Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

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Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by bobrofilin »

Hello!
I'm a long time C developer, and I would like to focus on scripting the AI, not graphics.
Sorry for my english, by the way.
Out of the box, unity offers features I need, but how about flexibility?
I know that it is possible to implement every shader or shadow effects in ogre, but it requires coding,
the question is unity or ogre have better graphics out of the box?
Also, against unity, is that I can't get my hands upon the source code :)
Unity can use only DirectX 9.
And how about speed? I think optimized PhysX used with ogre will be faster than those in unity.
Who have used both? I'm looking into using ogre, but maybe I should spend money to buy unity?
TIA
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by Praetor »

You would like to focus on AI programming, and the indie version of Unity is free now. Is it really important that the graphics be amazing? I haven't explored all of Unity's upper-level effects so I can't say how far they go out-of-the-box but I don't think you'll find too many roadblocks to making something good-looking. Ogre just isn't much of an out-of-the-box type system. The Dx11 render system for Ogre is still in development, so dx9 is the limit for us right now too. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by bobrofilin »

I will try out unity free version. Thanks.
But I still want to use ogre, as I think it's way more powerful.
What is the secret behind? I saw no really serious projects using unity, and their graphical demos are not so good as ogre's.
Why developers choose ogre? Even Torchlight is built upon it, and they are planning mmo version.
My work is not really about final result and I have as much time as I need.
I have been making windows applications, and firmwares for MCU. So, all this is about programming experience.
As I understand, Unity is for creating games fast, but ogre provides better graphics, and every aspect of the game can be directly controlled. As for perfomance, I think no custom scripting language, which is compiled by the game engine, can beat power of the pure C. Am I right?
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by madmarx »

>>>
As for perfomance, I think no custom scripting language, which is compiled by the game engine, can beat power of the pure C. Am I right?
Don't take it bad, but if you are asking yourself such question, I think you are aiming at the wrong path.Scripting is mainly about productivity and ease of use. In some case, it has no sense at all to compare power of some scripts with C. (e.g. ogre3D material scripts).Early optimisation on something you don't have experience with is most of the time quite evil. (And I think that shaders on a 88000GT for example runs much faster than pure C even on larabee :wink: ).

To put it in a nutshell, instead of trying to have everything 'best' available in a game engin and then select the subset you need for your apps, you should instead select first only the features that you will need. Then we can tell you what would be more appropriate in our opinion to your need. Otherwise, you will have the choice between reinventing some wheel, or buy the cryengin, or set up your own game engin with 10+ libraries (sound, filesystem, threading, pathfinding, skeletonanimation, facial animation, 3D, logging, physics, language translation, particle system, compression, networking, ... ), not to mention the necessary unified exporters importers for the game engin to code, editors etc...

(also check esenthel, might be more appropriate than unity3D for you, even if not all versions are free.)
Tutorials + Ogre searchable API + more for Ogre1.7 : http://sourceforge.net/projects/so3dtools/
Corresponding thread : http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 93&start=0
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by bobrofilin »

Thanks. I think there is misunderstanding because of my english, and sometimes I say just no what I really mean.
I think that learning C and ogre will be of more practical use, then specific scripting language. Not those material scripts, but, for example TorqueScript developed by garagegames, or some modifications of LUA. Those which are for the whole game logic, when source not avaliable.
Also, cryengine is great evil :lol:
About features. If it was just to make a game, use ready engine will be the best option.
But it gives little experience in game development. I want to use ogre. The game idea is common. FPS like, with simple multiplayer. It ships as a framework with torque. But I want to make it myself with ogre. So, I need renderer, physics and networking. The question is, how hard will it be for an indie, to put together this libraries?
In ready engines it is not time consuming to make simple or common games, but result is average too.
Do I need a team, or it is possible for an indie to create simple application?
I do not need 'everything' best in my game. There are few features which must be good, and one of it is graphics :)
It is always a pleasure to work with good tools, which allow you to achieve awesome results. Even if you can't use everything it can let you to do.
I think it is personal somehow. I'm just confused about everyone saying that Unity3D has everything the best in the industry, excluding cryengine, unrealengine etc. I want to prove, first of all to myself, that it is possible to get better graphics than in unity, using open source tools. I heard Ogre is the best out of them. I even hope that It has better graphics out-of-the-box. I believe that if you put some effort in writing wrappers for physics and binding other libraries, you can get the same engine as unity but with better graphics, that you have choice between spending thousand of dollars, and your time, and if you spend time, result will be better :D
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by madmarx »

ah ok.
A programmer alone can do a full FPS engin and game if you need little content (I mean little scenario, little gameplay, little everything that is purely artistic and time consuming about gameplay, story etc..., and that should be the main focus when creating games :mrgreen: ). You can re-use physics/ogre binding (search the ogre forum for bullet or physix) to begin quickier.

