Seeking assistance in evaluating OGRE-Next as a replacement rendering engine for an existing VR project?

[kaestralblades]

Hi there! I hope I'm posting in the right place. I am part of the community for a creative/social VR platform called Resonite:

I am posting here as part of a community-driven research project to search for and adopt a new viable rendering engine for the platform. I am taking part in the crowdsourcing efforts in finding information on what fulfills and doesn't fulfill the game's technical requirements, which are a list put together in a previous also community-driven phase of this research project.

Right now, Resonite runs on a split architecture, where a custom C# game engine (FrooxEngine) is communicating raw render data through an IPC/shared memory mechanism to a very bare Unity process to render to the screen. This is somewhat of a stopgap solution, and while the split process architecture is being kept, we (the development team and the community, the latter of which I am part of) are looking for a new rendering engine as a home.

The research project phase to find viable candidates has now opened and I am currently working on a candidate evaluation document. This is a list of requirements with information on what is currently supported by a candidate rendering engine and what is not, which you can see here (anything with a question mark or a chat bubble emoji are things that we still need to evaluate, for reference):

https://github.com/Yellow-Dog-Man/Rende ... re-next.md

I'm posting here in hopes there will be those more familiar with OGRE-Next willing to help look over my work here, and to see if there's something I've missed? Any input is hugely appreciated, and very grateful in advance for any eyes that can assist me!

[bishopnator]

I think, the decision is more in direction what you are willing to implement and how much code to write. The ogre (and ogre-next) has no strong limitations which will restrict the usage in any project, the question is more about the amount of new code which one must write. If the features available by ogre out of the box are not sufficient, then you will end up with writing a lot of new code. First check if HlmsPbs (HlmsUnlit) is exactly what you want. If the implementation doesn't fulfill your needs and you think you need completely new HLMS implementation, then the complexity grows a lot )there is a possibility of copying existing HLMS implementations and just tweak them to your needs).

Check also the compositors - they are very powerfull, but IMHO too complex if you need certain amount of dynamism which is hard to fulfill with the compositor scripts.

DX12 support is something which probably won't come to the ogre as there is vulkan and according to some posts, the dx12 won't bring anything special compared to vulkan.

Just to get a brief summary - if you can live with built-in features of ogre and writing the scripts, it should be relatively easy to integrate and use the ogre. Otherwise prepare yourself that integrating ogre will take longer time as a lot of new code will be needed to write. The ogre is not a game engine, it is rendering engine usable for any kind of applications which need rendering through gpu.