Irrlicht Engine

Yes, Ogre is better engine in many aspect than Irrlicht, but it's dependent on Yours requirment for graphic engine. For me better engine is Irrlicht I also don't like monopoly Currently I see this trend in begginer programmers:
Irrlicht is good for education, but You can't write good game with them, for that You have to use Ogre it's very powerfull engine... This is total bullshit, because Ogre and Irrlicht are easy engine, so both are good for education and second, if You has got in plans write a game Ogre isn't better, because You need Your own shaders and functions (so in this point Ogre powerfull go down). Ogre is better only if You need quick create pretty well game (so You can use all Ogre "helpers").

In my opinion shadow mappings techniques built-in engine isn't good, because for shadow is very dependent on project specification (integration it with engine on game engine level is very easy).

LGPL isn't good license in my opinion:
1. We have to use *.dll
2. Public all changes in engine
So maybe for me it isn't problem, but for someone I will be not good...

@OP

uh: http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/Ogre_Tutorials
takes mere minutes if you follow directions on it. I've been hesitant to use ogre for years because I hear from everyone how its soooo difficult to use, but one day i was just browsing, and took a look at there tutorials, and the one thing everyone complains about is the thing i like:

It's sooooooo well organized. Everything is set up in such a logical way that Im not sure why you'd want it in any other way. sure, it might make for some longer lines of code, but at least you can read the code and without even being an ogre expert, know to an extent what your looking at.

Idk, just starting, but i like it.

LGPL isn't good license in my opinion:
1. We have to use *.dll

Actually, no you don't. dll is just the easiest way, but lgpl still allows static linking libs.
Ogre has 2 licenses. One is the commercial OUL license, which costs money but allows you to do anything you want (don't release engine changes, make console versions, etc). The other (most commonly used) license is LGPL with an added exception that statically linking with Ogre libs is treated identically to dynamic linking.

Generally I'd always prefer a zlib style over an lgpl, and I won't touch anything that's gpl (unless it's stand alone. I'd use a gpl tool, but not link with gpl code). But lgpl isn't really that bad, people often think it's worse than it really is.

I'm a bit confused about why having built in shadows in ogre makes it worse, since irrlicht has built in shadows too.

Ogre and Irrlicht are really sibling projects which have both had great success in the open source community and have large fan bases. The best engine is the one you are most productive with and enjoy using the most.

Hmmm, i like irrlicht better cause its smooth,small and good orginized in my opinion.
I think the only problem is that many peoples look at ogre gallery and see beutifull graphics and then come to irrlicht and see less beutifull images and they presume ogre is better...

And for those members that says you cant make something big with irrlicht i say your wrong, cause if you make a good design document with everything working smooth together then you cn make something big...

I disagree. Although there are much things that Irrlicht can do pretty well, it still lacks some features that can enhance quite a lot the capabilities of the engine, namely hardware skinning, for example. Without a proper hardware based skining, the models of the irrlicht programs must be constrained to low resolutions to make them useful, and that is a limitation (for the time being) of the engine, not the programmers using it. Still, you can do pretty nice models with few faces, but it is not the same at all.

This is only an example, there are others, like occlusion queries, i think Irrlicht still don't use them, cube maps, 3D textures... And i'm sure i'm missing more.

Mel wrote:occlusion queries

That's mainly because occlusion queries, themselves, aren't outright useful. Ogre implements a bare-bones 1-to-1 translation with regards to occlusion queries. You need to implement your own hierarchial occlusion culling on top of it. (You can use it for other things, like debugging, but that's not the main thing people associate with occlusion queries.)

At any rate, it's not even useful for an engine to implement a "general-purpose" dynamic occlusion culling solution because ultimately it is application dependent. In fact, using the "general-purpose" solution will most likely increase the time used to render a frame, if used improperly or not neccessary, etc.

And the reason cube maps and 3D textures are not in the engine currently is because it requires a full low-level rewrite of how the engine handles images and textures.

I think irrlicht is great because it has a very professional way how things are organised. It is really easy to extend and not completly overloaded.

Also the ogre license is horrible. It is somekind of LGPL and somekind commercial. They have this strange Alternative License (OUL).

So i really like to support really free software and stay with irrlicht.
It is zlib nearly freeware and thats great !

i tried to start irrlicht and ogre at the same time, and success came quicker with irrlicht, so i sticked with it.
after a year i tried ogre again, and still could not figure put how to use it well, so i sticked with irrlicht
next year... will be the same i think ^^
irrlicht is just simple to use and fast-compiling, also easy to extend witch is important for me, as well the good documentation is.

@psycho,

you should check out my post above, it has a great tutorial to get you started, honestly I work with Acknex7 and if i didnt have 8 clients working with it right now and I had enough time and money to switch engine/ build the tools to work with an engine only, I'd switch to ogre immediately.

anoki wrote:I think irrlicht is great because it has a very professional way how things are organised. It is really easy to extend and not completly overloaded.

Compared to Ogre, Irrlicht's organization is faaaarrr from professional.

Also the ogre license is horrible. It is somekind of LGPL and somekind commercial. They have this strange Alternative License (OUL).

Wait, what? Ogre is LGPL. With an exception: you don't have to use .dll, you can also statically link. The OUL is for commercial stuff, you can do pretty much whatever you want.

Like others said, Irrlicht has it's place: quick-to-get-up-and-running simple stuff. Get more complex than that and Irrlicht simply won't provide what you need. Of course, your argument would be "but Irrlicht is 100% zlib which means you can add stuff you need to Irrlicht by yourself " - and, you're right. But why? Ogre already does all of these things

BTW, yes, there's integrated shadow mapping with Ogre. There's also shadow mapping you write yourself.

There is also the fact that Ogre provides well-wrapped utilities. It doesn't really matter that Ogre doesn't really use hardware occlusion queries or the stencil buffer (you have to agree, no one really uses stencil shadows anymore, even though Ogre provides support for them). The point is that such utilities are well-wrapped and work the same on both Direct3D and OpenGL. Therefore, when I went ahead to write my own deferred renderer, I could use the stencil buffer, MRTs, and so on without worrying about the implementation lacking or being buggy.

Hey nullsquared, or should I say agi_shi. Nice to see you on our forums again!

Don't worry I know Irrlicht is lagging in many features departments but now that me and CuteAlien are on the dev team things should get better soon! I already added support for FP render targets so we can do VSM pretty easily now (Packing into fixed point textures causes artifacts).

For users like me this stuff isn't a problem, I implemented MRT in a very short amount of time and went on to write my deferred renderer. The source is just so short, easy to understand and rip apart that it's great for people who just want a simple framework to start off with.

Well, Ogre may have lots of stuff but I still have more fun coding with Irrlicht.. And that's what matters for me.
And if I need some cool effect/feature that Irrlicht doesn't have I'll work hard on getting it myself.
That's my argument on the subject.

BlindSide wrote:Hey nullsquared, or should I say agi_shi. Nice to see you on our forums again!

I'm known as nullsquared pretty much everywhere.

For users like me this stuff isn't a problem, I implemented MRT in a very short amount of time and went on to write my deferred renderer. The source is just so short, easy to understand and rip apart that it's great for people who just want a simple framework to start off with.

Does it support both OpenGL and Direct3D seamlessly?

nullsquared wrote:Does it support both OpenGL and Direct3D seamlessly?

Yes, of course

I'm known as nullsquared pretty much everywhere.

Yeah but it's you, agi_shi! You changed your name from agi_shi to nullsquared on GameDev. You know you could have just asked one of us to change your name on here too instead of creating a new account.