Uhm, no, he doesn't say anything to this effect. It is only you reading into it what you want to read into it.hybrid wrote: So you say it's a matter of taste? Well, then it's not worth discussing, it's usually even not worth mentioning.
Sorry, if I sound pissed or something, but your post is quite ridiculous.
You set up your own strawman and beat this instead of actually answering the points being raised, which have nothing to do with what you pretend them to be in your post here.
agi_shi's account might not be exactly oozing objectivity, but I guess it wasn't meant as such. He delivered an report of the experience he made. This was obviously not meant as an objective benchmark, so please hybrid, don't pretend he failed to do so, just because you expected it to be one.
I hope I have made it extra clear in other posts, that not one 3d engine is able to serve all. I want to stress this again. But to dismiss his experience report like this, without even addressing a single point he made is a bit insolent. He explicitly mentioned that shadows are available, but also mentioned the state they are in. And I don't believe this is the first time you heard it.
What kind of comparison do you need here? Irrlicht supports modulative stencil shadows. Ogre supports additive and modulative stencil and texture shadows. Stencil shadows there are better integrated into the whole render pipeline. They can be used together with vertex shaders that transform the vertices, unlike in Irrlicht. Ogre has a very advanced system of determining the hull of a mesh and caching it for more speed, Ogre uses double sided stenciling, which only requires rendering the mesh once instead of twice like Irrlicht does (one time front faces, one time back faces) Ogre uses hardware extrusion on GPUs supporting it, it has better culling and it automatically determines the algorithm to use, whether z-fail or z-pass. Irrlicht only has its own "capped z-pass" which doesn't really work in the cases z-fail is needed. (Like when the camera is inside a shadow volume)
I don't want to bad mouth Irrlicht in any way here. I only list this because, reading your post, you seem to doubt this as fact. What information do you need to accept it? Same is true for everything else you mentioned.
Yes, you are right: "Lights, shaders, shadows, everything's there for Irrlicht" too. But having the features just to put them onto the feature-list, or having them implemented in a way, that they are ready for prime-time is a difference. For shadows see my last paragraph, for shaders see what agi_shi wrote. Using shaders in irrlicht in a big project is a PITA, once for the reasons listed by agi_shi, and also because artists can't define the material to be used. this is imho a severe hit to the art pipeline.
STL not available on platforms Irrlicht is available? Like what platform exactly? Even Nintendo DS has STL available. (Though it is hardly used) So have PSP, XBox, etc..