Halloo,
I'll not give too much an introduction, but enough so you know who I am, and more, what this website and Sylphis are all about. First, me. My name is Derek Mounce, and I'm --well, we'll say its enough for now to know that I'm someone in the process of learning Sylhpis. And, that, of course, brings me to Sylphis itself. ;) Sylphis is a very impressice 3D game engine from Harry Kalogirou. What the Sylphis site will tell you is that Sylphis is a "next-gen" engine --has features like per-pixel everything, full rigid-body physics, HDR rendering, and so on. It will tell you that Sylphis has a built-in IDE, can be fully Python scripted, and has a complete level editor based on Quark. Not many game engines can say all of that about themselves, and certainly few in the price range of Sylphis --99 euros.
The thing that the engine's site doesn't convey --at least to me- is how incredibly easy the engine is. Not a person too much interested in programming, Ogre, Crystal Space, and Irrlicht all were great for their features, but always eventually threw me away because of the amount of programming involved in using them; going through the landscape tutorial of Ogre, I got distracted creating a better set of textures for the terrain --just as an example of me learning Ogre... When I came to Sylphis, after watching its progress for a year and a half or so, I expected the same amount of programming, just using Python instead of C++. A little reading and research in the public forums however, gave me the slight feeling that Sylphis may in fact be easier than that, that it may need very little programming at all.
As it turns out, I was right. In its simplest form, Sylphis can be used as a tool simply for creating maps, just like you would use Half-Life 2 or Unreal Tournament to create maps. You can insert entities, attach physics, control effects and events all within the editor, and all without programming. However, unlike other engines that allow for that --like Game Studio A6- Sylphis allows for complete control over everything if you're willing to touch the Python scripts. Even at that point it, messing around with the programming, it can remain fairly simplistic and easy if you want it to. Sylphis really surprised me with how easy and "artist friendly" it is. If to compare it to anything, the Unreal Engine / Unreal Editor / Unreal Script would be the closest comparison. The two primary differences though are the price and the features --Sylphis is far mare advanced graphically than UE2 and is more along the lines of UE3.
Hopefully I've conveyed what Sylphis truly is --or at least how I see it- and have convinced you that it is worth your time and slight but of money. Sylphis really has no equal competitor except perhaps --maybe- Beyond Virtual,although that I could argue, having also used BV. Sylphis is easy to use and, although still in beta like BV, quite stable. Its support for 3rd party content creation programs is impressive, being one of the few engines that seems to fully support Blender. With its next-gen features, extreme ease of use, and powerful tools and tool support, Sylphis seems a particularly well suited engine for many game projects, though particularly to indie developers who's primary concern is on the art rather than developing the technology.
Sylphis, however, is not without its negatives. True, it is still in beta and thus is not perfectly user-proof. That really isn't a horrible issue though if you get a feel for the software. The most crippling element of Sylphis is its documentation --it has nothing except for an almost useless "Creating a Benchmark" tutorial. To learn Sylphis, you must dissect the single sample level and look through some of the source code, trying to piece together how it all works. Fortunately, Sylphis has a rather small user base (the private forums, to which I have yet to be granted access, showed only 3 users...) so if you have any serious questions where you just cannot figure out how to do something or what something does, you can email the developer personally. (I would assume this anyway; I've not yet run across that situation.) Theoretically, documentation is coming for Sylphis, but until then, learning Sylphis is a moderate chore.
My goal with this blog is to document my process of learning Sylphis (thus the name... did'ya catch? ;) ) Each time I mess around with Sylphis, I'll write something about what I did and what I learned. I imagine that often I will have learned nothing but what doesn't work, but that isn't really a bad thing. Perhaps sometimes I'll start to think and write one thing, but then will find out that I was wrong. I don't think that's a bad thing either though. Of course, this website will not come close to serving the purpose of a manual, but my hope is that making at least some sort of documentation available for Sylphis will attract more users and thus will eventually allow the developer to grow into a group of developers and will help Sylphis succeed.
So, with all of that said --that long (and I said it wasn't going to be... oops.) introduction- I'm going to go play around with Sylphis and see what I can figure out. Then I'll be back to write about it. In the meantime, go at least download the demo of Sylphis and watch some videos. If you're really intrigued, support Sylphis and buy the SDK for 99 euros.
Thanks for reading! I'll be back soon.
-=Derek