Irrlicht (vs Ogre) and documentation questions

[Elendil]

Hello

I discover Irrlicht engine. I was read that Irrlicht is easy to learn or use. But before I decide to use Irrlicht i have questions:

1. How good is rendering? It is fast? Can I display lot of animated entities in large outdoor (forest and hills) area on old graphics? For example Torchlight (Ogre) is going prety fast on my integrated graphic Intel 3000 in notebook.

2. Can Irrlicht create holes in terrain? I want create caves or underground areas and don't want split outdoor and indoor areas like The Elder Scrolls Morrowind game.

3. It is possible compose scene with meshes which will be joined as one in Irrlicht? I mean I create handmade terrain area and this terrain will be splited in to smaller areas and roads, tunnels, caves etc.. but this splits produce visible edges (if light is used) and player can see the world is build with "blocks". If you know Dungeon Siege 1 or 2, the game is build with blocks (terrain and caves), but in game you don't see it, and it looks like one big world.

4. How good is documentation? It is still relevant? I see there are two documentations on Page and on Wiki.

5. I hope I can ask it there, if you know Ogre, what are advantages and disadvantages compared to Irrlicht? One thing I see it, there are commercial games created in Ogre (Torchlight, Shadows Heretic Kingdom), which are in Irrlicht?

[CuteAlien]

None of your questions is really easy to answer...

1. The thing with 3D graphics is that it's very hard to give general answers to that. I worked with scenes with half a million textured polygons which were fast - I worked with scenes with under 100.00 polygons which were slow. Figuring out why one is fast and the other is slow often takes time. I never used Irrlicht with animated mass-scenes, but I don't think it's optimal for that. Then again, if I ever need that for a project then Irrlicht is probably easy to extend for that.

2. The terrainscenenode can't do that. But I still have to experiment more with terrain myself (doing that a little bit right now, but mostly playing around with Blender and looking at results in Irrlicht).

3. Not sure if that depends on the engine. We do not support streaming - so huge worlds which need that are a problem.

4. Examples are probably the best documentation. Wiki... might have useful bits of info sometimes.

5. Roughly - Ogre is bigger - Irrlicht is often somewhat simpler to use (at least for small projects). Also Ogre has more developers. If you compare engines - also check-out Godot - it's the new kid on the block and right now has a lot of traction. Front-page has some projects using Irrlicht.

[Elendil]

Thanks for answers.

You mention Godot. I know about Godot, but it is easy to use Godot with C++ (I tested it but long time ago when I don't know C++)? Godot is complete GameEngine as I know, problem is rendering engine is not powerfull, but I tested it long time ago and maybe it is changed.

And do you know Panda3D? What you think about it (compared to Irrlicht and Ogre)?

[CuteAlien]

I haven't used Godot yet myself (just seen it a lot in the news over last year). Panda3D... I remember the name, not much more.

[Xaron]

Forget Godot when you want to use C++. It is possible but a pain. Godot itself is nice indeed. Another option would be Urho3d.