Horde 3D & Irrlicht

GameDude · Post by **GameDude** » Sat Aug 04, 2007 11:01 pm

This engine has been out for a little while. http://www.nextgen-engine.net/

In terms of it being easy, it seems to be around the level of the Irrlicht, although I find the Irrlicht to be far easier, although this engine claims it is next-gen because it using the techniques being used in newer games. I was wondering if this engine was along the same lines of the Irrlicht or not.

wildrj · Post by **wildrj** » Sat Aug 04, 2007 11:27 pm

hmm i dont know... let me try it out and read up on it and ill get back to you.

Edit:hmm there community is vary small just 63 members...and the lack of tutorials makes it hard to learn how to use the engine.So imo it dosnt seem to be along the same lines reason being community / documentation is small and it dosnt seem to have has many features has irrlicht.

GameDude · Post by **GameDude** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 1:28 am

Well They way the site is setup it seems to be as easy as Irrlicht, but according to them, the features allow for next-gen capalitites, I was wondering if it was worth the hype.

JRowe47 · Post by **JRowe47** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 4:10 am

http://www.nextgen-engine.net/license.html

It's more of a hassle to use because of the licensing, and because of the early nature of the project, you're probably more likely to tinker with the engine code itself. Other than that, looks like a fairly decent small graphics engine, comparable in size and feature list to Irrlicht. Community is smaller, yes, but community isn't everything ( it's a lot, but it's not everything.)

http://www.nextgen-engine.net/docs/_faq.html

Go with irrlicht, and if you see something nextgen has that irrlicht doesnt, request the feature. There's probably someone already working on it, or something very similar

GameDude · Post by **GameDude** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 4:26 am

Well now that I think about it the Irrlicht has all the featues Horde 3D has, you just got find the libraries, however over time this libraries are added to the Irrlicht its just a matter of time. Yeah I'm going to stay with Irrlicht, it has a great licesne, easy to use and this new animation system looks great.

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Sun Aug 12, 2007 3:34 pm

GameDude wrote:Well now that I think about it the Irrlicht has all the featues Horde 3D has

Not really, but like JRowe47 the licensing for Horde3D is uncomfortable if you need some Horde3D features (Post-processing, shader-driven architecture, vertex skinning, hardware buffers, multiple-light coloured soft shadows) you can just ask someone to implement that feature. But most likely you wont need this feature, or you can just write a shader for it (But some shader effects still need a little modification to the engine.)

Cheers

EDIT: Nevermind the shadows I just checked out thier demos and they fully sucked, not very soft at all and contained major depth clipping.

GameDude · Post by **GameDude** » Sun Aug 12, 2007 5:11 pm

Well I knew the Irrlicht was better, I just wanted to make sure. Besides eventually the Irrlicht will be along the lines of a next-gen engine anyways, plus you can always make the modification's yourself if you need since the Irrlicht is completley open source.

Halifax · Post by **Halifax** » Wed Oct 31, 2007 12:24 am

*bump*

I would even consider the Horde3D engine to compare to the Irrlicht engine. First of all, the claims that he makes are ridiculous. He claims that HordeD sports a clean Object-oriented C++ API, but after looking at the tutorials it looks more like a clean C API.

Also, the code is much harder to understand compared to Irrlicht, and overall he makes claims that aren't even true.

Second off, IrrSpintz is more next-gen then this! First off the fur shader made by sio2 is the same thing used by Insomniac Games with RCF, it has DirectX 10 support, hardware raytracing rendering, HDR rendering, and everything else you need out of a next-gen rendering engine.

So overall I would just stick with Irrlicht and its extensions.

Virion · Post by **Virion** » Wed Oct 31, 2007 8:03 am

I think it's time to call it as "current-gen" rather than "next-gen".

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Wed Oct 31, 2007 1:29 pm

Careful with that; if we get into name calling, then Irrlicht is "last-last gen" by any objective standard.

sio2 · Post by **sio2** » Wed Oct 31, 2007 4:02 pm

Horde is GL only and LPGL. Plus a couple a demos I could have knocked out in an afternoon. I've only had a quick look at it though, so it's difficult to be totally objective. LPGL is a major drawback from my own personal point of view, though.

Irrlicht's major advantages are: its license; clean OO design; portable; stupidly easy to extend. I've lost count of the number of my own scene nodes I've made, from Doom3 animated meshes to Ocean, hardware skinning, HDR post-process, glass refraction, water reflections, etc.

Irrlicht's major deficiency is lack of hardware buffers (VB/VBO). Irrlicht's primary major performance boost will be when VB/VBO are implemented properly (i.e. being able to handle Alt-Tab). Using dx9device->DrawPrimitiveUP() for anything extremely non-trivial is Not Good.

GameDude · Post by **GameDude** » Wed Oct 31, 2007 9:10 pm

I don't know. I've seen some pretty cool games made with the Irrlicht. Some of them look like like next-gen status. Although I guess we shouldn't call the Irrlicht next-gen. Its hard to tell.

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Thu Nov 01, 2007 3:54 pm

It's not "hard to tell".

No DX10 = last gen.

No VBO = last last gen.

IrrSpintz is "this gen". Irrlicht is 2 generations old. I like Irrlicht, for the reasons that sio2 gave, but it's way behind the curve at this point.

Halifax · Post by **Halifax** » Thu Nov 01, 2007 7:32 pm

And where would Ogre3D fall into this equation? last-gen also?

By the way, what is VBO?

Saturn · Post by **Saturn** » Thu Nov 01, 2007 9:24 pm

Last gen according to this scale. But Dx10 support is in active development right now. VBO == Vertex Buffer Objects ==> vertex data is stored in graphics card RAM instead of uploaded to it every frame.

sio2, I am not convinced, that your list of custom SceneNode types illustrates the ease of extension of Irrlicht. Actually most of what you list here, shouldn't be implemented as a ISceneNode ideally. Doing it on ISceneNode base is a crutch actually. Implementing new scene nodes is, compared to other places for extension, the most convenient. I mostly agree with your list of Irrlicht pros, but clean OO design is definitely not among it. ISceneNode is an example of sloppiness in the design. Vertex types and SMaterial (though currently partly fixed) are others.

The problem with ISceneNode as I see it is that it has too many responsibilities. It is not only the transform in the Scene, but also the rendering technique and details of rendering dependent objects (shadows, post processing). The problem with putting too much into it is that you can't independently develop the aspects from each other. Water implemented as a node instead of as a material means, I can not use it as freely as a material. It is nice to have a water surface, but what if I wanted a Water Elemental, completely rigged and animated and somehow looking waterish. Instead of implementing rigging in the water node, it would be better to have the water as a material and just apply it to an IAnimatedMeshSceneNode.
When I have three aspects each with three different implementations, when I encapsule them into a single class hierarchy, then I have to implement each aspect for each other one and end up with 3^3 = 27 different classes. If I develop each aspect independently, I only need 3*3 = 9 different classes. Orthogonality is a major factor in a clean OO design, Irrlicht violates this in many places, that's why I don't consider this one of Irrlichts advantages. The others you named I agree with.