why irrlicht?
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Guest
why irrlicht?
Can some one tell me why i should use irrlicht as a 3d engine and not crystallspace or orge3d ive looked into them there quality seems much better then irrlicht.
It's a free world out there.
Check out each engines' features, ease of use, API and 3d support. Check also which one suits your creation needs -graphics, 3d formats, physics, audio, etc.
Each one has its own and different pros and cons. The best person to decide will be yourself.
I chose Irrlicht because I found it easy to understand and fast to implement stuff. I also loved the wole bunch of 3d formats it supports.
regards,
afecelis
edit:
Irrlicht's features:
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/features.html
Ogre's features:
http://www.ogre3d.org/index.php?option= ... &Itemid=62
Crystal space features:
http://www.crystalspace3d.org/tikiwiki/ ... e=Features
Check out each engines' features, ease of use, API and 3d support. Check also which one suits your creation needs -graphics, 3d formats, physics, audio, etc.
Each one has its own and different pros and cons. The best person to decide will be yourself.
I chose Irrlicht because I found it easy to understand and fast to implement stuff. I also loved the wole bunch of 3d formats it supports.
regards,
afecelis
edit:
Irrlicht's features:
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/features.html
Ogre's features:
http://www.ogre3d.org/index.php?option= ... &Itemid=62
Crystal space features:
http://www.crystalspace3d.org/tikiwiki/ ... e=Features
From a non-programmers point of view:
1. Ogre
2. Crystal
3. Irrlicht
From a programmers point of view who may someday wish to make a commercial game:
1. Irrlicht
2. Ogre
3. Crystal
I say from a non-programmers point of view as in if you go to the websites and look at the website layouts and screenshots, Ogre looks the best, then crystal, and finally irrlicht. That has more to do with the artists involved in the various projects than it has with the quality of the engine though.
If you actually try to use Ogre or Crystal, you'll see why Irrlicht is the best from a programmer's point of view.
Both Ogre and Crystal are LGPL. Although the LGPL is commercial friendly, it places odd burdens on the developer in regards to linking and extending the engine. That's enough for me to avoid them.
Also, since Ogre's development model is cathedral in nature, even if you did want to play by the LGPL rules, if you did update the engine you'd be hard pressed to get the Ogre developers to accept your patch.
With Irrlicht, the engine is mine as much as it is Niko's, something you cannot say about Ogre or CrystalSpace.
1. Ogre
2. Crystal
3. Irrlicht
From a programmers point of view who may someday wish to make a commercial game:
1. Irrlicht
2. Ogre
3. Crystal
I say from a non-programmers point of view as in if you go to the websites and look at the website layouts and screenshots, Ogre looks the best, then crystal, and finally irrlicht. That has more to do with the artists involved in the various projects than it has with the quality of the engine though.
If you actually try to use Ogre or Crystal, you'll see why Irrlicht is the best from a programmer's point of view.
Both Ogre and Crystal are LGPL. Although the LGPL is commercial friendly, it places odd burdens on the developer in regards to linking and extending the engine. That's enough for me to avoid them.
Also, since Ogre's development model is cathedral in nature, even if you did want to play by the LGPL rules, if you did update the engine you'd be hard pressed to get the Ogre developers to accept your patch.
With Irrlicht, the engine is mine as much as it is Niko's, something you cannot say about Ogre or CrystalSpace.
It sure is a free world out there, some parts are more free than others 
imo irrlicht's major advantage is the license. if you modify crystal space or ogre to make your own custom engine, you have to release those changes. I'm not saying I don't like to release my changes, I just like the choice to be mine.
also, irrlicht is easy to read and learn. maybe I'll move on to another engine one day, but for now I can learn all about 3D engines by playing with irrlicht. whats more, I don't want to make the most beautiful game in the world and spend 4 years and have 30 developers working on it. I just wanna play round with some 3D stuff. so Irrlicht is the engine for me.
imo irrlicht's major advantage is the license. if you modify crystal space or ogre to make your own custom engine, you have to release those changes. I'm not saying I don't like to release my changes, I just like the choice to be mine.
also, irrlicht is easy to read and learn. maybe I'll move on to another engine one day, but for now I can learn all about 3D engines by playing with irrlicht. whats more, I don't want to make the most beautiful game in the world and spend 4 years and have 30 developers working on it. I just wanna play round with some 3D stuff. so Irrlicht is the engine for me.
