Phoronix is running a news story about the XreaL project, which its lead developer claims is the most advanced open-source game engine. XreaL is based upon the vintage Quake 3 engine, but it has been rewritten over the course of many months such that it no longer resembles the original id Software engine. The XreaL engine has its renderer written entirely in GLSL with compliance toward the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification in mind, but it supports the new OpenGL 3.0/3.1 specification and is able to take advantage of its new features. XreaL has also added an HDR pipeline to its engine and on modern hardware is actually GPU — not CPU — bottlenecked. XreaL can also load game content from Unreal Tournament 3. This engine, which is described to be as powerful as what can be found in Doom 3 or Call of Duty 4, is written entirely with free software. The XreaL project has created plug-ins for Maya to broaden their game development capabilities.

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl.../04/10/0541217