Irrlicht and Ogre

[gagagu]

Hello,

i'm working for some days with ogre and i think it's a great engine. But one thing i'm interrested in:

What is the differrence between Ogre and Irrlicht and why should i use Ogre instead of Irrlicht ?

Thx

[labigne]

Hello

Well it seems that Ogre is mainly a graphic rendering engine. So if you want to do a game with it, you'll have to had a few things (sounds, scripts, collisions ...). In order to add all this functionnalitys, you have some great adds on (OgreTok is just fantastic ) plus a few libs very easy to use (LUA for scripts is a good lib)

Irrlicht seems to be more a game engine. But it's also less powerfull than Ogre when it comes to rendering (this is just my point of view, I don't want to offense anyone).

Hope this will help you a bit.

[Robomaniac]

Advantages +
Disadvantages -

Irrlicht:
+ Collision Detection
+ Great Tutorials
+ Awesomely easy api
+ Great GUI
+ Large Community
- Fairly badly designed internally
- Not extensible
- Graphics aren't top of the line
- No CVS
- One Developer

Ogre:
+ "Holy Shit, thats fricken amazing" graphics (TM)
+ Sinbad (tm) super clean code style
+ HUGE Community
+ Lots of plugins (OgreTok as mentioned above)
+ SHADERS (which irrlicht lacks)
+ Huge
- Graphics, no more, no less
- No real dev c++ support (its a - since i use it )
- Subpar GUI (but that's being fixed by Crazy Eddie ( i think still) )
- Huge
- Larger Learning Curve than irrlicht

Hope that helps!

[jacmoe]

If you choose to use OGRE you get a lot of freedom and power.
Trouble is - you have to work harder ! But it'll get you further.
IrrLicht is a great engine - but it is limited in what it can do.
GameEngines tend to be that - for good reason!
You'll rarely make a one-size-fits-all engine - you tune your engine for what you want to do.
OGRE is a powerful graphics rendering engine - it your job to build your game-engine around it.
And you can specialize in any direction you want - not only the "IrrLicht" way.

[psyclonist]

@Robomaniac: I don't know anything about Irrlicht but I can't agree with your disadvantages for Ogre nevertheless. They would be valid if you'd see Ogre as a game engine. But Ogre is NOT a game engine (a fact stated so often that I can't believe people don't stumble on it when searching the forums).

- Graphics, no more, no less

That's exactly what I expect from Ogre. No more, no less!

- Subpar GUI (but that's being fixed by Crazy Eddie ( i think still) )

That's OK as long as Ogre provides the necessary hooks to create GUIs, I think, and that it does.

- Huge

Huge in which way ? It's a complex piece of software but designed with care.

- Larger Learning Curve than irrlicht

I can't comment on that as I don't have experience with Irrlicht.

-psy

[leedgitar]

Larger Learning Curve than irrlicht

This is also coming from someone who has not played with Irrlicht, just personal opinion of Ogre. I would say I don't think there is that much of a learning curve, assuming you are already familiar with your dev environment of choice, C++, and basic 3d concepts. The demos included demonstrate a fair amount of the different features, in some cases showing different ways of doing things (i.e. some load materials from file, some are created on the fly using the API), so getting up and running should be fairly quick.

I didn't really have a good understanding of 3d concepts until I discovered Ogre. I guess it just depends on you; the design of Ogre and the thorough comments brought me to a whole new level of understanding that I couldn't seem get elsewhere. Other engines are just too convoluted, or too narrowly focused, which makes learning how to do things The Right Way (tm) much harder because you aren't looking at them from a general outlook, but rather seeing "how its done for a bsp loader" or the like. Ogre's approach of implementing a core set of general 3d concepts, with the community proving in can be used in a variety of different ways (puzzle games, FPS shooters, MMORPG, card games, etc) is the ultimate accomplishment IMHO.

[Robomaniac]

@psyclonist :
1) Yep, I was trying to review Irrlicht and Ogre from the stand point of a pure comparison to Irrlicht, and vice versa.

2)Yep, that's fine, but again, compared to Irrlicht's GUI

3)As you said, it is a very complex and large piece of software, however, it is very well designed

4) The learning curve compared to irrlicht, and starting with no experience is much larger than irrlicht's

This is all assuming that the person has no idea at all about anything 3d related, and wants to get into graphics programming.

@leedguitar

Same as above. ^^^

[sinbad]

I thought Robomaniac's comments were very fair - I review other engines from time to time and although I haven't done anything major with any of them (like I'd have time ) my impression was that a lot of people like Irrlicht's simplicity. I personally think it's gone a too far on the side of simplicity, to the extent of limiting its flexibility, but then I get the impression that the kind of people using it are generally quite inexperienced so I'm sure it's a good fit for them. Some people just want to bash something out quick, and are probably not bothered about extensibility or flexibility.

I think OGRE tends to appeal to the more experienced coder; not that it's hard to use (I hope), but because it's a bit more rounded and doesn't box you in to a given solution, but with this flexibility comes some additional complexity which if you're totally new to 3d might seem a tad daunting. I'm comfortable with that - to be honest I'd much rather have a community full of somewhat battle-honed coders who can generate some good debate and contribute well to the engine's development - a forum full of newbies can have a very low signal-to-noise ratio.

[jacmoe]

@Leedgitar:
I agree totally!
I think OGRE is for the kind of person who would rather implement his/her own engine, instead of looking into the game-engines out there. Do it *our* way.

And, having settled on that - the next question arises:
DirectX or OpenGL ??

(( neither of them especially elegant, nor easy to grok - and DX is not cross-platform)) ...

Well, we have OGRE !
The best of both worlds - and then some !

