Planning is important for anything larger than a tech demo.
I'm not just talking planning for programming wise, but also for every little thing about your design.
Generally there is a Game Design document ( art style, game play style, characters, story etc) and a Technical Design document ( programming challenges, class design, uml diagrams etc).
Whiteboards are good, and for my last/current/if i had time for project I got a wiki running for my design documents. I will send you a PM with the link to it, I dont post it on forums so it doesnt get picked up by wiki vandel bots.
Engines wise, Irrlicht is a good start. I love how easy to use and change it is. Good documentation and friendly community (proved by the fact of how few posts ever get moderated).
Physics I would personally go Bullet, its fast, free, feature rich, open source, fast dev cycle and reasonably easy to implement.
Sound is an interesting one, I have had issues with OpenAL (well its wasnt really OpenAL's fault it was a buggy Nvidia wrapper driver that still haunts me to this day), but there is no real alternative to it.
Networking: Raknet is good, only issues I had with it was the poorly designed replica system but I think that has recently got an overhaul and is fixed.
Seeking advise...
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I reccomend Audiere for sound, as mentioned earlier it doesn't support 3d sound, but it has all the necessary components to set such a system up (volume/pan controls etc), and I got my own 3d sound system with audiere working in my current project without much difficulty.For the sound engine, I'm thinking about these 3 engines: FMOD, Irrklang and audiere.
"Surely we don’t need to waste resources on pathfinding; they just need to walk along the shortest route from one place to another." - EA Producer
Yeah i did some basic 3D sound with audiere in my Curse of the Pharaoh project. Not sure if i had panning or not but definetly had distance-based volume.
EDIT: just checked and it doesn't have the panning, but i guess it's not hard to do, just calculate the angle between the camera's target and the sound source and then use that to work out the pan.
EDIT: just checked and it doesn't have the panning, but i guess it's not hard to do, just calculate the angle between the camera's target and the sound source and then use that to work out the pan.
