Does anyone could give me their comments about OGRE vs TV?

[nikko]

I know that Ogre is only a renderer, but on the speed side, also stability and feature, how do you compare the 2 engines?

[nitro]

Ogre is C++ only ,
But you will have to code a lot more lines to do something than in TV3D !
And in TV3D it will be more easy to code !
In terms of power some demos of ogre were standard 50-60 FPS ,
but with hight effects like multi shadows and bump , the frame rate have droped a lot in my radeon 9800 Pro.
TV3D 6.5 , i think has same features and a lot more :
-physic engine included and with ogre you must use a wrapper , you will not find specific
physic engien instructions
- TV3D  6.5 have a lightmapper for your levels (ogre hasn't one) : no need to use some quake 3 editor with it's limits and compatibilty problems like with ogre
and there are some more features that TV3D 6.5 will have and not ogre,
or you will have to use DLL with ogre and call directly in C++
your physic engine or other things :
a very great lines of code to write and not easy at all sometimes.

like i said , with ogre you will code in a more low level and the power is i think
the same or under but not more powerfull.


Ogre was a pain to install at beginning !
I've tested some demo and write some things , but i think i'm going to remove it
from my computer.

[potato]

Ogre, IMHO, is more logically laid out for someone who is trying to expand upon the engine's ability, which is not possible for TV due to its closed-source nature.

However, TV is easier to work with for the most part, until you want to gut the innards and code something yourself, in which case TV becomes a pain.

Ogre is also fully DX9 and supports shaders, something that we are still waiting for (unless you're in on the beta).

Overall I find the Ogre documentation lacking, and the constantly-changing nature of the code means that nobody can really get any documentation laid down before it becomes obsolete.

If they had a forum as active as TV3D's, where help is plentiful, Ogre would win over, assuming you're a C++ user.

[Yukito]

i wanted to try ogre once. but i couldnt get on the page really. i had to wait minutes for loading site and contents... this is really bad for me. i thought it might be my connection, but at other computers i had the same problem.

so for me this is a point for NOT using it... even right now where c++ is up to die for the most developers because lack of stability, ease etc. im wondering how long it will take until nobody is using this language anymore (except driver-development, what is good with c++, as it has deeper access)

[nitro]

Yukito , C++ is one of the most speed langages in terms of executables and
in the industry of professionnals video game :
it's the main langage , like C also ,
so i don't think it will disappear like you said !
Half Life 2 is full C++ , like Doom3 and all Direct3D Games.

[AriusMyst]

Yukito , C++ is one of the most speed langages in terms of executables and
in the industry of professionnals video game :
it's the main langage , like C also ,
so i don't think it will disappear like you said !
Half Life 2 is full C++ , like Doom3 and all Direct3D Games.

I don't think it will dissapear anytime soon. But there are many other languages nowadays that can easily compete with it - and in some cases beat it. Especially in terms of development time.

[potato]

With CPU power to spare, there must be a tradeoff between ease of development, maintainability of code, and speed. IMHO languages like C# are better balanced in this department than C++. Sure it's fast - but then again, I can also try coding the whole game in Assembly, that'd be even faster    but it certainly isn't feasible.

[nikko]

Yes thanks for your comments, it helps me

[Yukito]

btw a thing to add by now... there exists a wrapper for c# for ogre now.

http://www.axiom3d.org/

although it is not complete it might be very useful
[sorry for getting up this thread again, but with these few it think it wont be a deep cut]

[BlindSide]

Additionally, ver. 1 of ogre has been released, which adds a fair bit to the feature list. Worth checking out.

[dudeman]

I have been working with Ogre for about two months now. I'm a C/C++ programmer, so I'm not really phased by the total object oriented nature of the API. Like most have said, Ogre is a RENDERING ENGINE. This implies that it is not a game engine. As such you can make pretty pictures, and nice simulations. I'm using it for proof of concept work, and so far it is decent, but you have to work pretty hard to get things going. It's open source, but hey you gotta work, TANSTAAFL.

