Why I selected Irrlicht over Ogre3d

LizardGamer · Post by **LizardGamer** » Sat May 28, 2011 11:46 am

I'm a person that doesnt always like to follow the crowd just because someone says its good. I wanted to use irrlicht over ogre because of how nice this community is, it feels like a family, so really I have selected friendship over looks. Of course ogre has some more features than Irrlicht but Irrlicht has beginner use in mind.

I want to and will contribute to this community by first learning Java or Lua and helping make a wrapper for Irrlicht (after I have completed my year 11 exams in the next week).

I want to be apart of making Irrlicht great.

Radikalizm · Post by **Radikalizm** » Sat May 28, 2011 12:21 pm

Well, you're more than welcome to contribute

I always think it's funny when people start the Ogre vs Irrlicht debate, it's true that Ogre shows nicer examples and that a lot of people have made really cool things with Ogre, but in the end you can achieve the same results with either engine, there are no groundbreaking features in Ogre which make it superior to irrlicht

LizardGamer · Post by **LizardGamer** » Sat May 28, 2011 1:25 pm

Radikalizm wrote:Ogre shows nicer examples and that a lot of people have made really cool things with Ogre, but in the end you can achieve the same results with either engine, there are no groundbreaking features in Ogre which make it superior to irrlicht

Exactly, and you Radikalizm are one of the many examples of friendly members that I'm inspired by in the Irrlicht forum.

Of course everyone one here has different views/likes but there are lots of you that are so nice, which makes Irrlicht feel so nice and welcoming.

Radikalizm · Post by **Radikalizm** » Sat May 28, 2011 2:45 pm

LizardGamer wrote:Exactly, and you Radikalizm are one of the many examples of friendly members that I'm inspired by in the Irrlicht forum.

I'm flattered

Brainsaw · Post by **Brainsaw** » Sat May 28, 2011 3:08 pm

I never touched Ogre, but in the beginning I selected Irrlicht over CrystalSpace because Irrlicht is very easy to get up and running. I don't mean from the code side (I think I'm good enough as a programmer to get some decent things done in CrystalSpace) but the initial "get the first demo running". Took me about 10 minutes (+download) with Irrlicht, whereas I never got anything compiled and running with CS.

Virion · Post by **Virion** » Wed Jun 01, 2011 9:54 pm

All Ogre demos are fully using shaders while most of the irrlicht demos are just using fixed-function materials that is why the difference is so huge.

devsh · Post by **devsh** » Wed Jun 01, 2011 10:23 pm

I gotta defend irrlicht here... it's the easiest to modify engine... ever I can do inferred lighting without touching 99.99% of the source code of the engine, where as to just load an image in Horde3D from raw bytes.... engine rewrite.

some engines like Lightfeather and Horde enforce loading and setting up poop from XMLs, which pisses me off because I feel like using GameMaker again.. limited features/you suffocate in a box.

I instantly see a way to do Global Illumination with spherical harmonics, texture manipulation/reading/writing etc. whereas this is not possible with other engines because they are too big or too small. In Horde I would have to create countless interfaces to support textures as good as irrlicht does and highly specific post proc, in OGRe I would have to modify it to the extent at which I would not be able to keep in sync with the releases... not mentioning the days or weeks spent to read to code and get the code path into my head, trying to grasp how it all works and identify the pitfalls so I dont gently caress anything up.

Kalango · Post by **Kalango** » Wed Jun 01, 2011 10:31 pm

The thing is that most people just want nice looking graphics, etc. Some dont realize the possibilities within irrlicht. Also people think that shaders is what make graphics cool, but a good art is like 80/100 of the beauty. I just wished default CG support within the engine ;D

Radikalizm · Post by **Radikalizm** » Wed Jun 01, 2011 11:33 pm

Kalango wrote:The thing is that most people just want nice looking graphics, etc. Some dont realize the possibilities within irrlicht. Also people think that shaders is what make graphics cool, but a good art is like 80/100 of the beauty. I just wished default CG support within the engine ;D

It's not like shaders and art are completely different things or something, they are tied together rather heavily; you can't get the most out of your art without decently written shaders to achieve the effects you want, nor will your game look good with nicely written shaders but without good art

And I really have to agree with devsh, I skipped between engines a lot a couple of years back and I always came back to irrlicht after a while because of its completeness, its flexibility and ease of use, something I never had with an engine like OGRE

Kalango · Post by **Kalango** » Thu Jun 02, 2011 1:51 am

Radikalizm wrote: And I really have to agree with devsh, I skipped between engines a lot a couple of years back and I always came back to irrlicht after a while because of its completeness, its flexibility and ease of use, something I never had with an engine like OGRE

Sadly enought Ogre has much more to show than irrlicht..

ChaiRuiPeng · Post by **ChaiRuiPeng** » Thu Jun 02, 2011 2:03 am

Kalango wrote:
Radikalizm wrote: And I really have to agree with devsh, I skipped between engines a lot a couple of years back and I always came back to irrlicht after a while because of its completeness, its flexibility and ease of use, something I never had with an engine like OGRE
Sadly enought Ogre has much more to show than irrlicht..

i think ogre just has more built in "polished" features. however i don't like that feel since i feel it is just trying to attract all the newbies who want to "maek 3pik gaem z0mgsh lol"

ogre is a fine engine, but for me it's too bloated. for my project if i were to use ogre3d i would probly use about 5% of the features, and everything else requires custom behavior i will have to write myself.

tl;dr:

ogre3d: more features out of the box, a bit more polished

irrlicht: very EASILY expandible, needs a little more effort to get where you want but the results are the same as any other graphics engine if you know what you're doing

Kalango · Post by **Kalango** » Thu Jun 02, 2011 3:57 am

One difference i noted on Irrlicht vs shader based engines is..well.. the shader speed.
Much of the irrlicht pos processing and material shader implementation is really slow compared to other engines.

devsh · Post by **devsh** » Thu Jun 02, 2011 10:14 am

Much of the irrlicht pos processing and material shader implementation is really slow compared to other engines.

This would worry me a LOT.... its impossible for shaders to be faster or slower if its the exact same code under exact same driver exact same HW and exact same API... but the handling of the data etc. (like trying to update shader vals every draw call and setting the material every draw call) could be the result....

greenya · Post by **greenya** » Thu Jun 02, 2011 1:30 pm

I selected Irrlicht over Ogre3d copule of years ago because i was scared by HelloWorld example of the second one.

mongoose7 · Post by **mongoose7** » Thu Jun 02, 2011 1:30 pm

OGRE looks as if it has an animation system, whereas Irrlicht hasn't. It also appears to support hardware skinning. I think I'll mosey on down and take a look.