is irrlicht right for me, flight sim game

[steveh2112]

hi all, i am in the beginning stages of planning development of a flight simulation game. the game will require high speed (30-100fps) rendering of detailed terrain (1920x1080) on a 'reasonable' spec gaming pc. the idea is to fly very close to the ground, though canyons, valleys, mountains, etc against the clock or another player (or AI). there will be obstacles to fly through along the way so it will need collision detection. besides that, i don't need a lot else. animated waterfalls would be nice but not necessary. lots of trees good, but again not essential. no special lighting or environmental effects.

the most important thing is terrain detail at the highest level you would find on google earth over say Yosemite valley and frame rate.

i've flow the google earth flight sim around Yosemite and its actually very cool, so something like that but much faster (smoother animation, no cache loading) and with game elements like racing against another plane, flying through gates, keeping score, maybe networked multiplayer, etc. i don't need a lot of fancy physics (although maybe nice to have the planes bounce off a wall rather than crash) and the flight model doesn't need to be pro flight sim level, i can program that bit.

i don't need a lot of GUI stuff and i don't care about rendering inside a cockpit or any of the standard flight sim stuff. i'll have a simple HUD (heads up display) for flight parameters like airspeed, altitude, heading, etc, which i can do with a simple 2d overlay.

i'm a c++ programmer so no problem there, so irrlicht looks like a good choice vs. say orge3d (maybe too slow) or torque (maybe more stuff than i need), but i don't know. any advice please?

also, i'd like to import terrain from google sketchup (which can grab from google earth). i know there are licensing issues there, but besides that, am i correct in thinking building terrain from say a .3ds file or similar is quite easy? what large area terrain editor works best with irrlicht?

thx

[REDDemon]

In general I'll advise you to make a custom terrain system. It will be much easier for you than trying to tweak engines (i'm doing a thesis on terrains so I compared plenty terrain systems). You keep just details you need. the fact is that most terrains are not truly scalable, they may have high detail or pagin systems but no one scales well on speed (well Irrlicht does if you generate some detail on the fly, but you need google earth data .. ^^ wich is the most complex part I fear. ).. When you need specific things no general-purpose engine is a well-fit.

the lucky part is that everyone did a custom terrain for irrlicht, so starting by looking around is very easy