FLOW (Flexible Lightweight Ogre Wrapper) was a powerful, easy to use 3D engine for BlitzMax, one of only a handful available at the time, and certainly the most powerful. It focused on 3D and Physics, tying Newton Game Dynamics with, you guessed it, the OGRE rendering engine.

FLOWED was a scene layout editor with some crazy features.

We began writing an Ogre wrapper in 2005 for LokBlox but it wasn’t until 2007 we settled on a system that worked. It was the third iteration of FLOW.

I could go on for hours about FLOW, I loved it, it’s a project close to my heart. But FLOW needed more than just a renderer. So we build FlowED. The best way I could describe FlowED is a Three-Man-Team, early version of Unity. It gave you the ability to lay your scenes out, modify materials, test physics in real time, and it had an awesome ability to automatically plug into any game running that was written with it, allowing you to modify that game. I had planned to include scripting, but it never made it into the final build.

Sadly these projects ultimately failed because BlitzMax had a total userbase of around 3000 at the time, so we had failed to select a market we could thrive in. We decided to release Flow for free.

Flow is still available (unsupported) from http://www.flow3d.org/

You can see FlowED’s mod capabilities in this video of MazeMonkeys: