Freeware and commercial 3d engines

[rwy09]

Hello all,

what are the main differences
between a freeware
3d engine (like Irrlicht) and a
commercial 3d engine (like
the dice Battlefield2 or
the HL2 engine from valve)?
What make them look much
more realistic like Irrlicht demo
worlds?
The shaders? Or just better
textures?

MfG. rwy09

[Saku]

The diffrence you say? How about MONEY!! Lots and lots of money!
You see projects like Irrlicht was till recently only being developed by a single person (Niko) and only in his spare time.
The Dice and Valve engines on the other hand has tons of ppl working full-time to making it the best engine! Best engine wins and gets all the money.

See?

[Quall]

Also, irrlicht’s emphasis is on graphics, those other engines you mention do AI, Physics, Sound, scripting, etc...

Graphic wise, well pretty much the above. It was made by one person on his free time rather than a large group getting paid 35+ grand a year. Not to mention the cost to develop on this engine over the thousands and thousands that it will cost you to use theirs.

[Joe_Oliveri]

Well you have to look at it like this. Irrlicht is a free 3D graphics engine. Niko works on it with his spare time. HE used to be the sole developer for Irrlicht. He himself made Irrlicht what it id today. No one else other then the peoples input and feedback.

Unreal, Source, and the Dice Engine are all made by huge teams there for they get alot more done faster. So they can focus on making the graphics more realistc while. However Irrlicht does have parallax mapping which is one other the newer graphics addition out there. Other then HDR and so other shadings.

And thats why

[Guest]

rather than a large group getting paid 35+ grand a year.

you'll need to add several more "+" after that. $35k a year is nothing.
more like starting out at $50k
Not only do the commercail engines have a huge team, but they attract some of the best in the business.

[Eternl Knight]

Yeah, but take it from experience, game development still does not pay that much. A developer working in gaming will make (around) 60% of the salary that an equivalent developer working in another industry (engineering, finance, etc). Sure the "top end" of game developers are making a envious salary, but then again, the "top end" of developers in other industries make salaries that would blow your mind!

--EK

[Quall]

New programmers start out at about 35-40 grand a year. I put a minimum to state at least. Most make high cash, but not all.

[rw09]

Hello all,

perhaps you misunderstands me, that should not be a criticism at the Irrlicht engine.
I am just interested in the technical differences, that make commercial 3d engines
look much more realistic then the free 3d engines.

I know the commercial 3d engine have much more features (like the physic engine),
but I am just talking about the visual quality of the engines.

Or differently said, is there a realistic chance to let the free ones (Irrlicht) look like
the commercial 3d engines? Or is it much more work to get state of the art graphics
from a free 3d engine then building a complete new one?
And yes, I know, a finished ready for the market product needs more then just a
3d engine. But thats not the point in my question.

MfG. rwy09

[Baal Cadar]

Commercial engines can't do anything conceptionally different from freeware ones. Both use render-api calls in the end. What sets them apart the most is an highly integrated tightly coupled tool-set for scene generation, meta-data handling and so on. Thus letting the game developers be more productive. And this is, were freeware engines lack the most.

Optimisations are important too, but not as much. There are highly optimised freeware engines too and the biggest part of optimisation is the scene handling, which is very application depending, so having a special purpose engine for a specific scene type helps too. (Like CryEngine for hightmap based outside scenes, Source engine for higly occluded scenes and so on.)

Considering the rendering quality, there is no potential difference between freeware and commercial engines. The quality of the art assets is the most important faxtor here. High quality models, textures and shaders and a well made scene lighting don't depend on the engine. (Maybe a little bit, where lighting is concerned, but this differs from engine to engine.)

Here are two games made with an open-source engine:
Pacific Storm (not yet released): http://www.pacificstorm.net/gallery/
Ankh (only available in Europe afaik): http://www.ankh-game.com/

[zenaku]

Why do commercial engines look better? There are a lot of reasons, but mostly it's the artwork and models. If you render "dwarf.x" with the HL2 engine, it won't look much, if any better.


Almost all 3d engines are simply wrappers to the underlying 3D rendering API. They give you an easier way to use things like OpenGL and DirectX, but it's still OpenGL or DirectX underneath. As long as the wrapper is up to date with the latest advances in the underlying API, the rendering quality should be comparable between engines.

A lot of the latest advances in graphics hardware have to do with pixel and vertex shaders. Irrlicht supports them, but not many people using Irrlicht are using them fully. Also, 3D hardware advances very quickly. If I were to start making my own engine based around DirectX10 for Vista now, by the time I was done, DirectX11 would be out. A commercial developer with more resources could make that deadline as they would have access to all the latest and greatest stuff, while the free software world doesn't. As a result, the free engines will always lag behind the state-of-the-art. Quake4 is out and looks great. Irrlicht is out and is at least as good as Quake3 at rendering, and with HLSL and GLSL support it's only getting better. That's impressive for a free software project.

For comparision, check this out:

http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/li ... erms.shtml

They are asking $750,000 for a full Unreal2 engine license, which IMO Irrlicht renders at least as well. They don't even mention how much the Unreal3 engine license costs.

[AndyCR]

certainly, irrlicht is more advanced than unreal engine 2. unreal engine 2 dosen't even have normal mapping! irrlicht has virtual displacement (parallax) mapping, which is a touted feature of unreal engine 3. the artwork is what makes the difference.

then theres the whole tools issue. unrealed is extremely nice. your paying partly for the tools, which is something irrlicht doesn't have.