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Guest
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Baal Cadar
- Posts: 377
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I don't get this one. Ogre's development is much more open than Irrlicht's has been in the past. By a great margin. What's done in the CVS is well documented in the wiki. Supplied patches are listed in the patch tracker. When patches are not accepted, the reason is communicated but it can be discussed and after a few changes the patch might still be applied. zenaku, what do you mean specifically here?zenaku wrote:Also, since Ogre's development model is cathedral in nature, even if you did want to play by the LGPL rules, if you did update the engine you'd be hard pressed to get the Ogre developers to accept your patch.
From my experience Sinbad and the others in the Ogre team are very open for discussion, but they also have their view of what the engine should be, which Nico and its team has too for Irrlicht.
And the views differ much.
In so far, there cannot be a simple order between the engines from "the generic programmer's" POV, as this too much depends on the purpose.
From my POV the main design differences between Ogre and irrlicht is, that Ogre is made more generic, while Irrlicht is made more for immediate use.Things that are hard wired in Irrlicht, are free to choose in Ogre.
Two examples:
Material subsystem: Ogre has the most flexible system I have see so far.
A material can have one or more techniques, that decide LODing or fallbacks (if no hardware shader available for instance), as many passes as you like with as many texture units as you like. (automatically split into several passes, if hardware texture units don't suffice) Completly free blending between the texture units and the passes and very customisable depth handling. Downside: As a beginner you have to read heaps of documentation you don't understand well at first. Even a simple material looks complex and in the beginning you can only do copy/paste and change a little.
Irrlicht on the other hand has ready-made materials for a variety of purposes, easy to use and ready for production. But if you need more than that things get complicated and you end up changing the source.
Meshes: Ogre has a very flexible hardware buffer setup. Vertex format is completly free, you can use any semantic in any order, split them up in several buffers if sensible for the application. But setting this up manually (which you don't need to do that often though) or reading from it for some reason (like physics engine feeding) is extremely hard for a beginner and even after some working with Ogre I have to look things up over again if I work in that area.
Irrlicht has software buffers with hard wired vertex layouts. Easy to use, but if you need something special, you are on your own and probably have to change the code in many places.
Ogre is not that hard to use really, it is just extremely big and complex. It is difficult to learn and to get into, but usage isn't. The design is clean and sharp. I just mention this here, because it is one of the most often heard prejudices here.
Anyway, enough differences between both, for both having their place in the community. My whole point is, that none is strictly worse or better than the other, but that purpose and level of the programmer define individually what is better.
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Random Dood
Just some random guy here, I must say I know absolutly nothing when it comes to programming comming from an IT field myself. I have tried/tested Ogre 3d and CS, all I can say is their hard as hell to grasp. First thing you must realise their not game engines even though they advertise them as so, their more like utilities, Ogre is purely built for graphics rendering and they admit somewhere its not a game engine. Crystal Space was one of the hardest things I worked with, after spending a day compiling it I fealt like everything was a waste. Turned out to be a set of demos and test apps, after inquiring for help on their forum they told me to read the documents provided with the engine. So I found out CS is actually an array of smaller individual modules that provide you the means to create somthing, thats provided you understand how to use each moduel and combine it into a single project. I don't know much about the irrlicht engine, if it even is an engine, but honestly its extremly confusing when people call somthing a game engine. All us lil people seem to think its the ultimate tool to end our gamming woes, well anyhow thats my sorry storry still on the look for somthing that will allow me to create an orpg.
You make a lot of good points Baal. To be honest, I haven't used Ogre enough to give a truely fair comparison. The point I was trying to make about ogre's development model is that it seems that the ogre team's vision of what ogre should be isn't nearly as open as Niko's vision of what irrlicht should be. I should have said the 'vision' for irrlicht is more open than ogre, not the development model. Niko seems like he is influenced a lot by the communities needs. That makes me feel better about using irrlicht, although it might not be the best way to design software.Baal Cadar wrote:I don't get this one. Ogre's development is much more open than Irrlicht's has been in the past. By a great margin. What's done in the CVS is well documented in the wiki. Supplied patches are listed in the patch tracker. When patches are not accepted, the reason is communicated but it can be discussed and after a few changes the patch might still be applied. zenaku, what do you mean specifically here?zenaku wrote:Also, since Ogre's development model is cathedral in nature, even if you did want to play by the LGPL rules, if you did update the engine you'd be hard pressed to get the Ogre developers to accept your patch.
