IRRLICH VS PANDA 3D VS OGRE

[emekapa]

Hi all,

I'm new around here so i dont know very much about IRRLICH!

I need to do a project and the main funcionalities that i need are:
SPATIAL CULLING,
PERFORMANCE,
COMMUNITY,
INTEGRATION WITH MULTIMEDIA FILES,
POSSIBILITY OF CALLING WEBSERVICES, and OOP.

Can someone give an advice ?

[Seven]

Code: Select all

Features
The Irrlicht Engine is a cross-platform high performance realtime 3D engine written in C++. It is a powerful high level API for creating complete 3D and 2D applications like games or scientific visualizations. It comes with anexcellent documentation and integrates all the state-of-the-art features for visual representation like dynamic shadows, particle systems, character animation, indoor and outdoor technology, and collision detection. All this is accessible through a well designed C++ interface, which is extremely easy to use. 


 

 


 Its main features are: 

•High performance realtime 3D rendering using Direct3D and OpenGL [more]
•Platform independent. Runs on Windows95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Linux, OSX, Solaris, and others.[more]
•Huge built-in and extensible material library with vertex and pixel shader support [more].
•Seamless indoor and outdoor mixing through highly customizeable scene management. [more]
•Character animation system with skeletal and morph target animation. [more]
•Particle effects, billboards, light maps, environment mapping, stencil buffer shadows, and lots of other special effects. [more] 
•.NET language binding which makes the engine available to all .NET languages like C#, VisualBasic, and Delphi.NET.
•Two platform and driver independent fast software renderers included. They have different properties (speed vs. quality) and feature everything needed: perspective correct texture mapping, bilinear filtering, sub pixel correctness, z-buffer, gouraud shading, alpha-blending and transparency, fast 2D drawing, and more.
•Powerful, customizeable, and easy to use 2D GUI System with Buttons, Lists, Edit boxes, ...
•2D drawing functions like alpha blending, color key based blitting, font drawing, and mixing 3D with 2D graphics.
•Clean, easy to understand, and well documented API with lots of examples and tutorials.
•Written in pure C++ and totally object oriented.
•Direct import of common mesh file formats: Maya (.obj), 3DStudio (.3ds), COLLADA (.dae), Blitz3D (.b3d), Milkshape (.ms3d), Quake 3 levels (.bsp), Quake2 models (.md2), Microsoft DirectX (.X)... [more]
•Direct import of Textures: Windows Bitmap (.bmp), Portable Network Graphics (.png), Adobe Photoshop (.psd), JPEG File Interchange Format (.jpg), Truevision Targa (.tga), ZSoft Painbrush (.pcx)... [more]
•Fast and easy collision detection and response.
•Optimized fast 3D math and container template libraries.
•Directly reading from (compressed) archives. (.zip, .pak, .pk3)
•Integrated fast XML parser.
•Unicode support for easy localisation.
•Works with Microsoft VisualStudio 7.0-9.0™, Metrowerks Codewarrior, Bloodshed Dev-C++, Code::Blocks, XCode, and gcc 3.x-4.x. 
•The engine is open source and totally free. You can debug it, fix bugs and even change things you do not like. And you do not have to publish your changes: The engine is licensed under the zlib licence, not the GPL or the LGPL. 

[Seven]

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/features.html

[Seven]

Code: Select all

It comes with anexcellent documentation 

LOL! now THAT is funny

[JhimBhoy]

For me, the documentation is this forum.

Typos included

[hybrid]

Argh, I guess we need to update the features site Please take that website only as a beginning, the engine offers much more. And those things not yet in the engine can be found on this forum. Everything available
But please, next time some more effort in testing the engine, and not just asking general things which can be found in the docs or examples.

[Reiko]

I have never tried Panda 3d, but I have tried Irrlicht and some basics of Ogre. (still hoping to complete a mini project using Ogre when I can, just to say I've used it)

Since you've posted this on the Irrlicht forums though, you should know that most of the replies you get are obviously going to be regarding Irrlicht or biased to Irrlicht, but anyways, I'll tell you about my experience.

