What to use for an indoor/outdoor RPG?

iindigo · Post by **iindigo** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 5:00 pm

Hello!

My team and I have been conceptualizing and designing our RPG project for a while now (around a year and a half, possibly more) and as we're approaching a final concept, I've taken up the task of deciding which libraries/engines to use and what parts to write ourselves.

This is our first game project. We are not programming experts, but we aren't completely new in the matter either - I have personally dabbled with Objective-C in the past (have written a couple small apps with it) and have also worked with a couple forms of BASIC. I am currently learning C independently (through online tutorials and books), and two other people on our team are computer science majors who have taken Java and will be taking C/C++ courses very soon. To tell you the truth, our initial idea was for an MMORPG, but it quickly became obvious to us that the project was too ambitious at this point and that we should develop our skills with something smaller (hence the offline RPG).

The RPG will feature a mix of indoor and outdoor areas. We would prefer if we could develop the visuals to the point of being a feasible competitor with the "big boys" in RPGs - not necessarily matching them, but having a quality nice enough to not be a major con when a potential customer is comparing games. Basically, we don't want a final product with visuals equivalent to that of a PS1 game. I don't know if that is possible at this point, but it's what we'll be aiming for.

Ideally, this game would also be multi-platform from the start, meaning that good OpenGL performance is very important - we can't have Linux and Mac OS users experiencing incredibly lower framerates than our Windows/DirectX users. We feel that this is important after seeing the recent 2-4% marketshare shift from Windows to Linux and Mac OS, as slight as it may be, because this shift might (and probably will) continue. Two or three of us are Mac/Linux users as well, which also influences this decision.

Our primary modeling tool will be Blender or possibly Wings 3D. What is to be used for other pieces of the game is still being debated.

Taking all of this into account, what would be the best option for our project's graphics engine? Using Irrilicht, OGRE, writing our own (highly unlikely considering the team's lack of trig and higher math skills), or something else?

Thanks in advance to anybody with advice on the matter.

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 5:33 pm

Irrlicht and OGRE should both be fit for purpose (as should Lightfeather, or IrrSpintz, or CrystalSpace) . I don't know enough about recent versions of OGRE to talk smack about it, so I'll stick to talking smack about Irrlicht instead.

Irrlicht pros
Very easy to get scenes up and running.
Irrlicht is relatively easy to extend and modify if you need to.
Shader support, so you can do eye candy.
Octtree support, which is good for indoor environments.
A scene editor (IrrEdit).

Irrlicht cons
No hardware VBO support yet, but I suspect it will be there by the time you need it.
The built-in GUI isn't as fully featured (yet) as the CeGUI that OGRE uses, but you can also use CeGUI with Irrlicht.
No built-in support for portals (although you can do them youself).
The built-in terrain node has some known limitations, but you won't necessarily be using that anyway, and there's a good tiled terrain node in the forums.

It sounds like you should have a good idea of your requirements by now. If you list them, we can give detailed answers on what Irrlicht will and won't do for you to help you decide.

iindigo · Post by **iindigo** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 5:42 pm

rogerborg wrote:It sounds like you should have a good idea of your requirements by now. If you list them, we can give detailed answers on what Irrlicht will and won't do for you to help you decide.

We're not entirely sure at this point... we haven't acquainted ourselves with the technical side of graphics engines yet (for example, I have no idea what VBO means). We have a general idea of how they work (enough to know what UV wrapping, normals, etc. are) but are missing the details.

As far as gameplay/graphics... portals would be nice, but not entirely necessary. There will be a fair amount of water in some of the areas, so it'd be nice if water looked reasonably realistic... I can't think of much else at the moment (but then again I'm pretty tired). I'll have to ask during the team's next IRC meeting.

I will admit that IrrEdit looks very nice and very well may be the deciding factor... does OGRE have an equivalent? Also, I heard that IrrEdit doesn't handle bumpmapping yet - is this true?

shogun · Post by **shogun** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 8:04 pm

rogerborg wrote: A good scene editor (IrrEdit).

I use it for my project and to be honest, IrrEdit in the current state is a pain in the ass when creating larger scenes. You can't select more than one node, you can't stop animators, many flaws in the interface which just slow down the workflow (e.g., reset of the property window's scrolling position when selecting another node) and creating a plugin really just lets you add a new type of scene node (i.e., you can't add an own toolwindow). And no undo!

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 11:01 pm

rogerborg wrote: A good scene editor (IrrEdit).

Original post is now slightly redacted.

ultran00b · Post by **ultran00b** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 11:09 pm

Just so you know, Rogerberg, IrrSpintz is defunct. In it's place is the 3Demon engine, located here.

Just to let you know.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 11:30 pm

well, neither IrrSpintz nor 3demon do really help because the requirements include multi-platform, while those two are windows only...
The VBO support (which means that you can store mesh information on the gfx card, not just textures, which makes drawing large static meshes pretty fast) for OpenGL is already working, we only have some shortage on active direct3d implementors

There are several water scene nodes for different levels of realism available. Some of them will probably be taken into the Irrlicht SceneNode Collection sometimes (or maybe they are already?). I'll have to check.

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 11:48 pm

ultran00b wrote:Just so you know, Rogerberg, IrrSpintz is defunct. In it's place is the 3Demon engine, located here.

Ah, I wondered why Spintz had gone so quiet.

dlangdev · Post by **dlangdev** » Tue Jan 22, 2008 12:10 am

just to let you know, i've mentioned irrlicht to my manager about using irrlicht as a suplement to my simulation and testing tools, he said nothing about it, so i guess that means ok. he really doesn't care about the tools i use, he's more interested in keeping the business running smoothly, though.

i'll be using it to probe the server and display a map of the current state, where users are in their world and stuff like that.

should be fun.