Highly modular OSGi-based engine

[corristo]

What do you think about making Ardor3D a highly modular full-featured game engine framework and Eclipse-based IDE using OSGi?

Goals:

• Due to modularity components of engine can develop independently;
• Easy replacement of one implementation of some functionality to another;
• There can be set of plugins for RPG, set of plugins for simulator, for any kind of interactive 3D application;
• It will stimulate developers to make modular projects and return their code back to Ardor;

Discuss please

[renanse]

Actually, Rikard and I have long thought this was a good direction... but have not had to time to explore it much further than that. Do you have experience in this area?

[Endolf]

I'm not convinced that it's needed/wanted for a game engine. For large applications where lots of rewiring is expected then OSGI is good, but for a game?, especially a small one.

I have thought about this myself, and decided that for my needs its over kill. However, OSGI is just extra data in the meta inf, so as long as we don't end up requiring OSGI, I'm quite happy for the extra meta data to exist

Endolf

[renanse]

Yeah, we're more interested in it from a tools perspective, to be honest. But I'm sure there's other good use cases. As long as it's not required, as you say.

[amivanoff]

Well... We're developing a client-server GIS-based 3D simulator. When the server comes to play... all're changing.

Scientific visualizations and simulations, GIS apps and almost all kinds of 3D apps are your patients. And when a new bundle emerges all others can use it.

Yep, OSGi additions are metadata and maybe a little initialization code. Each bundle expose services and events. You can load/unload/update bundles programmatically. And of course easy integration with Eclipse.

OSGi framework run-time footprint is about 80Kb (Concierge) to 1,1Mb (Equinox).

[amivanoff]

Such a modularity at all is more friendly for integration, for big players like NASA (known Eclipse fan), MMO game gevs etc.
Bundle update feature interesting especially for MMO games.
Even bundle load/unload -- for RAM critical apps.