When I started using Irrlicht, the only prior knowledge I had was doing a couple of the tutorials on the Dark GDK engine. That was also the only C++ experience I had, although I had quite some experience with C already from university. Actually I also took a C++ class, but failed it. Failed my C class too, haha. Well that's more because I'm terrible with taking exams.

Anyways, what I like about Irrlicht is that although the documentation doesn't give much help in the way of "example of use", there are a number of example programs and tutorials which cover many of the sorts of things you would want to do with your project. Even now, sometimes I find myself wanting to do something, and remembering there being an example program similar to what I want, so I went back and took a look at it.

Basically, if you run through the tutorials from the start, up until things start getting confusing, and then start playing with what you learned so far, it won't be very hard to get into the engine.

With Irrlicht, you can easily use either procedural or OOP programming style. With Ogre, it seems to be pretty much just OOP (as the O in Ogre suggests). This might be a blessing or a curse. Some may think it is easier to learn the harder way to begin with, rather than wasting time the easy way first.

With OGRE, I found that the tutorials seemed very backwards. For example, the tutorials teach you the basics at the start, such as how to place models into your scene, move them around, rotate, add lights, etc.

But for something as simple as loading my own model, or simply adding a cube and giving it my own texture, I found it incredibly difficult to work out how to do it. Also, initial simple things such as setting up the window where your game appears in yourself was not taught until tutorial 6 or 7 (before then, they get you to extend their "example class" all the time without really explaining much about what that example class does). This seemed very back to front to me, and I was quite frustrated that I knew how to move my camera around, add lights and all this stuff, but yet I didn't know how to apply a texture to an object.

Also, the concept of how a 3d scene works etc is explained very well as you go along with the irrlicht tutorials. The OGRE ones were not bad either, but it was easier for me having already played with Irrlicht before.

As for support, like I said earlier the documentation does explain what everything does, but it doesn't really give you examples on how to use everything. However, once you got a grasp of the engine, these explanations are usually enough. If not, then you can search this forum, which already has loads of questions been asked already, and you should be able to find your answer.

If not you can just make a thread. The admins here are very good, they know their engine very well and are very helpful. You don't have to wait long for a response either.

As for OGRE, I only ever made one thread at their forum there, but it was also replied to rather well and promptly. So I can't really judge them there, but it might not be bad. One comment I have though is that this forums is seperated into many sub forums, and categorised well. The OGRE subforum basically just has one subforum which contains code snippers, beginner and advanced questions, etc all clustered into the one place. So it's a little harder to look through, but then again you can use the search too.

What sort of turns me off about OGRE though is that most of their addons are not very well maintained, and are very difficult to get working.

The Irrlicht engine itself is still maintained well and theyre still comitting new versions to the SVN every day, even though the Irrlicht project is like 6 years old now.

Another thing is that when implementing features, I have noticed that the Irrlicht developers seem to commonly "reinvent the wheel", while the OGRE developers seem to borrow from tried and true libraries. While this could be good or bad, it does mean that the developers here used their own code and know their own code well, so when other things need to be changed, they pretty much know off the bat if something is gonna be a problem for something else. It also seems they try their best to make the code as efficient as possible as well.

But, I do like how the Irrlicht dll is just one 1mb file, while OGRE has about 15 dlls you need to include with your game, which total to like 20mb. This would be fine for a complete game, but when youre starting out and just sending it to a friend or two to see your work in progress, it feels a little silly.

Irrlicht also supports many different types of mesh formats, while OGRE supports only its own .mesh format which you will have to convert your models into to be able to use them. Although I noticed that OGRE supports .dds texture format already, while Irrlicht doesn't (however, support for this is not hard to implement with a patch which a user here created).

etc etc

I've just had a much more pleasant experience using Irrlicht. The tough part is that the people here are mostly programmers, and not artists. If you look at the OGRE demos, they are very flashy and neat, and show off the engine well. The Irrlicht demos look much less interesting, and really don't show how good the engine is. It would be great if we could get some good artists which could help redo all the sample media with stuff which looks "prettier", but then again, I guess it is also more realistic for the common developer, since they probably can't make such pretty models etc unless someone quite experienced is doing it for them. So maybe this way it feels more real.