To get beautiful graphisms the most important thing is of course the data provided by the artist. So you will likely need an artist.
So the exporting tools for it's preferred modeling software are extremely important. (And then getting something beautiful and quick to execute is another problem (batching, rtt costs...)).

If you want to learn, the best is not to try to make something beautiful, but to make many very little games which will help you to manipulate the APIs and get an idea of the limits you can get. When you think you are ok, with a first experience you can try something better. For example, if you want to do a FPS, just try to do a FPS that works but that looks like shit (with ogre). That should be already a big work.
I want to prove, first of all to myself, that it is possible to get better graphics than in unity, using open source tools.
If you need a proof, you don't need to do it yourself, just check the gallery or the showcase forum ^^.

To get something beautiful, you will much more need a good artist than a programmer. You will also need to know exactly what shaders you will use if you want to allow the artist to do advanced work.

To answer one of your question, the new ogre 1.7 seems to come with RTSS which can generate some shaders for you.
You can use directly all the shaders provided by ogre (see /media/materials/program). Or those on the wiki and the forums (showcase forum got lots of good things). Personnaly I wrote all my shaders for my FPS to get a render that is different from what you can see everywhere.
Tutorials + Ogre searchable API + more for Ogre1.7 : http://sourceforge.net/projects/so3dtools/
Corresponding thread : http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 93&start=0
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by bobrofilin »

Hey, that is much better. That is what I wanted to hear :)
About simple games, you are right. Just wanted to know about capabilities of ogre. For prototyping, it is not necessary to make real models, I think. For fast development import boxes as characters, and tubes as trees, just to focus on code.
After checking galleries, it seems clear that in proper hands ogre looks much better than unity :D
Did I make right decision?
To make FPS looking like shit? Thats for me! :lol: My models always look like that. I wonder, If there are good programmers, who can make beautiful models.
So, I will go for ogre, and when I will make out of it something that works like a game engine, the rest of the work, and graphics is after the artist.
And last questions about ogre. If we are to compare unity graphic engine and ogre, are there some major differences, for example some supports SSAO, and the other doesn't. And about speed. Without any effects, which can render more polys?
And does ogre support dynamic shadows? I found no information about lights and shadows in ogre.
Thanks !
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by madmarx »

And does ogre support dynamic shadows? I found no information about lights and shadows in ogre.
Sorry, but how did you do to miss it?
I think you should begin reading a little the wiki. Like the basic tutorial 2, which present an basic way to do shadow and manipulate lighting.
The ogre manual too contains a lot about this and many other aspects and is very useful.
Without any effects, which can render more polys?
Bad question.
1/ It's up to the hardware (<=> depends on the graphic card).
2/ Today the polycount is rarely a determinant factor (compared to fillrate, batching, or memory management). So you shoudn't care.
3/ It is possible to draw an infinite number of poly on a surface. It will take time and might also need lots of memory stream but this will work.
If we are to compare unity graphic engine and ogre
Sorry I don't know enough unity. But a shader in glsl will always look the same, whatever is the 3D-engin making it run.
Anyway, ogre3D is used in a vast variety of places(games, industry, research...), only to do good 3D. And there are many guys more talented than you and me here who are collaborating here everyday to make it better :D. At least you can trust that.
Tutorials + Ogre searchable API + more for Ogre1.7 : http://sourceforge.net/projects/so3dtools/
Corresponding thread : http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 93&start=0
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by steven »

For several reason I switched from Ogre to Unity (mostly the game editor) I will speak only about graphics.

Ogre has the advantage that there is more scene manager available (PCZM, ROAM planet rendering, ...) that don't (yet?) exist in Unity. This is where Unity is lacking the most.

Unity has -for me- the advantage that it can very easily adapt to low-end machine (via an in-game options menu).
What you can do graphically with Unity is imo mostly limited by your artist (shader & art).

Try this web-browser demo to get an idea: http://www.interstellarmarines.com/game/bullseye/
The game idea is not bad either. Btw the unity plugin is very small and isn't invasive so you have no reason not to install it - the only thing is that it sends at first use the graphics card you use to Unity so they can profile better the engine.

