Just a couple questions...

[Sonicphreak]

Hi everyone!

I've been shopping around for options for a game engine to use for a game I want to make and to keep me occupied with something productive. The three that caught my eye the most were Ogre, Crystal Space, and Torque, each for different reasons. I've ruled out torque because of its closed nature. Some of you may know that Orge just reached version 1 and its rendering system is awsome. Crystal Space appeals to me in other reasons however. The design of CS and extend-ability combined with CEL make me go weee!. Anyway, my question is, how would you compared CS rendering system with Ogre at the moment. As far as renderers go, I think Ogre is the best at the current moment. How long, if ever, will it take for the new renderer to match Ogres capibilities currently in the best case and worse case. I'm just curious as this will aid in my decision even though I've pretty much decided CS. I'm interested in helping, but the furthest my graphic programming will take me is copying and pasting code from Ogre and praying it works   but I'll find some other way to help hopefully, more than likely creating an AI plugin that CS seems to be lacking since AI is my only strongpoint.

Sonicphreak

[paul]

I can't help you with Ogre, but I know a little bit about Torque. Most of the material (> 90%) is aimed at the use of something called Torque Script. There are references and a few  docs for the actual Game Engine itself, but all the  applcation examples I saw use the Torque Script language. Requests for C++ examples are resisted in the Torque community.

[Keen]

To put it simply, Crystal Space 3D beats Ogre hands down in almost every way.

Personally I've had a go at Ogre. Ogre is a great engine. There are a few things that make Ogre better than Crystal Space 3D:

- Ogre is alot more nicer looking.
- Nice and simple, great for beginner to intermediate programmers.
- A very active community (hate to say it, but its more active than this one).

As you can see there aren't any things that Ogre exceeds Crystal Space 3D Engine wise that I know of.

But here are Ogre's cons:
- Object-oriented Graphics Rendering Engine - Its only that. A rendering engine, good at making graphics, hopeless at anything else.
- Crystal Space 3D's renderer is pretty much faster than Ogre's.
- The plugin system doesn't seem as well organised as CS3D.
- Crystal Space 3D is a lot more advanced in almost every aspect of the engine, except maybe the program design.

To sum up, CS3D is ahead in almost everyway. But Crystal Space 3D has a very steep learning curve (The author of the engine even said himself). So if you want to have quick results and cool looking graphics in a flash, go to ogre. But if you want the top graphics in the industry in your program and have a little patience, go with Crystal Space 3D.

Personally I'd choose Crystal Space 3D. I was working on a game using Ogre, and I found it was EXTREMELY limited, as it only was a rendering engine. While Crystal Space seems to have everything.

- A very active community (hate to say it, but its more active than this one).

Well, this is not the main community of CS (yet, unfortunatly).. Main user<->developer interaction is on the mailinglist and on #crystalspace on irc.freenode.net , and there i think we're more active than OGRE..

-M

[Anonymous]

True, for that aspect =)

[dirkk]

This kind of explains something ... so although the obvious workaround is to get on the mailing list, I fear this would be too time consuming for me ...