I switched to Ogre

pix0l · Post by **pix0l** » Sat Jun 11, 2005 2:08 am

Hi. This post is kinda pointless but I'm just gonna post it anyway. I don't want to start a battle or anything just giving my opinion.

I recently switched from Irrlicht to Ogre primarily because there is no support for normal mapping on animated meshes in Irrlicht. Irrlicht was the first engine I put any effort into learning and I found as a 3D noob that the Irrlicht documentation was lacking. Sure there's some examples to go by and the source code is heavily commented but I had alot of trouble getting started in Irrlicht. It could really use some step by step tutorials in my opinion. When trying to learn the ropes in Irrlicht I found myself jumping back and forth between classes in the API docs to try and figure out their relationship to each other and sometimes I couldn't find what I was looking for in the documentation at all I had to resort to looking through the source code to figure out what's what. Another small thing that put me off of irrlicht was the help forums here. I posted a few times about what I thought were relatively simple noob questions and nobody really bothered to reply save for maybe once. I know this isn't a paid for service or anything but the community support here left some to be desired. No offense intended.

I was initially put off by Ogre due to it being only a rendering engine and I was under the impression it would be more difficult to pick up for a noob. I found my impression to be totally wrong once I actually took the time to look through the example programs and read the documentation. It's laid out in a much friendlier way. After reading the manual I had an overall sense of how things worked, which I never really got with Irrlicht. Granted this is after spending some time stumbling around in Irrlicht but even if that was not the case I still would have to say the Ogre documenation is much better. On top of the manual you have the Wiki and a series of step by step tutorials which go from the bare bones up to more advanced stuff. Documentation aside, I also found the actual structure of the engine in Ogre to be far more intuitive and logical than that of Irrlicht. Posting on the Ogre forums I found yielded much better response. Maybe this is due to a larger user base. I don't know, but it's nice to have some support from others when it's needed.

afecelis · Post by **afecelis** » Sat Jun 11, 2005 2:18 am

Good luck!

work with what you feel comfortable.

use what gives you better results.

both projects are open source and will always be willing to receive ppl from both sides.

bal · Post by **bal** » Sat Jun 11, 2005 8:38 am

A few months ago I also switched. In the beginning (about a year ago), when I was looking for a 3D-engine, I found Ogre to be overwhelming (I didn't know anything about C++ nor 3D-programming). I actually learned all the basics by working with Irrlicht. Looking at the code I was changing values to see what would happen. Watching Ogre demos motivated me to seriously learn C++. As time went by, I began to understand how Irrlicht worked. Later on I studied Ogre and I also realised it was better designed than Irrlicht. But then again, it's developed by a few code monkeys who have been working in the programming industry for years

.

As you can see, I'll never forget nor neglect Irrlicht

.

X_for_Extra · Post by **X_for_Extra** » Sat Jun 11, 2005 12:56 pm

Yes, well ogre is futher along in its development. I have looked at it, but as C++ noob, all those dependancies scare me off. And all the tutorials are OO which doesnt appeal to me. I dont know if the engine really requires that or if you can use the mixed style.

I agree that a lot of things are less than optimal with irrlicht, but its good enough for me, for now. I am keeping an eye on the NX++ stuff though.

Robomaniac · Post by **Robomaniac** » Sat Jun 11, 2005 2:04 pm

The engine does not force you to use oop in any way. Most new users also complain about this, as the demos kind've hide all the dirty stuff of initialization etc. I made a tutorial (eventually will continue the series) here: http://centaurforce.sf.net/Ogre_Tutorials/ Tutorial 1 covers setting it up, Tutorial 2 covers making a simple program

don_Pedro · Post by **don_Pedro** » Sat Jun 11, 2005 4:04 pm

Of course Ogre is much more advanced than Irrlicht(however there's surely still long way to Irrlicht 1.0), but at the same time Ogre is much bigger. I like compactness of Irrlicht because it's easier to understand its entire sourcecode, therefore it's easier to extend engine's possibilities to my needs, as I try to test my own original ideas rather than use most of built in functionality. Thanks to Irrlicht I just hadn't to start everything from scratch and much more. In short, I preffer Irrlicht's flexibility over Ogre's complexity. Anyway they're both good engines, it was realy hard decision for me to chose one of them

AssiDragon · Post by **AssiDragon** » Sat Jun 11, 2005 5:57 pm

I was also using Irrlicht as long as I couldn't grasp that C++ firmly; but I made a quick change to OGRE pretty soon. That said, I don't think Irrlicht is not capable of reaching such heights. It's just it's new in development - and the fact that OGRE is made by a number of developers also helps it. That said, Niko's being pretty good at this thing, taking Irrlicht so far alone!

