Irrlicht Engine

Hello.

I am doing an MSc Project and have had the spec of the project changed.
Before, I was building a simple networked firstperson maze game.

This has now become a comparison of two open source graphics engines, one of which being Irrlicht, as I got to know it from my initial work.

My problem now however is this: I need to find a second open source graphics engine to compare it to. Before I am flamed, let me just say that I have tried google on just about every permutation I can think of. The results? About two dozen engines which stopped being worked on in about 2000, and OGRE.

I have tried to get to grips with OGRE, but have failed to even build the thing properly. I am ideally looking for an engine as straightforward to use as Irrlicht, which is already compiled into a .dll, with the source code available purely for reference.

Does anyone have any suggestions?
Or can point me in the direction of an already compiled version of OGRE?

Many thanks

Gezmo P

I have heard about another grafic engine "genesis". May be that would be an easier one. But I just read it somewhere I have no experience with that. May be like to give it a try

From what I have seen, Irrlicht is the easiest to use, however OGRE is far more powerful. One of the things I like most about Irrlicht is that it is self contained, whereas OGRE requires you to get the STLPort to be able to compile. Irrlicht is slowly getting better however. For ease of use, not having to mess around with a lot then Irrlicht is probably the best thing for you. If you are after an FPS game then graphics are ultra important and so OGRE is the way to go.

There are a few others as well but from what I have seen they are either too poorly documented or too poorly built to be as useful as either Irrlicht or OGRE. OGRE is king but Irrlicht is much easier to use.

If you do want to look for more 3D engines then I recommend you use the Sourceforge search engine rather than googling it.

Ogre isn't too hard to build. What compiler are you using?

If its MSVC, mine built straight out've the box after i downloaded the precompiled dependencies

If its DevC++, get the devpack (link on front page)

NeoEngine is pretty good, but it's dead.

If you want something really different, look at Nebula2

I followed all the instructions on the OGRE site, got the STLport and 3rd party dependencies, but guess I must have screwed up somewhere along the line. I have a feeling it might be with the settings I needed to change in Visual Studio 6. I hate that thing!

I might also need Service Pack 3 for Visual Studio 6. How can I tell?

Robomaniac, could you provide a link to the step by step stages you followed to get OGRE up and running? Or email me about it separately? (I appreciate I may have strayed off topic here )

My email is guillaumeSTUPIDruette.fsnet.co.uk if you replace STUPID with @...
That should fool any auto readers out there I hope...

Thanks for the help so far guys...

And I agree, I find Irrlicht to be superb for all round usability.

Gezmo P

If you are familer with C# I would recommend Axiom it is the C# port of OGRE. While you do have to compile it they have a step by step for VS .NET 2003 and it also have ODE support built in right after compile. I found it easier to comile than OGRE(WHich is kinda funny). I really enjoy working in C# and I am hopeing niko will finish the port of Irrlicht to c# soon.

Offtopic:

It's funny that we've had a ton of people put on flame retardant clothing and ask questions about other engines here all the time and I can only remember one time that the person was ever flamed. (And that was when the person was an obvious troll and said something like 'irrligth sux why not use OGRE') Then again, the flame was directed at the person for being a troll.

But, on other forums, if you ask about an engine in compared to another, you get an overly biased and almost offensive rundown.

We are so sweet, aren't we .
I do use Irrlicht because I think it is better to gain experience with something that you can understand than start with eg. Ogre, which is (imo) a lot harder to learn. But Ogre can do (atm) magnificent stuff compared to Irrlicht

I think maybe the people here all have their own reasons for liking Irrlicht and a lot of it doesn't have anything to do with graphics. I just find Irrlicht as a whole a lot easier to understand as it has much better documentation and any questions you have are answered very quickly whereas when I started, the OGRE forums seemed a bit intimidating due to the fact that I'd seen a lot of people flamed off the boards for asking questions about C++.

I doubt I'd have any problems with OGRE now I understand the concept of 3D gaming a little better but I haven't seen any need to switch so I don't think I will. An FPS game would be different but to me graphics aren't everything and I know the engine quite well now. I think it is good that there is an engine that has such good tutorials and such well documented source, I feel almost obligated to support the engine since I have probably learnt more about C++ by using the engine in 6 months than I did in the year or so I was studying C++ through books and tutorials.

Gezmo: i just followed the first step of http://www.ogre3d.org/docs/Readme/ReadMe_Building.html this

I've used both of these in the past:
OpenSceneGraph
Cystal Space

Both might suit your purpose

Another two engines which I have used quite recently, that are fairly easy to learn and provide good resaults are the following.
---
NeoEngine 1/2 - www.neoengine.org
Qube - www.qubesoft.com