... the design of Ogre and the thorough comments brought me to a whole new level of understanding that I couldn't seem get elsewhere.
...
Ogre's approach of implementing a core set of general 3d concepts, with the community proving in can be used in a variety of different ways (puzzle games, FPS shooters, MMORPG, card games, etc) is the ultimate accomplishment IMHO.

That's why I am using it !

If you don't want to make your own game-engine, you'll probably be much happier with IrrLicht, etc.

If you are determined to do your own thing - choose the right tools for the job !

And OGRE is one of those tools.

[jacmoe]

For a "ready-made", "good-to-go" game-engine - I would choose between IrrLicht and NeoEngine - the best of game-engines (OpenSourced, that is).

[Electron]

I've been using Irrlicht for a few months, and just discovered Ogre (now trring to decide whether to use Irrlicht, Ogre, or Q2 for a game), anyway the continued mention of Irrlicht as a game engine seems odd to me. It is not really. The only other thing it has besides graphics is user input. Well, it has some very limited physics, but they are so slow that it would be impossible to make a game with them (considering Irrlicht's rendering isn't the fastes anyway). Personally, I like Newton for physics.

[eugen]

Can anyone make a comparision between Ogre, NewoNegine and Irrlight...i needed a free graphic engine to use (that supports both OpenGl and DirectX) and those 3 remaines, from a list of 9. The game we're going to do involves fairly graphics, video, some colision detection and networking. Which one should i use?

[Dorkula]

I have tested Irchlight (whatever) a little bit. Have used NeoEngine, and am now using Ogre.

Depending on what your game will rely on.

NeoEngine comes with a built in physics system, making it easier to do some physics stuff (not all), also comes with a built in collision detection system, a scripting system, and a few plugins. Graphics wise, it is close to Ogre (not all the way there though).

Ogre has many add-ons and plug-ins, Managing terrain in ogre is 100 times easier than in NeoEngine (not too fair of a comparison, since NeoEngine 0.81 is the first release that includes any terrain handling at all), but is easier none the less. Setting up the engine is easy. There are refrences for libraries like Tokamak and ODE that will make it easier to understand how to add the physics + collision. As for rendering speed, on my computer, Ogre rules, faster than any other I have tried.

Depending on how much time you have. You can make a decent project with NeoEngine, in less time than in Ogre, but Ogre in the long run would create a better product if you are willing to put in the time and effort.

IrrLight is not even a question, Ogre and Neo are very simple to learn, study the examples and learn from them, write your own shell with what you have learned and move on from there, or start with an example shell and add features from other examples to get an idea of how things work.

Thats my opinion anyway.

- Anthony

[eugen_]

Thanks!!!
I the meantime i had read more articles about those three engines, and opinions of the users. Seems that ogre is a graphic engine, that does not much beyong graphics, although i saw an example of physical collisions and it looks great...Neoengine is a game engine, that's why u probably said the will take me less time to develop using it...
i have one more question, about animation...i can see anywhere if ogre supports morphing animations? is there support for such a thing, i need to use some linear interpolation for a sphere crushing on the wall for the compression effect...if u think this could be done some other way, pls let me know !
ah, last question, NeoEngine supports morphing animation other then importing it from Quake3 type of files?
thanks very much!

[Antiarc]

Thanks!!!
i have one more question, about animation...i can see anywhere if ogre supports morphing animations? is there support for such a thing, i need to use some linear interpolation for a sphere crushing on the wall for the compression effect...if u think this could be done some other way, pls let me know !

Well, you can modify vertex data dynamically relatively easily - see the water demo, for example. If you were to set up a stick-spring verlet integration model for your spheres, you could cause compression fairly (relatively) easily, I think.

[Oogst]

I tried the BSPdemo of Ogre and found out that is was actually the same demo as the OpenFrag-team that uses NeoEngine is currently running, so I could test the the framerate on that map. Ogre got much better framerate, which convinced me to use Ogre. I must put a sidenote there, though: OpenFrag is not filled with super graphics-coders, so there demo might not be using NeoEngine optimally.

[sinbad]

Demo_BSP could be faster in Ogre too, I never got around to re-optimising it after the material / pass changes in 0.13. I've left it alone for a good while because I see it as a tech demo only, rather than something people will use in real products, given the limitation that you can't make commercial projects using the iD map compilers without paying serious money. I'm looking forward to Doom3 coming out, because based on iD's track record I would expect them to release the source to the map compilers under the GPL a little while afterward, at which point it will be worth revisiting the BSP scene manager.

[_jacmoe_]

map3bspc is an opensource quake3 bsp-compiler - I think it is capable of outputting a decent bsp from a map-file. That map-file could be outputted by Quark...

[sinbad]

It only does the BSP compilation, and it's pretty young. That still leaves 'vis' and 'rad' which are not covered by any free tools.

[vgmdev]

I agree, it all comes down to C++ knowledge....

Irrlicht does not have any decencies and its documentation looks nice...
But ogre is 3 colors for everything and looks “dark”.

I don't have to mess with ExApp.

[jacmoe]

But ogre is 3 colors for everything and looks “dark”.

eh?

Congratulations on being late - last post in this thread is a year and a month old.

[vgmdev]

I was talking about documation

[Falagard]

But ogre is 3 colors for everything and looks “dark”

Hahahaha.Ha.

[SuprChikn]

Wait a second. So you're quick and dirty review of ogre came down to the colour scheme used in the documentation??
(Side note: I like the colour scheme )

[Tyn]

And you don't have to fiddle about with ExampleApplication, it's just to show you how to use Ogre and so that the examples can run off some common code, saving the amount of code you have to see when examining the samples. It's not part of the engine, it's part of the samples. You can write what you want.