I switched to Ogre

[zenaku]

I like Irrlicht better because of the license.

Irrlicht = zlib
Ogre = LGPL


zlib is more free, IMO.

[Guest]

How about 'upgrading' Irrlicht.
I just gor my hands on the oldest Ogre source code and is kind of equevelent of Irrlicht 0.6 or 0.7 as features and is a lot less source so mucht easier to understend.
Well my idea is to take some things(ideas, features) from Ogre and transforme them into Irrlicht.
The bad think is that for Irrlicht to get as good as Ogre or to might get better, it need some rewireting of the framework. So I have some ideas how to make it
and wat realy need to be modefied to make it better.
Well it needs first a more powerfull IDriver(or a RenderSystem) with much more functions(mostely all that are posible to poot in it last beeing shaders).
So the Driver must be kind of independent of the other stuff, he must just render with all the stuff and fx posible and that the rest is around it.The problem is that the actual Driver api is kind of much different that what it shoul be( but it wont be that kind of inpact on the code because the rewrite I have in mind make Irrlicht's api a lot more intuitive and logican that it is now so it would be much easyer to use and more powerfull too)
A good thing Ogre has is the RenderTarget(and can be a window, a texture ) so it is much easier to use RTT.
An other think that I truly sugest for Irrlicht is the material scripting.You have text files in wich you say the name of the material you describe in it and that
you pass all the layers the material is made of each layer with it's oun proprety like ambient color, difuse collor, texture if wanted, pixel shader or vertex shader and the way to blend the layers togather.


IrrRoot(Device)----->saveConfig() a file with the configuration
|
----->loadConfig() loaf the config from the file or gen. default
|
|
|
----->RenderSystem(VideoDriver) and RenderSystemList(?)
|
|
----->ImputReciever(EventReciever)
|
|
----->FileSystem
|
----->GuiSystem(GUIEnvironment)
|
----->SceneManager
|
----->MeshManager ---->MeshLoader
| ----->MeshLoader3DS
| ----->MeshLoaderMY3D ....
|
----->MaterialManager----->TextureLoader(ImageLoader)
| ----->TextureLoaderBMP ......
|
------>AnimationManager---->Animation
____________|__________________________________________________
|
----->*CollisionManager(workind throught animations atached
| to SceneNodes)
----->*SoundManager---->Sound(can be atached to
SceneNoded insted of
Meshes)
*all below the line are not part of an only rendering engine, but throw a extendible(flexible) framework the rendering engine can easely be extanded to everibody's need becaming even a game tool using ather engine(libs) or ones created by ourselvs.

The new names are geven so that describe theyr functions(even thow Device may remain the way was orginaly called).As you might've noticed the texture loading I sugest to be outside the Drive(RenderSystem) because the Driver has the role to render thing(vestexes, textures, shaders ...) not to load image files or mesher.The MaterialManager should load them(it makes sense,no?)..

I'll apreciate all your ideas and comments on this.

[katoun]

Sory, I forgot to login.The above is me.

[grayman]

i am an artist so i can help with that but anything what make irrlicht better is welcome, ogre could be better than irrlicht but irrlicht is soooo clear for that i am here, isnt bad idea take the good the good stuff from other engines, so do it.

[omaremad]

yeah each person should do what they are god at to help the engine

like all the loaders

i have tried to add my share of shaders but im not good at that

while others have added portals and new texture functions so why is ogre better?

their gui is horrible.

but i like the auto shader loader, but who cares u have to customise shadrrs to your needs any way.

so tell me what is irrlicht missing?

they just have better artists in their tech demo.

[katoun]

Not quit.
Ogre has a profesionalway of working. Being able to change materials properties like layers or add shader without changin the source code of your project( from scripted matrial file) to the fact that load dynamicaly dll like pluging so making the engine more extensible and easier to develop to the fact that can use multiple scen manger to render difernt object with different thcniques(like CLOD for terrain and OCTREE for the other and BSP for the interior).

[omaremad]

all this can be done in irrlicht if u want to do it

in our project we made our own xml config system ogre does that automatically

u said about auto shaders well in irrlicht u can just use a xml and xml reader in the code as a scripting technique

irrlicht is cappable but not being used to its potential

and why do u need seprate smgrs it just complicates things here the terrain has its own lod system from the octree and there are multi smgrs done in irrlicht to make split screen multiplayer

it seems that most of us have fear of using the engines advanced features or expanding it

(katoun u done a water scenenode that is better than ogre`s so why are u complaining )

we can have better visuials than ogre if we experiment with shaders etc...

i have made 6 shaders but there is a limit for what 1 noob can do.

in conlusion in h1 font size <h1>dont re-write re-adjust</h1>

i think they thing irrlicht is lakking ogre has is the .dds loader but it isnt that useful.

