't think this phone has a proper driver?!?
Lame

Sorry I couldn´t test it on my iolite yet, but yes Omnia2 has unfortunately only OpenGL2.0 driver afaik.
Well i wish u the best and hope your solution will suceed
http://cafe.naver.com/bjphone.cafe?iframe_url=/ArticleRead.nhn?articleid=288534 Nick

Check out the latest demos of the Galatea 3D engine for Windows Mobile if you want to see some amazing stuff… here's the link for the latest release: http://cafe.naver.com/bjphone.cafe?iframe_url=/Ar…

Runs amazing on my Touch Pro 2!