...and once I complete my game, I will be working on a way to make it OGRE indepentent. I'm still pretty impressed by MAGE and at the fact it could use both Irr, OGRE or any other rendering engine.

(Plus OGRE has a higher number of user projects as I perceive - PLSM landscape manager, Theora plugin, OgreODE, OgreDex, Oasis, YAKE, etc... Sometimes I feel the user made stuff starts to get just as important as OGRE itself. Heh.

)

Pedro, OGRE is not hard to extend - at all. Actually, I'm using a pretty customized OGRE version for myself, and it takes like - 10 mins? to do all the changes. As I remember, it wasn't harder than Irrlicht, apart from the fact OGRE has a different internal layout - so editing stuff while being used to Irr might be a bit hard in the beginning.

MikeR · Post by **MikeR** » Sat Jun 11, 2005 6:33 pm

I'll stick to Irrlicht. I don't like having only 1 import option.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sat Jun 11, 2005 7:56 pm

if i would know opengl better i would write my own little engine

and if it fails then i may dont have any engine but i learned more about programming (which is always good).

(with my current knowledge of course i dont even try to write engines LOL)

i looked at this ogre thing but there are a few things that bother me:

1. irrlicht is much simpler and easier to use (my opinion)
2. i dont like learning another api because i just know the irrlicht related things more and more every day im programming with it
3. irrlicht can do everything i want so there is no need to change
4. i dont like the ogre website nor the documentation or forums, and without these things beeing bad i will never use it, neverseless how good ogre is or not. without good documentation and a good community any engine SUCKS BALLS!!

PS: irrlicht is great!

afecelis · Post by **afecelis** » Sat Jun 11, 2005 8:31 pm

I switched FROM Torque, Cipher, PowerRender, AMP2, 3dGameStudio, DBpro.

And I'm more than happy!

Robomaniac · Post by **Robomaniac** » Sat Jun 11, 2005 9:11 pm

what do you not like about the community gfxStyler?

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sat Jun 11, 2005 9:32 pm

i dont know the community for myself but i heard from a lot of places that the ogre community is _very_ noob-unfriendly and not really helpful in general...

ok, i dont like noobs that ask the same question over and over, but if they ask something thats not so easy to solve as all other noob-questions, i try to help them, because thats what i would want from others too. if you dont get any help you can get nowhere, so i think it would be useless to try ogre without the possibility to get help from the community.

but i could still ask kotormaniac hehe

i know you use ogre for a time already

AssiDragon · Post by **AssiDragon** » Sat Jun 11, 2005 10:04 pm

Just do address a misconception I feel there. I don't really think the OGRE forum would be that noob unfriendly. Sure, some things that are asked three times a day are not answered all the time, but get a "use the search now for gods sake"-like reply, but I don't think I recall hostility towards noobs. (...as long as you don't start a "letz make an mmporg" thread that is.

). About not being helpful, I think most questions get answered. So far, all of mine got answered.

PS - what's wrong about the documentation? I actually liked it more than Irrlicht's.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sat Jun 11, 2005 10:19 pm

PS - what's wrong about the documentation?

last time i looked at it (somehow in the last 6 or 7 months) i didnt really found it good, but confusing. and i did not found any good tutorials on the ogre page too, i couldnt even get it to compile right!

and irrlicht is in fact a lot smaller, the ogre thing i downloaded back then was about 35mb, thats a lot.

after all, i think everyone should use the engine that he likes the most. nothing more to say

i dont want to really flame ogre, dont get me wrong please

AssiDragon · Post by **AssiDragon** » Sat Jun 11, 2005 10:27 pm

GFXstyLER wrote: last time i looked at it (somehow in the last 6 or 7 months) i didnt really found it good, but confusing. and i did not found any good tutorials on the ogre page too, i couldnt even get it to compile right!

Well, compiling OGRE with some configurations can be challanging. To me, it's just downloading and compile-right-away. (NET2003) Guess it's a matter of ...compiler.

About docs being confusing Hmmm. I rather think they can be lacking examples for newcomers; that said, OGRE gained a lot of tutorials in the last weeks (months?). But the official documentation is pretty much the superb API documentation and the manual for the scripts.

GFXstyLER wrote:and irrlicht is in fact a lot smaller, the ogre thing i downloaded back then was about 35mb, thats a lot.

Well, it was 35MB because of all the media and art files used in the samples and demos. OGRE alone (with all dependencies) weighs around... 3MB.

GFXstyLER wrote:after all, i think everyone should use the engine that he likes the most. nothing more to say i dont want to really flame ogre, dont get me wrong please

Well, I was just addressing the points I felt incorrect.

And yeah, everyone should use the engine he/she likes the most. Too bad there isn't a big variety of good OS engines though! lol =P