Here is a video of what it can do: http://www.youtube.com/user/UnityStudio ... dsKJFUqWEI


And this is a screenshot of a guy that made a "crysis like sample":

Image
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by bobrofilin »

Pretty impressive.
I really know little about ogre, so excuse me, when I ask some stupid questions :mrgreen:
I'm new to game programming, so I don't know where to dig. I just read what was written under the features section on the ogre's website.
Also I examined showcase and other forum section. What can I say? It seems like everything is already implemented, just search and use in your code. Played with unity a little. Nice editor and renderer. Both ogre and unity offers the same graphics out-of-the-box. By the way, Venetica is so cool. At first I couldn't believe it was in game screenshot.
I think if artist who work for crytek used ogre, result will be the same, if not better. All this is really about the artist =)
It suddenly struck me when I looked at my creations, both in ogre and in unity. No game programming in ogre. Just loaded the scene created in 3ds max.
And the last. How do you deal with large terrains. I mean really large. How to make ogre render just the part around, and load the rest when you need it. For example when I need milliards of polys for mmo world. I don't mean I want to create one ))) just want my world to work fluently, without loading between scenes. I think I can lost in variety of solutions. Which one is the most common for billboarding the foliage?
Thanks
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by Praetor »

bobrofilin wrote:I think if artist who work for crytek used ogre, result will be the same, if not better. All this is really about the artist =)
Good you came to this realization early. You could be scratching your head for weeks wondering why, even after programming all the cool shader effects you could, your app doesn't look as good as Venetica or Torchlight. You need to realize that if you are just starting out this is going to be a long process. Learning how to make applications like games is a pretty long journey. It may seem like a big decision now, but choosing whether to tinker with Ogre or Unity first is probably not that important of a decision. Set some small goals, get results, keep learning. If you choose Ogre and find your programming is a little weak for C++ you can build up some knowledge with pyOgre, or play with Unity's scripting for a bit. When you are first starting you'll want to tackle small projects anyway so these decisions are pretty short-term anyway.

Specifically about terrain and nature there is the PageGeometry addon for Ogre which will handle large amounts of grass and trees in your scene. Sinbad is nearly finished with the first version of the new paging terrain system which makes massive worlds possible. If you are financially inclined you can even license speed tree and OgreSpeedTree to handle the flora which is really really nice looking. But, I warn you, jumping from beginner to creating massive virtual worlds is a huge leap.
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by madmarx »

I'm new to game programming, so I don't know where to dig.
Ok. So all your question until now are pretty wrong. Cause it seems you are interested in doing a tech demo (that won't look as good as the one done by others, cause you got no knowledge of shader and 3D programming, or any funds to pay 10 professionnals to create animations or clean motion capture for you...), and certainly not doing a game.

If you are a beginner, do what every beginner should do : do little apps, please yourself by beginning with little project (tetris, bomberman, shoot them up, ...). Read post mortems. Check the advices given to the thousands of other beginners on the forums (gamedev, ogre ...). When you'll be ready for a fps with ia, you will just now it because you will already have the knowledge about how it works.

Otherwise you will just end up trying to do some kind of tech demo that will neither be fun to play, neither be fun to develop, and lies unfinished forever. Do yourself a favor and begin with littler than little. Just little games without complexity. You will soon realize than 'without complexity' is a lie. A first game is an enormous challenge. Don't underestimate it, even if it is tetris.

For the terrain, there is the excellent moquette plugin for ogre, or the new terrain system (cf search for 'new terrain early shots' in the showcase). Please try to 'google' at least a little (for terrain + beginner in making games) !

EDIT : arf, I didn't see praetor answer.
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by jacmoe »

Excellent replies :)

Take Nikki, for instance: He is working on Grall II, which is a continuation of Grall I, which is a very simple game.
The key to success is to take a very simple game idea and finish it, polish it, keep working on it. Until you have a game.
Grall I
Grall II


Other prime examples of doing small, manageable games:
Yet Another Tetris (YAT)
Chess

All simple games, that you can do. But not without effort. :wink:

If you don't, your game will just end up on the unfinished games junkyard..
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by Vectrex »

A few things. Unity doesn't use 'scripting' as such. It uses C# (or other .net languages) so it's not a wacky custom language which is nice. Unity is all about the editing environment. It's as realtime as you can get. The other bits are good but you can get better out of Ogre if you put in a HEAP of work :) btw Torchlight uses DX7 level graphics so.. technology is no excuse ;)

Make a marble/maze game in both Ogre and Unity. The simplest combination of gameplay/graphics/physics I can think of (I get my students to make one :) ). That will answer all questions.
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by Evak »

I have pretty much switched to Unity now. The free version has some significant limitations. No RTT and therefore no dynamic shadows and Post FX have been disabled. For many the lack of shadows is a big downer in the rendering department. If you have pro then there's nothing to worry about.

