Ogre Forums

Hello Ogre Community,

It's been quite a long time since I haven't touched Ogre, or game development in general, as I'm way too busy to develop uninteresting things at work.
I've a friend who is pretty good in 3d modeling, his artwork amazed me, and now I'm in a mood to start something.

I'm looking for a complete, high level Game Engine, and here are my fairly classic requirements:

* C#/Java scripting
* Good performance
* Well thought architecture, high level abstraction, extensible architecture, component/plugin based.
* Extensible editors
* Suits very small team, productive results

so far I have on my list Neo Axis, and Unity, but yet haven't looked very deeply in any of them.
I believe the Ogre community has relevant opinion on them. I need something high-level, extensible, easy to maintain... well! I need your advises!

Thanks!

If you want to use one already done, I've worked with NeoAxis quite a bit. The editors are decent and I liked the extensible entity / entity types the best. Networking is baked in and you can use several model formats. Performance-wise, it really depends on what you use it for...FPS with 1/2 dozen player no problem, moderate RTS okay...but AI and everything else aren't threaded that well. Obviously, some of it is how you architect it and some things you can write yourself to be faster / more parallel. But, overall, I had issues with performance for my applications. But, again, it's managed code on top of C++. So you do take a performance penalty for some of that.

Thanks for your answer, Herb!
I've spent those couple hours playing with Neo Axis, so far I feel like I don't need to look any further: All the requirements above are met.
The overall architecture is also very simple, and well thought. I feel like I have a deep control on things.
I can't believe how much I understand it in such a small amount of time, Ogre knowledge helps quite a lot.

performance wise, the demos are incredible. I can believe sophisticated AI on the same thread would slow down things, this makes me wonder about thread safety also.
One of the few things that bothers me a little is that the binaries are compiled using .Net 2.0, which don't have lambda expressions, or the Task parallel library.
But so far Neo Axis seems to be a lot more than I was expecting.

Herb wrote: But, again, it's managed code on top of C++. So you do take a performance penalty for some of that.

It's C++ running mono internally for scripting

well, after a deeper look, I'm somewhat disappointed.

There are couple things that makes Neo Axis great:
It provides out of the box every components needed for every aspect of a game, including rendering, physics, sound, networking, everything organised in a unifyed high level logic.
It takes advantages of C#'s reflections capabilities to plug easily any game component in editors. This makes things very easy to work with a game designer.

But what makes NeoAxis not so great is mostly in high level design approaches, It's more Inheritance based than component based (and C# only supports single inheritance) Which makes things messy quickly, the overall design is very tightly coupled. For example the class MapObject (top level abstract class) has in it's interface the equivallent of Ogre's MoveableObject + SceneNode + FrameListener. It handles every media attached to it. This approach was "Not good but acceptable" until I found out that the MapObject has a IsAllowedToDie method, and DieObjectsCollection and everything that handles "Death" (not object's destruction, but "death of something organic that lives") of an entity.
Also In the sample application, every "dynamic object" can take damages, and Die haha.


I feel like I need to look for an alternative

syd wrote:I feel like I need to look for an alternative

Or cook your own bread after all

I would love to build something, but I'd like to build a game rather than an engine!
It's such a hard work...

Is there any Ogre package that includes sound + networking + physics somewhere?

I was kidding but high standards/expectations are seldom met with foreign code. You will have to live with some limitations and work around the corners in most cases.

Unlikely there's a package like that but I never really searched it.

bstone wrote:I was kidding but high standards/expectations are seldom met with foreign code. You will have to live with some limitations and work around the corners in most cases.

Absolutely.

But two more engines to look at:
Torque
C4

Maybe you can find one that suits your very use case perfectly.

bstone wrote:high standards/expectations are seldom met with foreign code. You will have to live with some limitations and work around the corners in most cases.

I agree, but somehow I was used to the quality ogre itself when it comes to game/rendering engine. I thought some "higher level ogre" would be available somewhere.

TheSHEEEP wrote:two more engines to look at:
Torque
C4

Torque is still alive? I have a vision of something somehow outdated.
I'm downloading C4 demo right now, but still haven't tried Unity. Anyone has an opinion on it?

You can do a lot of things with Unity.
But it's high flexibility comes at a price: performance. It isn't really bad, but you will find faster implementations of anything Unity does.
Also, if you try to do anything that Unity was not designed to do... well, have fun

So, yeah, have a look if it can do what you want and if the not-so-great performance is actually a problem for you (which isn't neccessarily the case!).

C4's demo are far from the quality of neoAxis's. rendering is ugly. No evaluation SDK available, I guess I don't need to look any further.
Seems like Unity is not for me neither.

So far NeoAxis is the closest thing from what I'm looking for, but what a disappointment, they almost got it right!

Hey you know what? right know I'm downloading Ogre SDK, and I'm not sure why

You should also check out CryEngine. They allow programming in C++. It's rendering performance is also remarkable.

Why did you rule out Unity? It's one of the most developer friendly engines.

How about Gamekit? http://code.google.com/p/gamekit/
It's a combination of Ogre and Bullet, written by the creator of Bullet.
It's got c++, lua and "logic bricks" coding, has sound, physics and rendering, uses blender's .blend files as scene format, is cross platform, etc.
MIT licensed as well.

@saejox CryEngine does looks appealing! I didn't know it was available so easily. have anyone looked at it?
I'm aware Unity has lot of success, I ruled it out mostly because I didn't like c# scripts I browsed here and there, I wasn't impressed that much with the demo I watched on youtube. and It's not open enough. I'd rather stick with neo axis.

@kojack: I looked a little on gamekit, which is interesting. I'd need a closer look, its state engine makes me curious. I'll keep an eye on it.

I've been following ogre since 2003, and this history makes me comfortable with it.
I finally started cooking with the SDK, as in the old days. Not sure where this will bring me, but i started working on a tool. An engine maybe haha.
So far neo axis is still my favorite "everything out of the box" solution. even if it's not the state of the art, design-pattern wise.

Last time I tried CryEngine it had some rather negative points. The editor requires an internet connection to start, because it needs to verify your account every time. Levels you make can't be loaded by anybody else, they are locked to your account. You could give out the compiled level, but not the editable version. That made it absolutely useless for teams.
Apparently now you can add extra accounts to your project so you can share the levels. But I just read the other day on the cryengine forum that automated account bans are still happening whenever they think more than one person is using one account, there's a whole thread on there just for requesting crytek to reanable your account. That seems way too unreliable.
Back when I tried it I also found the node system for controlling ai was very unreliable, things didn't behave consistently or predictably.

@syd: I think you're finding why a lot of us use Ogre and roll our own game solution It's not really easier, but lets us have full control to have the exact solution we want. You mention physics and sound integration and there is code already in the wiki for that to bake in. For example, I use FMOD for sound and there was a wrapper in the wiki I just tweaked and it works great. You mention tightly coupled with NeoAxis and it's true. The other bummer is that you can't really start from "scratch" with it very well, you end up "hacking" the demos to get somewhere. But, as you said, it does have some things done right and gives you a jump start on making a game (if you can live with the limitations).

It's always worth doing your game design fist. Then find something that fits or make something that fits.

Concerning Unity, I guess it should fit your needs, apart if you need very complex shaders (eg mesh feedback) or multi windows. It is composent based, not inheritance. There are a few bugs when you dig deep, but performancewise for example it has got a faster culling than Ogre, and you can code in C and ASM (you need to write dll in that case, which works only on standalones).
Also concerning the scripts, i wrote only 1 in my first (profesionnal) game, which was calling then C# classes.

Also there is "Esenthel", but I have never used it, it has a good reputation.