Open Source vs Affordable Indie 3D Game Engines?

TBBScorpion asks: "Lately I have been investigating 3D game engines. I was mostly paying attention to open source engines like Ogre3d, Irrlicht, Crystal Space 3D, and the like. Then I found out about cheap Indie licenses for commercial game engines like Torque Game Engine ($150), Torque Game Engine Advanced ($295) and the C4 Engine ($200 + free upgrades). I found a list of top commercial and open source game engines at devmaster.net in case anyone is interested (I didn't want to take the time to list all the engines, but there are more good ones that I did not list on this page). Now for my questions. Now, here's my dilemma. Which of the engines are worth investing in? Should I buy an indie license or hold out for open source? Or should I start with an indie engine and switch later if open source catches up?"

"Torque Game Engine 1.5 works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux but lacks modern shader support (except for something about a free modernization kit). I mostly do cross-platform software development so I like this feature.

However, there is Torque Game Engine Advanced (TGEA) which adds shader support, the Atlas terrain paging feature, and a few other nice features, but since is DirectX9 based it is no longer cross-platform. I have also heard rumors about support for the engine to be a little on the lacking side, yet the Torque community seems to be rather large compared to other commercial engines. Are the complaints just from people who don't really know how to program expecting to be able to edit the C++ of the game engine, or are capable people really having trouble? I've heard rumors about stability of TGEA compared to TGE? For those of you who have used TGE or TGEA, would you recommend it over other engines?

The C4 Engine looks nice as well, but seems to be under active development and less mature, but might it potentially be a more modern game engine? Also, it supports Windows XP and Mac OS X, which is better then just Windows.

Here are the features I am hoping for are: a cross-platform engine, if possible; modern shader support; a built-in terrain paging system; and model, material and animation import from Blender 3d.

When it comes to the open source engines like Ogre3D, the main thing that seems to be lacking is the built-in editors, and at least Ogre3D is currently mostly a graphics engine rather then a complete game engine (i.e. physics built-in; does provide wrappers for ODE and other physics engines). My assumption is that is just a matter of time before Ogre3D and other engines catch up with the top Indie commercial engines?

Lastly, I will be using the game engine for not only making games, but for some scientific applications as well. Also, I started using C++ 10 years ago and have been using Python since January 2002, so I'm ready to dive into the engine code."

Torque on linux?

[tulcod]

From what I've heard, you will be investing hours to get Torque working on linux. And forget about updating it (which is pretty useful for added features like the shader functionality). I am, though, not sure if this is still true. Ogre3D is slow. That's just not what you want. If speed is all you want, and don't care about the interface, Irrlicht is nice. If you want both, crystalspace is really nice, but there's not a lot of documentation about it.

If you want to actually get into the engine code

[unDiWahn]

I can't stress enough to avoid TGEA. I can't speak for the original engine (TGE) but the new version has no documentation, and a pervasive attitude of "If you can't figure it out without help, you shouldn't have gotten the Advanced Engine".

The engine is simply not geared towards direct interfacing. If you're happy using TorqueScript to do everything, then give it a shot. If, like me, you need to interface with other C++ components, you're in for a tough ride.

Doom or Quake...

[apathy maybe]

Have you investigated the open source versions of Doom and Quake? While maybe a bit dated (the Quake III engine is from 1999), they are GPL and have a lot of community support.

The original Doom engine has been used in a shit load of games since (including games available for a wide variety of platforms, such as portable music players).

The Wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_III_engine [wikipedia.org] has a lot more information about the Quake III engine, and a lot of handy links at the bottom (such as http://www.icculus.org/quake3/ [icculus.org] "A project to remove bugs, clean up source code and to add more advanced graphical and audio features via SDL and OpenAL, and to act as a clean base package to build other projects on.")

Go get it!

jMonkeyEngine

[Anonymous Coward]

jmonkeyengine http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/ [jmonkeyengine.com]

Runs on OSX, Win, and Linux. Advanced Shader Support. Open.

Is an engine by any other name still an engine?

[abes]

After going through all the choices and possibilties, I ended up with Ogre. It's true, it's 'just' a graphics engine. But it's made that way. The designers have many times over said they don't wish it to be anything more than that. But that doesn't mean you can't use it in conjunction with other packages out there. Projects like Yake are attempting to do so.

It in some part depends on specifically you want to do with the engine. For example, physics stuff can be handled with ODE, Newton, Novadex, or others. There are even Ogre bindings to use these (Gangsta wrapper abstracts this process, though there does exist OgreODE and OgreNewt as well). You'll also find, basically all open source projects end up using OPCODE for collision detection, though you might not want to use it directly (there is also a wrapper for Ogre and OPCODE).

I ended up writing my own code for interfacing with ODE, since I desired collision detection, but not physics. Since the code you can find is open sourced (a good amount is free use without any restrictions -- I believe this is true for anything posted or related to Ogre).