From my experience Sinbad and the others in the Ogre team are very open for discussion, but they also have their view of what the engine should be, which Nico and its team has too for Irrlicht.
And the views differ much.
In so far, there cannot be a simple order between the engines from "the generic programmer's" POV, as this too much depends on the purpose.
From my POV the main design differences between Ogre and irrlicht is, that Ogre is made more generic, while Irrlicht is made more for immediate use.Things that are hard wired in Irrlicht, are free to choose in Ogre.
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Baal Cadar
- Posts: 377
- Joined: Fri Oct 28, 2005 10:28 am
- Contact:
Yeah, understood.
One very often made feature request for Ogre is implementing automatic fading for Entities when they reach a certain distance to the camera.
The team declines this request, as it is too application dependant and then can be reproduced by the developer using the other features. Because they feel it taints the design.
I can see how this feature fits perfectly into Irrlicht, though, and I guess it will come some time. This is what I meant with Irrlicht being more suited for immediate use than Ogre. Ogre is more flexible, but you will have to put more effort into integrating it with your application.
One very often made feature request for Ogre is implementing automatic fading for Entities when they reach a certain distance to the camera.
The team declines this request, as it is too application dependant and then can be reproduced by the developer using the other features. Because they feel it taints the design.
I can see how this feature fits perfectly into Irrlicht, though, and I guess it will come some time. This is what I meant with Irrlicht being more suited for immediate use than Ogre. Ogre is more flexible, but you will have to put more effort into integrating it with your application.
I don't really need this in Irrlicht to be done automatically, but it would be nice to just fade nodes in and out, so, just a material which allows to set the transparency of a node.Baal Cadar wrote:One very often made feature request for Ogre is implementing automatic fading for Entities when they reach a certain distance to the camera...
Regards - Xaron
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HazardEffect
- Posts: 9
- Joined: Fri Feb 03, 2006 2:06 pm
- Location: Wales
This is the reason I initially chose Irrlicht. I'd like to think that perhaps sometime in the future I will have a game with the potential to go out on a console, but the license for Ogre prohibits you from using it in a closed-source project when you modify the engine. Although I can only target the PC initially, it's nice to know I'm not backing myself into a corner.bitplane wrote:It sure is a free world out there, some parts are more free than others
imo irrlicht's major advantage is the license. if you modify crystal space or ogre to make your own custom engine, you have to release those changes. I'm not saying I don't like to release my changes, I just like the choice to be mine.
But as a small developer I know I can't make a FPS like Doom 3 - but I can make a small commercial game, and I don't need an overcomplicated engine with features I can't use or won't need, or something that is very difficult to debug / extend / integrate with (Torque is a good example of that... I wish I'd never bought the license
). So for me Irrlicht is perfect, the code is easy to follow and after a couple of weeks working with it I am very impressed and would recommend it to anyone. Thanks to all involved with the development, I hope to be posting a project announcement soon.Re: why irrlicht?
Well I worked on free cross-platform engines:
1.: Irrlicht engine:
Very easy to use. I just loaded the SDK and clicked the code blocks projects, and I take the build buttom /building about 5 seconds/. Linux developing is very easy too. But it supported a few features. Materials, textures /with my scene or model/, light map, shadow map etc not supported directly.
speed:
water demo: 27 fps
terrain: 39 fps
env mapping: not supported
CEGUI demo 8 test: 175 fps
2.: crystal space:
Crystal is half game engine. It is not really game engine. If u want game engine with Crystal u can using CEL end etc systems. Crystal + CEL + etc very slow! New generation Crystal Belnd Lite /directly .blend importing/ is very very slow system. The simple scene running about 1-5 fps. Itegrated sound system is software render very slow. Integrated ODE and CEGUI system very well. Crystal programming is hard. If I running my program I must using very big dll's /about 80-100 mb/. It can importing shadow map, light map, env map etc materials, animations to 3d modeller programs export.zip directly! Export-import system very cool! But the exports scripts very buggy unfortunately.
speed:
water demo: 79 fps
terrain: 11 fps
env mapping: 26 fps /with teapot/
CEGUI demo 8 test: 55 fps
3.: ogre:
It is render engine only, but very fast! Integrated ODE and CEGUI very well and fast. It can importing shadow map, light map, env map etc materials, animations, skeleton, directly to 3d modeller programs export! New generation oFusion 3d editor system very cool. Ogre programming is medium. Big system, but the running files very small. About 4-15 mb dll's only.
speed:
water demo: 90 fps
terrain: 130 fps
env mapping: 212 fps /with 4542 triangles/
CEGUI demo 8 test: 302 fps
Conclusion:
If u a beginner game developer u want to Irrlicth. Very easy learning and very easy cross platfrom developing with it.