But yeah despite all this, as I said at the start, I would like to use OGRE more some time, basically to give it more of a fair chance even though my experience so far wasn't as good as it was with Irrlicht. For some reason I get the feeling there's actually a good engine in it too, under all the mess and confusion.

But yeah Irrlicht is a good engine, easy and great to use and I'd definitely recommend it.

[Brainsaw]

I guess you won't find many people here telling you that Irrlicht is bad

I didn't try that many other 3D enigens (only doing all myself with OpenGL and CrystalSpace), but the thing that made me stay with Irrlicht is the ease of use. Just unpack the downloaded file, set up your IDE following one of the tutorials and you're ready to go. There are some harder things in Irrlicht of course, but I discovered them rather late instead of having to compile the engine first (which I normally don't do) and getting into problems there.

[MikeDee]

Well, Ogre3D is more powerful than Irrlicht features-wise, there's no point on denying it, even if the difference isn't as big as the demos of both say, but it's also stupidly difficult to so something as simple as loading your assets for example. While in Irrlicht you can load most well known formats directly, in Ogre you have to use exporters for the format you want, that is, if they exist, otherwise you'll have to write them yourself. And that applies both for meshes, materials and skeletons (yeah, no animated meshes, you have to export the skeleton so most animation apps are useless, you are almost forced to use major modelling apps like 3ds max, maya, cinema 4d etc...)

In the other hand, Ogre3D has features that Irrlicht doesn't such as specular mapping, bloom and deferred shading, for example (though I believe all those effects can be achieved in Irrlicht by coding them yourself, but well it would be a way better if they came built in)

But well, nevertheless I prefer Irrlicht, it's just simpler and easier to use, the community is great, there are already many helpful user made libraries and wrappers for the engine, and they will keep on improving the engine even more as time goes by.

edit: Edited half my post to correct some errors.

[Seven]

Argh, I guess we need to update the features site

<wink>

[Viz_Fuerte]

...Ogre3D has features that Irrlicht doesn't such as specular mapping, bloom and deferred shading, for example...

There are plenty of examples and code to do that and more.

Has yet been done some great graphic quality with Irlicht,
but may have the same quality as the Ogre (even more) without eating much head.

The ease and power that has Irrlicht, not have any.

bye

edit: Please, no more comparisons...

[Abraxas)]

I wish and pray to god/allah/jesus/etc every day that IrrExt becomes a reality loaded with awesome scene nodes, shaders and other juicy delicious awesomeness that would make even the most banal boring games seem like they were made by microsoft.

[Kojack]

But, I do like how the Irrlicht dll is just one 1mb file, while OGRE has about 15 dlls you need to include with your game,

Ogre requires no dlls, you can do a static build which results in just your game/app exe, no dlls required at all (although if you want CG shaders that requires the nvidia cg.dll. Use hlsl or glsl to avoid needing that one).

Or if you don't like doing a static link with ogre and want to go the standard dll way, you only need 3 dlls: Ogremain, a rendersystem plugin and a scenemanager plugin (and cg.dll again if you want cg shaders).

yeah, no animated meshes, you have to export the skeleton so most animation apps are useless

Ogre has both morph and pose based vertex animated meshes.

[Reiko]

But, I do like how the Irrlicht dll is just one 1mb file, while OGRE has about 15 dlls you need to include with your game,

Ogre requires no dlls, you can do a static build which results in just your game/app exe, no dlls required at all (although if you want CG shaders that requires the nvidia cg.dll. Use hlsl or glsl to avoid needing that one).

Or if you don't like doing a static link with ogre and want to go the standard dll way, you only need 3 dlls: Ogremain, a rendersystem plugin and a scenemanager plugin (and cg.dll again if you want cg shaders).

Oh well, I guess there are some dlls which arent really needed then. I understand ogre a lot less than irrlicht anyways. And you can still statically link irrlicht too.

[Viz_Fuerte]

Ogre, weighs a lot (12 MB approx. in dll -particle system, GUI, BSP,...-)

Although you use the static libraries, compile-time an exe would be longer and would not be profitable for the person who is constantly trying out codes (Like me )

The good thing about it is system of shadows...


I hope that Irrlicht someday have as much power to the shadows as the Ogre.

Irrlicht globally, is much better than the Ogre or than the Panda3D.

It is unique in its kind.