I switched to unity because as an artist working on indie projects. I found I'd often get stuck on fun projects but had to rely on coders to produce a prototype. With Unity, I can bet by with my own limited coding skills and produce an entire game on my own. Mostly thanks to the drag and drop OO scripting, and simple heirarchy rigging and component system. It makes developing even fairly complex games fairly straightforward for me.

The rendering in Pro is very good and looks to be getting a lot better with deferred shading and 100k + of commercial libs integrated in the engine.One click build on different platforms and easy porting to iphone and soon Android, wii, 360 and PS3 is very exciting too.

Unity also comes with a LOT of shaders, all the main things an artist needs to produce 90% of the effects they want are shipped with the engine, and all have decent fallbacks. That means no need to scrape by with half working shaders or pester coders for weeks to get a simple shader.

I love ogre and often miss working with ofusion pro. But for my personal work I'm going to be using Unity. Though I do have the occasional Ogre contract job and keep ofusion and ogremax handy for those.
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by Vectrex »

"drag and drop OO scripting" please don't let that put you off ;) It's real coding with a real programming language (C#) and the engine is written in real c++, it just has a nice gui :)
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by madmarx »

Thanks Evak for your feedback.
Tutorials + Ogre searchable API + more for Ogre1.7 : http://sourceforge.net/projects/so3dtools/
Corresponding thread : http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 93&start=0
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by steven »

[Edit] Gahh... he removed his post :?
Basically he said that to work on AI game because Unity is Directx and full featured it is a no-brainer to choice Unity [/edit]

rajiv123 wrote:Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Depends as usual on your goals.

Unity is
* not free hence for example no shadows in the free version
* difficult to use in a collaborative way without one pro license per team member (no cvs/svn capabilities in the free version). Note that the license prevents you to use pro and free license in the same corporate entity hence quickly expensive
* documentation is good but not the physics/math/vector/matrix doc as it doesn't explain exactly how the calculation are done. So it is hard to make a realistic simulation
* doesn't work on Linux which is a no-brainer for others
* you can't tweak the internal of the engine.

Apart of that I agree Unity is good.
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by sinbad »

People are generally focussing on the wrong things here. Most of all this is about knowing what your intended usage is.

If you need a pick-up-and-go tool to make a game right now, can afford it, and are not bothered about whether you can see all the code or not, buy Unity (assuming it supports what you need to do). It's integrated, slick and comes with a whole bunch of proprietary goodies.

OGRE is not, and never will be, a boxed game engine. Arguably to make a really good one, you need to sell it as a proprietary system (like Unity) because it's expensive to create and maintain. OGRE doesn't try to do that, our open source model can't possibly sustain that (we can't for example afford to pay for Beast and Umbra), so we've never tried to be a game development tool. We're a rendering component, designed to be embedded, adapted, extended as well as simply used to create content. This works well in an open source model for those that have needs that don't fit within the boundaries of an existing product, or are willing to trade time for cost, but you shouldn't be surprised that it's not the same as a shrink-wrapped product. If you're considering between OGRE and Unity just based on whether you can pick it up and make a 'regular' game from day 1, you're obviously going to prefer Unity and frankly the whole comparison is moot, because you're missing the most important differences between us.

So it is indeed a 'no brainer'. If what you want is a packaged game development tool, you should buy one and shouldn't even be considering OGRE (well, vanilla OGRE anyway - engines built with it may be more to your liking). If your needs are more complicated and you need a flexible rendering component to build your own custom applications with, with 100% visibility and moddability (this is especially important if you're making a strategic investment in your own custom systems - e.g. if you're planning on a 3-10 year horizon and not just 1 product ahead - because you will always, always have the code from now to the end of time), that's where OGRE shines. It's all about knowing what tool works best for your particular use case, there are pros and cons to everything.

