Ogre3d vs Irrlicht revisited

First of all, I want to say that it has been a long time since I worked with any of those frameworks, today I prefer to write my own graphics code as I've noticed that basically the render engine is not that difficult, still, both ogre3d and irrlicht offer a lot of features that you have to keep in mind when developing your game or whatever you're going to develop using them: scene management system, particle system, portability, and files import system (for many types of files, that's really the biggest plus when working with an engine IMHO).

Revisiting the table I've posted before, I realize that unfortunately, there's not a lot of changes in it, both engines keep almost the same features, thery´re of course more reliable, stable, and have some new visual effects, which are cool but I won´t talk specifically about them, cause I believe it does not represent a big plus at deciding for one or another. I'll try here to focus at some points you should consider when evaluating one of them as the graphics renderer engine for your software.

- Portability -

This is not a requirement for a lot of projects, but if you do worry about this, you'll be glad to "hear" that both of them supports linux, windows and macOS. As for the language you're going to work at, they mainly work with c++, however Irrlicht has an official wrapper for .net languages while ogre3d has some community wrappers.
What mainly differs those two engines here is that ogre3d takes the lead as it has already an iphone sdk. Big plus!

- GUI -

One way or another, you're going to have an user interface, and I'm not talking about the user input needed for gameplay. I'm talking mostly about menus(game options, character customizations, and etc) and eventually you're going to have something more complex, a chat system for instance.
Irrlicht has its own gui components library, and although is not very rich, it probably fits with mostly of the projects needs. Ogre3d doesn't have one, it relies on 3rd party software,which can be good since you have more freedom when choosing the right library for you, but it can be a really pain in the ass, specially if it's not well documented and/or immature.

- Supported files format -

Irrlicht is definetly more flexible in this point, it has a lot of supported files format (.3ds, .dae, .bsp, .mesh, .b3d and etc) while ogre3d works mostly with the .mesh. Yet, we cannot forget that there're a lot of plugins created to fill this gap in ogre, and that the .mesh format is really complete, specially its material system which I think is great.

- 3d Math -

Both of them offer a good basic math lib, however, Irrlicht has a plus here cause it implements a fast collision detection system. But be careful, although it's good to have a collision system within the graphics engine, sometimes you just want to let a physics engine handling it.

- Overall -

Well, I think that what really matters is to understand the philosophy of each one of the engines, while Irrlicht tries to offer a lot of features within itself, ogre3d has its features but is a more plugable engine. Being plugable has its advantages and drawbacks, It's clearly a plus when you can work with the community's creativity, projects like ogre speedtree was borned like that. The problem is that sometimes you may find yourself dealing with products with no support at all. Sometimes the risk is just unnecessary. So, think about what you need, and choose carefully.

I hope you got some help here.

Good luck!

Comments

Since quite some time, Ogre also has its own "native" GUI framework, which (although not being a big one featuring many different widgets) offers some basic ones e.g. needed for quick samples: Ogre SdkTrays.

There´s indeed this GUI you´re speaking about, however is not part of the ogre3d core, it´s separated. I just confirmed this info on ogre3d forums.

There is a limited form of gui in the ogre core: overlays. The overlay system provides text and image rendering in 2d using a hierarchy of overlay panels. It hasn't really got much else in it (no real widgets or interactive things), but it's enough for huds and simple stuff like text console windows.

Em vez de criticar aconselhar uma solução.

Eu vou saber , muito obrigado pela explicação .

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