If u wanna seriuos game, u want to Ogre. Because Crystal space is very slow and hard programming and the running system very big.
1.: Irrlicht engine:
Very easy to use. I just loaded the SDK and clicked the code blocks projects, and I take the build buttom /building about 5 seconds/. Linux developing is very easy too. But it supported a few features. Materials, textures /with my scene or model/, light map, shadow map etc not supported directly.
speed:
water demo: 27 fps
terrain: 39 fps
env mapping: not supported
CEGUI demo 8 test: 175 fps
2.: crystal space:
Crystal is half game engine. It is not really game engine. If u want game engine with Crystal u can using CEL end etc systems. Crystal + CEL + etc very slow! New generation Crystal Belnd Lite /directly .blend importing/ is very very slow system. The simple scene running about 1-5 fps. Itegrated sound system is software render very slow. Integrated ODE and CEGUI system very well. Crystal programming is hard. If I running my program I must using very big dll's /about 80-100 mb/. It can importing shadow map, light map, env map etc materials, animations to 3d modeller programs export.zip directly! Export-import system very cool! But the exports scripts very buggy unfortunately.
speed:
water demo: 79 fps
terrain: 11 fps
env mapping: 26 fps /with teapot/
CEGUI demo 8 test: 55 fps
3.: ogre:
It is render engine only, but very fast! Integrated ODE and CEGUI very well and fast. It can importing shadow map, light map, env map etc materials, animations, skeleton, directly to 3d modeller programs export! New generation oFusion 3d editor system very cool. Ogre programming is medium. Big system, but the running files very small. About 4-15 mb dll's only.
speed:
water demo: 90 fps
terrain: 130 fps
env mapping: 212 fps /with 4542 triangles/
CEGUI demo 8 test: 302 fps
Conclusion:
If u a beginner game developer u want to Irrlicth. Very easy learning and very easy cross platfrom developing with it.
If u wanna seriuos game, u want to Ogre. Because Crystal space is very slow and hard programming and the running system very big.
my 2 cents
I do 3d game programming as a hobby.
I worked very breifly with orge and about 4 months with Nebula device before adopting irrlicht. From my point of view I use Irrlicht because
A. Licence Irrlicht and Nebula device are NOT GPL or LGPL.
B. The same reason many people complain ( no scripting, few tools, limitations due to a more simple design ) is the reason I really like Irrlicht. In general if you want a generic game then use a ready made engine. There are a few decent ones at low cost. If you want something different then you will end up coding/changing a lot of things anyway and with other engines this is difficult due to many dependencies and massive amount of code to wade through. With Irrlich adding a new shader was a piece of cake and a custom terrain engine Is working in a temporary test app.
C. Irrlicht seems to be very stable. I have never seen it crash except when I do something stupid and it even ran on my old laptop which Nebula Device did but had many odd behaviors and occassional crashes.
I do 3d game programming as a hobby.
I worked very breifly with orge and about 4 months with Nebula device before adopting irrlicht. From my point of view I use Irrlicht because
A. Licence Irrlicht and Nebula device are NOT GPL or LGPL.
B. The same reason many people complain ( no scripting, few tools, limitations due to a more simple design ) is the reason I really like Irrlicht. In general if you want a generic game then use a ready made engine. There are a few decent ones at low cost. If you want something different then you will end up coding/changing a lot of things anyway and with other engines this is difficult due to many dependencies and massive amount of code to wade through. With Irrlich adding a new shader was a piece of cake and a custom terrain engine Is working in a temporary test app.
C. Irrlicht seems to be very stable. I have never seen it crash except when I do something stupid and it even ran on my old laptop which Nebula Device did but had many odd behaviors and occassional crashes.