[edit]Hopefully this came off as rational - it's hard to be objective in my position. I do get annoyed when people criticise Ogre for not being a game development tool, it's like someone complaining that their knife isn't the best tool for eating soup. It doesn't mean knives aren't useful - try cutting meat with a spoon ;)
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by Kojack »

[Edit] Gahh... he removed his post :?
Basically he said that to work on AI game because Unity is Directx and full featured it is a no-brainer to choice Unity [/edit]
He was a spam bot who just copy/pasted Praetor's post from up the top. I deleted him. :)
(That's one of the current spam bot tactics, duplicate an existing post to make it sound like it fits the thread, while adding spam links to the bottom)
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by mkultra333 »

Spam bots are so clever.

Since about the year 2000 I've been after an engine to make a good FPS. It had to fit certain criteria, although I could be flexible if something was near enough.

1. Adequate, highly customizable graphics.
2. Stable, dependable engine.
3. Cheap, preferable free, with no nasty royalty scheme. Cheap for me means <$200.
4. C++ source code that I can access and edit.

But it never happened. All engines I've found broke at least one of those, usually all 4. The closest I've come recently was the Unreal Development Kit, but in the end I didn't like the lighting or limitations of the editing, and besides it's all scripting.

Free Unity fails especially on the graphics front, for lack of shadows. Expensive Unity is closer, but too expensive. I'll feel a little trapped by the lack of source code too.

So I've been working on my own engine, not out of love (though truth be told, I do enjoy programming it) but out of necessity. Ogre fits in well with that scheme, mainly for the simultaneous OpenGL/DirectX support, and for sparing me a lot of complex edge cases and gotchas regarding graphics cards the ogl/dx APIs.

I fully expect that the day I finish my engine, something ten times as good that fits all my criteria will appear on the market, but I don't mind because the perverse way the universe works, it probably won't appear unless I write my own engine first.
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by Vectrex »

mkultra333 wrote:Free Unity fails especially on the graphics front, for lack of shadows. Expensive Unity is closer, but too expensive. I'll feel a little trapped by the lack of source code too.
If you want to actually make AND FINISH a game get unity. If you're interested in graphics/engines programming or are a professional who wants to use OGRE in their EXISTING engine, get ogre. If you aren't interested in game engine development I think it's too much to just use ogre by itself. Unless the games are quite simple.
As for Unity source, no believes people when they say this but lack of source code in Unity is no where near the problem of other game engines. Unity itself is actually a light component framework with a kick arse editor. All the 'built in' stuff (even the terrain engine) is an external component. Most of the editor tools are external scripts. Your components/code runs at the same level as theirs. So basically it's a bit like complaining that you don't have the source code to 3dsmax :)
Also 'scripting' in this case means really fast compiled C#. We did some tests with C# with 5000 verlet physics particles with MOgre and it ran at 100 fps. Our tyre model easily runs at 300 iterations a second times 4 tyres (it's a huge pile of maths) and we get to use VS with Resharper/Visual assist. I'd like to see lua do that.
For $1200 at the moment, it's insanely cheap.

Disadvantages of Unity, PhysX is an utter pile of crap. Seriously, it's the worst, most unstable physics engine we've ever used. Unless you just have simple primitive shapes bouncing (unrealistically) around, it's useless.
The current version doesn't support C# breakpoints (Unity compiles the code itself). Unity 3 will have them.
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by jacmoe »

Yeah, yeah - its heart-warming to hear that you've found what you're looking for. :wink:
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by Vectrex »

jacmoe wrote:Yeah, yeah - its heart-warming to hear that you've found what you're looking for. :wink:
It was just as much about C# as anything. It's easy to get caught up with the technology behind the task. Switching from C++ Ogre to C# MOgre sped up our development hugely. You soon forget that you don't get the very latest code that people are working on, because you're busy actually writing your game! No compiling time ads a lot to your motivation and the clear syntax is a breath of fresh air. I would recommend picking Python Ogre or C# MOgre for anyone wanting to purely make a game with Ogre. I know Python Ogre has interfaces for just about everything since Python maps easier to c++ than c#. I personally prefer C# mainly because of Resharper and Visual Assist in VS.
I mean TorchLight uses the fixed function so technology alone won't make your game good. Not to mention you can still use c++ pretty easily for some bits.
Unity is a good example of how to do an engine I think. There's a few interesting game engine projects using Ogre that are Unity like, so I hope they get up. As Sinbad says, Ogre is designed to slot into an engine. Engines take a long time.
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Re: Unity Vs Ogre. graphic comparison

Post by syedhs »

I agree that Ogre is designed to slot into an engine. Once you have got that right, it is powerful :)
A willow deeply scarred, somebody's broken heart
And a washed-out dream
They follow the pattern of the wind, ya' see
Cause they got no place to be
That's why I'm starting with me
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