Ogre for a 3d browser project

benn · Post by **benn** » Mon Apr 18, 2005 12:46 pm

Hi,

I've been working on a 3d browser project in my spare time for the last few weeks. The system consists of 2 parts - a persistence server that keeps state of the world - and an opengl client that connects to the server and renders "Elements" that are injected into the world by users.

The elements are xml documents with some lua scripts and x3d-ish markup inside them. I am basically trying to create an extensible system that can be extended and developed for multiple purposes (simulations, games, etc) whilst still keeping all the participants in the same universe.

I have so far been using opengl directly, drawing transparent bounding boxes as the only visual representation for all of the objects in the world - and this is serving me well - however, I'd like to reduce the duplication of effort that I might experience by reimplementing lots of the features ogre has (eg octrees, portals, skeletal animation, etc).

If I could - I'd like some opinions on ogre as a 3d engine for non game-specific tasks, and how easy it is to adapt existing projects to the ogre rendering engine.

I like the ogre system - I just want to get a good feel that the system is flexible and simple for use in a new project - before I spend the time getting it to compile under mingw natively.

Regards,
Ben

Post by **DWORD** » Mon Apr 18, 2005 1:07 pm

Ogre is good for anything related to 3d, not only games, and you don't have to worry about flexibility as Ogre is very flexible and simple to use. You'll save a lot of housekeeping work when going from plain OpenGL to Ogre. How difficult it is to adapt existing projects depends on how they're designed, but from your description it doesn't sound like that would be a problem. Good luck.

Post by **jacmoe** » Mon Apr 18, 2005 5:45 pm

Here a news headline from the Ogre site:

Alpharis Release
Wednesday, 09 March 2005
Consultants Numerique, a young European company formed in 2002, has just announced the first public release of Alpharis, an 'Interactive and Visual Internet Knowledge Manager'. Alpharis uses OGRE and CEGUI, and is intended to be used for applications such as e-learning, interactive e-books, marketing presentations, and engineering collaboration.

Read more at the Alpharis Home Page.

Yes, Ogre in a browser is doable, indeed.