I'm an experienced C++ programmer, working on what will hopefully be my first releaseable game: a story-rich real-time-tactics game, which should feel like a cousin of Ogre Battle and Mount & Blade (minus the zoomed-in M&B battles), but with more diplomacy and reputation management, much richer worldbuilding, and more dialogue.
I've written several games in C++ in the past, but they never quite coalesced into something fun and playable, and so were never released. I even wrote a character-based UI with ncurses as part of one of these projects; that was an educational, confidence-boosting experience, but a waste of time and energy that could've been allocated much better.
Over the last 6 days, I've been trying to wrap my head around the Unreal Engine. The documentation is incomplete, unhelpful, and out of date. The engine itself is crash-prone and deeply non-intuitive. Third-party tutorials routinely fail to compile when I follow them. I've crashed the engine twice (if memory serves), locked myself out of my project once, and reinstalled Visual Studio two or three times.
After all this effort, putting in 8+ hours a day on the weekend and 4 at least on weeknights, I can't figure out how to render a cube and have text hovering over it.
So, sell me on OGRE. Given what I already know about C++, if I put a week of effort into reading OGRE's documentation and following its tutorials, will I be able to draw a cube with text over it on a featureless plane?