Hobbyist or Professional?

[kburkhart84]

It depends on your audience. That goes for any engine. If you're targeting the yokels who want pretty pictures, even if it means that the designers didn't have time to come up with a decent storyline and the control scheme is on par with the Atari 2600, then there's going to be at least one feature missing that will cause them to uninstall the demo after the scene loads (not sure what the feature(s) may be as I don't know Irrlicht's full feature list and I never progressed beyond DX8 in technological terms).

However, if you target the more intelligent people* who realize there's more to a game than graphics then everything from Game Maker (and similar programs) to Irrlicht to DX10 is capable of developing a professional program.

In fact, even though about the best you'll get out of Game Maker is SNES quality (it has 3D features, but they're laughable), there are forum members who do make a decent income off of it. One woman uses it to make games for adult websites, and while I haven't seem them (nor do I want to) and we've never discussed figures, I get the impression that for a time it was her primary source of income. There's another woman who creates educational games. The income from that combined with her Social Security benefits brings in almost as much income as before she retired.

There are people who still buy the Exile series (point and click RPG, no transition when moving from tile to tile (you just pop from one tile to the next), not even on par with the first Dragon Quest). I assume they still sell, because you can still order them. Normally even a shareware company will pull a product when it quits selling.

The point is, if you keep your target audience in mind it doesn't matter what tool you use. If you want the idiots who won't wait to find out that the game even has a story if they don't see HDRI lighting just as soon as the first scene loads then you might want to upgrade to Vista and use DirectX 10. If there's an online community obsessed with The Bard's Tale (PS2 version), then Irrlicht has the capabilities of doing a similar game graphically (though it won't handle any of the other elements, such as audio, etc.) and probably make a killing in that market.

If you want to target fans of the original Bard's Tale (google them both to see the differences if you're not familiar with them) then some of the abandoned tools from the 1980's and early '90's, assuming you can get them to run on the modern systems, would be professional grade.

Basically, there's no such thing as "professional grade" when it comes to graphics/physics/audio/etc. engines. Whatever you can use to make a game, assuming you can make a halfway decent profit on it, is "professional grade."

Of course, this only applies to the one man armies, the indie houses with no publisher, and the self publishers. When it comes to the big guys like Square-Enix and Midway there is such thing as professional grade, and Irrlicht is right on the border. It will only take one new major development in real-time graphics to push it back into the hobbyist realm.

*I know I insulted a lot of gamers, but I don't care. Ignoring a compelling story just because the graphics are DX8 quality shows a lack of intelligence.

I hate to quote the whole thing but it is packed with truth. I don't know how long it has been but not that long ago, like a few years, 2d games still held tops of the charts. Sure, 2d can still be pretty, but atleast it says to me that for the most part, gamers that actually buy product are for the most part intelligent as of the description of intelligent in the above post. Puzzle games sell well and look at Popcap etc... They aren't massive 3d products and they don't sell at $50 US a pop, but I bet they still make lots of money, so yeah, that is considered to me commercial quality. And Irrlicht is up their as well.
And yeah, gamers that only care about eye candy suck, and according to the charts, aren't the ones who truly power the game industry. Rather the gamers who play games for fun instead of eye candy are the ones who spend the most money on games(or atleast I think so, I don't have statistics on hand to back me up).

[BlindSide]

It depends on your audience. That goes for any engine. If you're targeting the yokels who want pretty pictures, even if it means that the designers didn't have time to come up with a decent storyline and the control scheme is on par with the Atari 2600, then there's going to be at least one feature missing that will cause them to uninstall the demo after the scene loads (not sure what the feature(s) may be as I don't know Irrlicht's full feature list and I never progressed beyond DX8 in technological terms).

However, if you target the more intelligent people* who realize there's more to a game than graphics then everything from Game Maker (and similar programs) to Irrlicht to DX10 is capable of developing a professional program.

In fact, even though about the best you'll get out of Game Maker is SNES quality (it has 3D features, but they're laughable), there are forum members who do make a decent income off of it. One woman uses it to make games for adult websites, and while I haven't seem them (nor do I want to) and we've never discussed figures, I get the impression that for a time it was her primary source of income. There's another woman who creates educational games. The income from that combined with her Social Security benefits brings in almost as much income as before she retired.

