Various 3D Engines

[Guest]

Question (albeit a large one) for those who have used many 3d Engines:

What is my best option?

3D Game Studio
Irrlich
Ogre
Qube
Torque?

Pros, Cons, Suggestions? (beatings for my stupidity...)

[Robomaniac]

Well, i've looked at almost all of those engines, and ogre has good graphics, but i hear the api isn't that great, irrlicht is easy to learn and has a good api for beginners, 3d game studio is real easy to use, but the out of the box quality is abysmal (at least from what i used of it). And i havn't used Qube and Torque, but the graphics look ok on each.

-- The Robomaniac

hope that helps

[saigumi]

Same feelings here. I used Ogre, but that was over a year ago and having to set up custom screengraphs to get any performance boost was beyond my comprehension at the time. I never got more than 90 FPS on a test application that I migrated to Irrlicht and get around 1200 - 1500 FPS.

Irrlicht is only a graphics framework, so other game elements like networking and audio are up to you to make and import. Torque, 3DGS, DarkBasic, etc... include those elements.

The only real flaw with Irrlicht is it's immaturity. The API is simple, but it's not as feature rich, doesn't internally load all of the common mesh/texture/other file types and has some internal inconsistencies that are worked on with each new version. My faith tells me that supporting Irrlicht until it reaches 1.0 will pay off.

Though, most of the opinions here will be slightly persuaded since this is an Irrlicht forum. You can find a more rounded set of people to answer this on a forum like Gamedev.net's.

[DarkWhoppy]

Torque is suppose to be for rapid development. . . but a few friends of mine say it isn't. Both had trouble compiling the thing, it also has its own scripting language. I haven't touched it though . . .

3D GameStudio is cool, its got a nice level editor and even comes with a modeling package (which isn't that great). 3DGS also has its own language, C-Script which is pretty easy once you learn what things mean.

BUT, in my true opinion, Irrlicht ROCKS

[tstuefe]

I used Torque for a year now. Looks good (though it can't do any of the more modern stuff like bumpmapping etc). To evaluate the graphical capabilities, you can download the tourque demo from garagegames.com.

Tourque does - or tries to do - everything, from networking to AI and physics etc. But it is kinda hard to get into. It is a big lump of code - the whole CVS directory is like 2-300 Mb. It comes with its own scripting language, which I find not very intuitive (give me C++, please , it is really poorly documented - you end up searching the user forums for even the simplest tasks.

If all you want to do is to program a multiplayer FPS, using torque would be probably fine, because that's what it was made for. But for anything else you would have to dig deeply into the engine and spent like half a frustrating year trying to understand the program flow. But granted, I always hated reverse engineering...

On the plus side (but that is probably true for all engines), the Torque community is really helpful.

For my current project, I switched to irrlicht. Irrlicht is pure C++, it does what it is supposed to do: the gritty job of rendering. It doesnt do anything else, and that's what I kind of like. As for physics and AI and stuff, that I rather code on my own (Hell, thats the best part of the fun anyway

...just my 5 c

[buhatkj]

i tried ogre too, and neoengine, and crystal space, and genesis 3d. i had the same basic problem with all of them, somehow, the API just didnt make sense to me, it wasnt set up in a way that followed any logical sense i was familiar with. i guess maybe if i had more exp in 3d programming it would have, but ive done my own crap using my very own custom OGL engine and guess what, it looked just like irrlicht. only didnt work as well im here because irrlicht makes sense to me. i like how niko does things, and it supports my goals as a coder. i am personally drooling just to see what 0.5 will be capable of, let alone 1.0!

also the bits that are left out of irrlicht, like sound and networking are easily accomplished with some other familiar libraries. i personally use audiere and have made myself a nice sound management engine for my use in Fmorg. and if you need networking, once i get 0.06 together you should see a nice irrlicht-compatible UDP networking engine

stick around, good stuff is coming
-Ted

[Elaran]

Thanks guys! I really appreciate the feedback. I'll certainly be sticking around to see what happens =). Glad I found this place (after much searching :-/ seems there are a lot of crappy 3D engines out there..)

[Elaran]

A few more questions if you dont mind =)

If I were to start a project now in version .4 will I be able to import this into version .5? I would just hate to start a project and hav new versions come out that I cant use =)

[keless]

the only major API-breaking difference between 0.4 and 0.4.2 was the changing of some enums from "DT_OPENGL" to "EDT_OPENGL", etc.

in a very few minutes, I was able to get my old projects running in 0.4.2

since 0.5 is a feature release, not an API re-write, I expect the API will be similar, but with added functionality, which means your current code should still work (though perhaps with a few tweaks as before).

Of course, I am only guessing, and its best to hear straight from Niko.

[niko]

since 0.5 is a feature release, not an API re-write, I expect the API will be similar, but with added functionality, which means your current code should still work (though perhaps with a few tweaks as before).

Of course, I am only guessing, and its best to hear straight from Niko.

Right.

[Zizilamoroso]

I've also tested Ogre, it has a lot of functionality, but: fully deployed and compiled, the package took 1.3G on my harddisk. There isn't such a thing as "out-of-the-box" for ogre. It's all or nothing. And it has a major dependency problem too!

TrueVision: rather good, but there's a watermark included in the free version. Garbage!

CrystalSpace: only openGL, no DirectX (but directDraw is included, try to understand that!)


As for performance, irrlicht is good. But the engine definitely needs more functionality. So, it's only a mather of time...

[Giarson]

Hi,
currently I'm trying to find the most suitable 3d engine for real estate visualisation project. After browsing some engine's (OGRE, Crystal Space, AURAN JET) feature list, I've come up with the idea to ask missing answers from the community itself.

I don't know yet whether IRRLICHT supports:
1) user-defined attributes for model components (assigning strings to objects, materials, textures)
2) arbitrary 3d clipping planes / clipping vloumes
3) billboard textures
4) auto-hide for billboard geometries (if angle of the billboard and the camera tends to 0)
5) dynamic / animated textures
6) 2D objects over viewport

[keless]

I'll answer those questions I know the answers to:

3) yes
4) not sure what you mean here
5) if you mean 2D sprites, yes. if you mean model textures/etc, im not sure, but I dont think so. Perhaps an animator could change a model's texture coords? so maybe it is possible.
6) yes

[Guest]

I'll answer those questions I know the answers to:

3) yes
4) not sure what you mean here
5) if you mean 2D sprites, yes. if you mean model textures/etc, im not sure, but I dont think so. Perhaps an animator could change a model's texture coords? so maybe it is possible.
6) yes

thanks for the quick answer.
briefly about 4), I think it's a minor issue regarding to the whole project. BTW, I have still some questions mostly about a user interface, could you give me a clue?

9) easy object/face selection in 3D with mouse
10) cursor snap
11) programmable - reactive mouse cursor which for example change its shape while moving over a certain object?

[keless]

9) easy object/face selection in 3D with mouse

if you look at the red wire-frame triangle selector in the tech demo, you'll see that the answer to this is yes. you can simply create a triangle selector (ie: ray-picking)

10) cursor snap

i believe IrrLicht gives you control over the cursor's position, so if you were to decide it needed to snap to a position, you could tell it where to go. you'd have to add this code yourself, as I havent seen it used before.

11) programmable - reactive mouse cursor which for example change its shape while moving over a certain object?

you can set the windows cursor to invisible. In the 2D graphics demo, it shows you how to create a 2D texture that is placed in the cursor's position (so you could place your own cursor image here using this)

and finally, you'd write code that would change which image was used in your custom cursor according to what your mouse was over.

so again, while it hasnt been done yet, its definately possible.