[Guest]

Delta3D

[katoun]

Yes you can do it yourself but you do it FOR YOURSELF but way not do it for all of us, why not all of these thing you say that can be done with Irrlicht(BUT WITHIN YOUR PROJECTS CODE so YOU HAVE TO WRITE EXTRA CODE) be inside
IRRlicht so EVERIBUDY CAN BENEFIT FROM THESE POSIBILITIES.
THAT IS WHAT I WANT TO DO AND NOT FOR ME BUT FOR ALL OF US, but if you don't think my idea is not good I make that JUST FOR ME like MOST DO !
I say some things can't be done with Irrlicht and you say it can if you write code for it, but I don't want to write code for it anymore(like most of us)I want an engine that does my life easier and I can concentrate on creating a game not an engine.Trust me there are some things you cant do with Irrlicht, WITHOUT WRETING EXTRA CODE.Look now I have been more explicit.
I know not everibody here can write an engine but there are some very goot progrmmers here andeveribody can help with what theay know.

I make a chalange:Who writes the nicest new improved framework for Irrlicht.
You can write a hole framework all just pecieses of it but the idea is that the code must be easy to use and intregrate.
IT IS NOT A JOKE.

[Guest]

For me Irrlicht is better.
Why Ogre is huge and tries to do many things -> you cannot control it fully. When you try to learn things it is good to have control on it.
I swiched about 4 days ago from ogre and cegui and i get better effect now in irrlicht than befor in Ogre.
Cegui get me mad 100 times because I got memory leanks.
Irrlicht gui took me 3 hours to understand fully how it works and I don't have now any problems with gui(maybe just a little disorder in funtion params i still make mistakes)

[A.Russell]

I find Irrlicht to be pretty good. It renders wickedly fast and the documentation is very good, if lacking examples.

Ogre also looks very good, and was a consideration for my current project, but it didn't have a feature I needed that Irrlicht has. That was the clincher for me this time around.

[terefang]

Ogre also looks very good, and was a consideration for my current project, but it didn't have a feature I needed that Irrlicht has. That was the clincher for me this time around.

which feature was that ?

[Guest]

Maybe one of the missing features are morph target animations? Ogre does indeed not have them yet in its current release, but will have in the next one.

This thread could be more helpful for people who want to decide which engine to use, if criticism wasn't made so general or grossly oversimplicated.

From my POV Irrlicht's big advantages over Ogre are the ease of setup and the built-in GUI. Having only one dll is a big plus over multiple dlls with quite a few support files, that the examples depend on. And if one tries to derive an app from the samples, then some file is almost guaranteed to be missing on. CeGUI might be more powerful and adjustable, but is very complex and, as Ogre, needs a lot of additional files to work. Irrlicht's buil-tin GUI is just good enough for most purposes and doesn't add complexity.

Ogre's big advantages, to me, are the powerful material system, or better content scripting in general and the concentration on full hardware support of all features for performance. Changing materials without recompiling the 3d graphics library is good, but changing material without recompiling anything is better. And Ogre's material system is very powerful, multipass rendering, LODing, and custom blending between the texture units and smooth integration of all kind of shaders and profiles (hlsl, cg and glsl and soon sh).

API-wise I don't think that one API is more difficult than the other. The library user usually won't have to deal with all the classes. Ogre's API is more complex, but slightly better documented too.

But there are "meta factors" too. Factors that don't lie in the library itself, but matter nevertheless. The most important to me is community support. Both have a forum and a wiki, but both feel better on the Ogre side. The Ogre forum is more frequented, questions are answered faster and the overall tone is very pleasant. Unlike the Irrlicht forum, though. The tone might be ok overall, but sometimes is far too harsh and when veteran forum users call each others moron and smartypants, well, then I want to leave this please better sooner than later. I seriously don't understand why the forum admins don't interfere in such situations.

Dan

PS: Midnight, I am no native english speaker, so cut me some slack, will ya.

[TheRLG]

I mean really you could say whatever you feel like using. Is Irrlicht easier to use? definetly. Is Irrlicht easily expandable? definetly. Is Irrlicht's community gigantic and incredibly helpful? ever increasingly so. These reasons alone are enough to keep me developing using Irrlicht. True, OGRE might have a few things that are just built in, even though the thing is a pain in the arse to use at all. But glory be, if you want that feature, you can just make it for Irrlicht. BAM. simple. easy. Really the difference here is like Lego's and MegaBlocks, they both do the same thing, just in different ways and appeal to different people. So to get a true feel for which one to use, just try them both out, and see which one floats your boat.

[vgmdev]

I started out 3 years ago, I used raw API’s and discovered how hard it was, so I put my game project hold. Now there’s Irrlicht and Ogre both are fairly good but they have pros and cons, Irrlicht has some bugs here and there, video renders need some improvement (not software one)
Why have an null device and move image loader’s some where else?
Code clean-up…
I understated this some is where in the plan and many users think about.


On the other hand, ogre has good code but it's big and hard to understating at times.
I use both engines.