Not having an editor is somewhat problematic, though there does exist world/terrain editors out there -- both free and for pay (some are reasonably priced). For basic 3d modeling there is of course Blender, which can also do scenes, though it does have a fairly large learning curve. If you search around Ogre's web page, it actually provides a ton of links to the other resources out there.

For input management, the new version of Ogre comes with OIS (open input system), which is cross-platform. And you can use OpenAL for sound. So all the components are there, but you do have to assemble them. I like this strategy, as each component has its own dedicated group of people who worry about it, and try to make it the best possible.

However, if you like things prepackaged, you might also want to look at the Irrlicht engine. They've taken the opposite approach to Ogre, and provide a self-contained engine. I haven't used it myself, but I am of the understanding it is much faster to learn and use than Ogre, though I don't know how the performance compares..

One last thing I would add about Ogre, and what convinced me to use it was that there are a bunch of profressional games out there that use it. Again, if you go to the Ogre web page, you can peruse the comercial games made.

Re:Torque on linux?

[simcop2387]

crystal space also is not geared only towards FPS's in fact one of the demos (or at least it used to be there, don't know if it is now), is a 3d tetris game.

Ogre3D is great

[l3mr]

I did my masters' thesis using Ogre3D, and i'd choose Ogre again immediately. I also evaluated Torque and Irrlicht, but Torque is just a mess, and Irrlicht didn't seem as complete ( as far as graphics functionality goes ). Yes, Ogre3D is a 3d engine, not a complete game engine, but it does that ( graphics ) really good. If you need Physics, use ODE or Newton, networking can be easily implemented using RakNet, scripting with python (or lua, or...) and for sound there's OpenAL. In my eyes, using a specialized library for the different things is a real advantage - if something doesn't work as expected, you can replace that part. And Ogre doesn't need to cath up to Torque; Graphics-wise it's more than on par, and the api design is (imho) far better. Ogre has also been used for commercial games already; Ankh comes to mind...

Re:Torque on linux?

[borfast]

Yes, getting TGE to run on Linux is an ungrateful task, to say the least.

Some time ago I got lured into buying it because they used to state on the product page that they supported linux. I bought both Torque Game Engine (3D) and Torque Game Builder (2D).

Long story short, the Linux version is far from the quality of the Windows and OS X counterparts (when it runs at all) and the company dropped Linux as a supported platform, "because it consumes too many of their resources". Instead, the Linux version is now supported by the community - but it bears the same price tag, nonetheless...

There used to be a guy who offered himself to help with the Linux version of the engine. He did this *for free*. Garage Games used to take months to reply to his e-mails when he sent them a message saying "hey guys, you just released a new TGE version so I took care of making a linux release, it's ready for you to put on your page". There was somewhat of a revolt on the forums and Garage Games eventually worked with this guy for some more time (still for free) and after that, I just gave up on Garage Games, because their support really suck. It's just as UnDiWhan said on another comment [slashdot.org]: a pervasive attitude of "If you can't figure it out without help, you shouldn't have gotten the Advanced Engine". This is also valid for the regular TGE and TGB.

Things may have changed, though, because Garage Games created a buzzword for their documentation and also a site to host it. But again, just like the Linux versions are "community-supported", the documentation is mostly (all?) user created content - it's a Wiki...

As for Ogre3D, I wouldn't say it's slow, it's actually pretty good and pretty fast. But if you don't use it correctly, it can kill your game. I've seen games using Ogre very efficiently and others that were slow as hell.

CrystalSpace has great documentation

[CrazyJim1]

I like the documentation on CS because it is an API that's easy to understand. But what really shines in CrystalSpace's favor is it's community. I wouldn't be able to code in 3d if it wasn't for handholding by the developers. They walked me through compiling and building, and then they answered my questions when I got stuck. I think they're so friendly, that I casually talk about my game I'm making in help questions that I post to the mailing list. CS is the 3d engine that I am writing: www.roamingdragon.com

I'm not saying the other engines could be bad, but I know that CS is awesome.

Re:Doom or Quake...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xreal.sourceforge.net/xrealwiki/ [sourceforge.net]

from their faq:

Q: I'm looking for an engine for our game project. What can XreaL offer?
A: XreaL provides a complete toolchain for game content creation. You will get:

            the Quake 3 Arena engine with many renderer tech updates
            a customized GtkRadiant level editor for Q3A/Doom3 style hybrid mapping
            a customized XMap compiler based off Q3Map1
            a customized BSPC aas compiler
            new Blender3D scripts like an .md3 import/export suite

Re:Torque on linux?

[Jorrit]

Crystal Space is certainly not only for FPS projects. In fact FPS projects are the minority. Most projects using Crystal Space are MMORPG type games like PlaneShift (http://www.planeshift.it).

Greetings,