There are people who still buy the Exile series (point and click RPG, no transition when moving from tile to tile (you just pop from one tile to the next), not even on par with the first Dragon Quest). I assume they still sell, because you can still order them. Normally even a shareware company will pull a product when it quits selling.

The point is, if you keep your target audience in mind it doesn't matter what tool you use. If you want the idiots who won't wait to find out that the game even has a story if they don't see HDRI lighting just as soon as the first scene loads then you might want to upgrade to Vista and use DirectX 10. If there's an online community obsessed with The Bard's Tale (PS2 version), then Irrlicht has the capabilities of doing a similar game graphically (though it won't handle any of the other elements, such as audio, etc.) and probably make a killing in that market.

If you want to target fans of the original Bard's Tale (google them both to see the differences if you're not familiar with them) then some of the abandoned tools from the 1980's and early '90's, assuming you can get them to run on the modern systems, would be professional grade.

Basically, there's no such thing as "professional grade" when it comes to graphics/physics/audio/etc. engines. Whatever you can use to make a game, assuming you can make a halfway decent profit on it, is "professional grade."

Of course, this only applies to the one man armies, the indie houses with no publisher, and the self publishers. When it comes to the big guys like Square-Enix and Midway there is such thing as professional grade, and Irrlicht is right on the border. It will only take one new major development in real-time graphics to push it back into the hobbyist realm.

*I know I insulted a lot of gamers, but I don't care. Ignoring a compelling story just because the graphics are DX8 quality shows a lack of intelligence.

I hate to quote the whole thing but it is packed with truth. I don't know how long it has been but not that long ago, like a few years, 2d games still held tops of the charts. Sure, 2d can still be pretty, but atleast it says to me that for the most part, gamers that actually buy product are for the most part intelligent as of the description of intelligent in the above post. Puzzle games sell well and look at Popcap etc... They aren't massive 3d products and they don't sell at $50 US a pop, but I bet they still make lots of money, so yeah, that is considered to me commercial quality. And Irrlicht is up their as well.
And yeah, gamers that only care about eye candy suck, and according to the charts, aren't the ones who truly power the game industry. Rather the gamers who play games for fun instead of eye candy are the ones who spend the most money on games(or atleast I think so, I don't have statistics on hand to back me up).

While this is all true, with saying this you are subtly undermining Irrlicht's 3D ability, and personally, I dont think Irrlicht's graphics are that bad. With some work they can look as good as any game, dont forget there is shader support...

[kburkhart84]

While this is all true, with saying this you are subtly undermining Irrlicht's 3D ability, and personally, I dont think Irrlicht's graphics are that bad. With some work they can look as good as any game, dont forget there is shader support...

You are right. My choice of words wasn't too clear and it wasn't my intention to downgrade Irrlicht at all. I agree that Irrlicht can be used as you say and can look just as good. I would love to see a game like Doom 3 done with Irrlicht, but actually have a good story and be "fun", not just look good. I also think Irrlicht is capable of this, and if you look at my first post(first reply to this topic) you will see that was my opinion from before as well. But I DO apologize for my words coming out wrong on the other post. And yeah, I'm glad for the shader support. Paralax mapping kicks A$$ when done right, and though it isn't part of Irrlicht, a good toon shader is ince as well and isn't hard to add since Irrlicht is made this way on purpose.

[Midnight]

I think it's because english is a second language to him one thing you have to remember about the internet is the lack of clearity or local context.

I ran into this problem in my own country to the point that the english make more sense to me. and we're talking about english.. lol well if you can call hick english.

anyways.

Irrlicht is a professional engine.. really the only thing that makes something professional is money. so in that respect alone Irrlicht is unprofessional.

There is nothing Irrlicht isn't capable of being extended to do and it proforms its job as a rendering engine just fine. people get confused when they don't understand the source they are looking at.

sure it doesn't do what ogre can do... yet. it's more liberal saying this without checking.. you can add in the bone junk ogre has even merge the two together. whatever you want can be built or added from an external library.

Irrlicht isn't a game engine. it won't do parapelegic backflips no mircles will rise from a lady in the lake and build your game for you.

questioning irrlicht on performance ability and potential?
thats just noob talk.