Irrlicht vs Id Tech engines (former Quake Engines)

[jmpep]

Hello to everyone

I'm a student of Computer Science and for my dissertation I was requested to obtain a free, preferably open-source 3D engine for Symbian OS. I found none, and I decided to port Irrlicht to that platform (re-starting what was done in SymbIrrlicht).

That was almost half a year ago. The problem is that yesterday I found that Quake engines are also free (under the GPL) now, and there are Symbian versions. Because of that, if I want to port Irrlicht to Symbian (and I do) I'll need to provide my lecturer a good reason not to use the Quake engines.

I've been searching for their exact features but I've been unable, so my question is -at last! thanks to read until here -:

What features do Irrlicht have that Quake III engine lack?

What I need is a general purpose engine for mobile phones, able to get the most of the device (I use a N95 8Gb, with HW acceleration) in order to achieve the maximum realism, so any feature of Irrlicht that cannot be done with the Quake III engine would server as a good "excuse"...

PS: My apologizes if this is not the correct forum to make these questions, I doubted between this one and the Open Discussion one...

[kburkhart84]

I think the main excuse you could give in this case is the fact that the "Quake" line of engines is genre-specific, and Irrlicht is not. I know most of the demos on this site are FPS based, and Quake maps are used(at least the file format), but Irrlicht can do any type of game. You'd have to heavily modify the code in quake engines to make another type of game.

Other minor excuses are that Irrlicht uses OK shaders and overall seems more modern that the quake engines(excape Doom3/Quake4, which I don't think is OpenSource yet anyway), but than maybe quake3 is pretty close.

[Dark_Kilauea]

Irrlicht has also been ported to mobile platforms before, as well as consoles.

[CuteAlien]

The zlib license can be used in more projects than the gpl.
I think quake III has no software renderer.

Beside that - don't know. I never worked with quake III because of it's license.

[sudi]

Well i guess u all are missing something here.
Irrlicht is just a graphics engine and the quake3 engine is a game engine with graphics, sound, physic and network ok irrlicht supports input and "physic".
anyway on a mobile device u should go with smething else then the quake3 engine bc it has so much stuff u won't need or need something different on a mobile device. anyway ur choice.

[jmpep]

Wow, thanks a lot for the quick response

I'll try to research a bit more about the fact that quake is specific for FPS, that could really be a very good reason (and not only an excuse ).

anyway on a mobile device u should go with smething else then the quake3 engine bc it has so much stuff u won't need

I know, but if the engine is well done, removing the things I don't want before porting the others should be relatively easy.

[dlangdev]

it would be good to visually draw the api stack as a bunch of boxes and rectangles sitting top of each other, that way you can identify the ones you'll be needing to develop or simply port to your project.

[hybrid]

Indeed the abstraction layers found in Irrlicht are the most important reason for Irrlicht. Especially the video driver interface allows for easy porting, enables use of the software drivers on non-hw-accelerated machines, and also avoids the strong OpenGL dependency that the quake engines often have. Finally, we have an eye on mobile platforms and will do our best to support as many as possible

[JP]

Following on from Quake engine having lots of stuff you might not need in your game; Irrlicht may have things you don't require; built-in GUI (you may prefer a different library for that or something), XML-parser etc but these things can very easily be excluded from the library by simply changing a #define in irrCompileConfig.h and then you can use it without those features, creating a more lightweight library.

I don't know if the Quake engine provides such easy removal but it could be a good thing to add to the list of benefits for Irrlicht.

[jmpep]

Hm, I'll have to see whether the quake engine is as coupled as it seems... but yes, definitely Irrlicht seems to be better at that

Just a final question: what about graphic features? Do you know if quake lack certain effects (in the first two versions I now it has weaker material support than Irrlicht, for example. I don't know if Quake 3 has the same disadvantage).

I'll keep searching for a idTech 3's list of features so I can answer myself, but as for now I've been unable to find any, so any help would be welcome

Again thanks you very much, I was very lost in this topic until you gave me so many answers

[JP]

To be fair i was pretty surprised that you'd be able to find any reasons why Irrlicht would be better than an engine made by ID but when you look into it there's a few reasons such as the fact that they're not the same sort of engine, one's graphics, the other is a game engine so that does make a difference depending on what you're looking for!

[jmpep]

To be fair i was pretty surprised that you'd be able to find any reasons why Irrlicht would be better than an engine made by ID

Well, idTech 3 was released in 1999. In nine years Irrlicht should have been able to surpass it, not even ID is able to make engines that can stand nine years being the best

Oh, and what I want the engine for is not for a game, but to be able to represent a real-world place (a University) in 3D, as realistic as possible -while still in real time- in the mobile phone

[Dark_Kilauea]

Irrlicht actually has better shader support than Quake 3 (since it uses GLSL directly, instead of going through Quake 3's shader language). However, you would need to learn GLSL, Quake 3 has the advantage of being relatively friendly with it's shader scripting.

But, if you really wanted to, you could also run Quake 3 shaders in irrlicht, via the built in Quake 3 bsp support.

[kburkhart84]

To be fair i was pretty surprised that you'd be able to find any reasons why Irrlicht would be better than an engine made by ID

Well, idTech 3 was released in 1999. In nine years Irrlicht should have been able to surpass it, not even ID is able to make engines that can stand nine years being the best

Oh, and what I want the engine for is not for a game, but to be able to represent a real-world place (a University) in 3D, as realistic as possible -while still in real time- in the mobile phone

WOW, I hate to say it, but I don't see that happening in any engine, Irrlicht or otherwise. Just how powerful of a mobile phone are we talking about. I honestly don't see that happening, though I could be wrong. You are talking about too many polys on too slow of a machine. Most mobile phones, even newer ones, don't have processors any faster than Pentium 3s. Yes, the architeture used now is better, so 400Mhz now isn't as slow as it was on the older pentiums, but still, it isn't enough power for a detailed 3d scene like that. Also, if you go for realistic and try to use shaders, it is additionally slower on top of that.

Now one exception I think to the above is this. I have heard of a phone, I think is called "Flame" or something like that, has an actual NVIDIA chip in it, GeForce 5900 I think, something along those lines. That would be your best bet, but you would have to customize your own Irrlicht drivers, and it would only work on that phone. But even then, I don't think that graphics chip is fast enough for what you are looking for.

Simply put, your "realistic as possible" more than likely won't be very "realistic." If anyone disagrees with me, feel free to explain why, as I like to learn new things, even if I am to be proven wrong in the process.

[lostclimategames]

actually many phones are powerful enough to run low poly 3d games, why do you think the new big thing with indie engines are iphone support?