Can it be extended? Absolutely. But you will have to really understand C++ to create a game using this engine. That said, you will have to implement audio, physics, networking, input (sort of works) and media import yourself. Not to mention your tools. There are plenty of free libraries out there that cover each of these needed features, but getting them to play well with Ogre is the challenge indeed. There are so many unknowns it's not funny. You have so much to figure out from scratch from a game engine perspective. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, it is WAY more work than what will be required when working with TV3D 6.5.  That said, Ogre is still a pretty sweet piece of software for Open Source. If TV3D did not exist, Ogre might likely be the base lib of choice for many multimedia developers.

The one thing that I can say that is unique about it, is that it is cross platform and works on MAC, Windoze, and Linux, but with Windoze owning so much of the hardware realestate now, that cross platform capability is not such a big deal. So far, for me Ogre is ok. It is fine to prototype in, and if you work hard enough, you could get a finished product. Ulitmately, I will be switching to TV3D 6.5 as soon as it's up simply because of the time savings and feature set. I want to make games, I don't want to build and maintain an engine.
-D-

[Borys Pomianek]

Well i dont want to maintain an engine my self too but you for sure make your future work easier if you write your own engine.

The problem is that before you will implement all the fetures that you need today it will be tomorow so thats a never ending development that you really have to be redy for.

I tryd creating my own engine and it was great to understand every part of it as it was all c++ but the best examples that i could get was good for the old standards and that was all becouse i had a book to help me do it. Actually the best thing at the end of a 1400 page book that is absolutly all filed with code as it demands from you that your a skilled programmer on the start lookd like something a kid could do with vb and tv3d with some code.

Still i have that felling in side me that i would like to write everything using just DX and c++ with only the most needed libraries and having all else writen my self but that more like a retirement hobby than a good idea for a single programmer.

About ogre:
I dint try it but iam about too as you tell its c++ only ( apart from the wraper ) and it should have lots of examples and tuts for this language. The problem with tv is that it treats vb a lot beter than c++ (6.2) in terms of examples and ease of use but 6.5 as they say will work great with c++ so iam just wating for the open beta to try it out.

BP

[cheng]

I've tried Ogre, and it's not a bad engine at all. The fact that it's C++ is a plus to me...

So why am I using TV then? Because I bought a license, and feel the need to get my money's worth. Also, at the time, Ogre was still pre-version 1.0, and I was unwilling to put a lot of work into an engine that hadn't yet achieved some level of permanence.

The other problem I have with Ogre is the "it's not a game engine, it's just a renderer" mentality. Personally, I want a flexible, extensible game engine that doesn't suck. If I have to write my own GUI, Physics, etc. etc. What am I really saving by not writing my own rendering too?

[Borys Pomianek]

I've tried Ogre, and it's not a bad engine at all. The fact that it's C++ is a plus to me...

So why am I using TV then? Because I bought a license, and feel the need to get my money's worth. Also, at the time, Ogre was still pre-version 1.0, and I was unwilling to put a lot of work into an engine that hadn't yet achieved some level of permanence.

The other problem I have with Ogre is the "it's not a game engine, it's just a renderer" mentality. Personally, I want a flexible, extensible game engine that doesn't suck. If I have to write my own GUI, Physics, etc. etc. What am I really saving by not writing my own rendering too?

Well i want a game engine too but as torge sucks iam here where tv is. but tv is not a game engine too.

Actually rendering is quite hard to do if you plan on implementing all the needed stuff. you propably know that better than be but i dint had good time when doing my software renderer.

Maby its more fun with directX and hardware stuff but creating a software renderer with  many of the nice technology is hard and very time consuming.

If you find other game engines please write about it on the forum.

BP

[darkforever]

- TV3D  6.5 have a lightmapper for your levels (ogre hasn't one) : no need to use some quake 3 editor with it's limits and compatibilty problems like with ogre

it was written 2 years ago, is that true?

[darkforever]

i'm testing ogre for the last few days and i'm impressed It is far more difficult to get things done but the feature set is great. If you dont care about coding a framework for yourself then it is ok.

+Scenemanagement(bsp,octree,paging landscape) + free gui(s) + texture shadows +  wrappers etc.
+The community is huge, lots of code snippets + articles
+Fully open source

-As everyone says it is a bit difficult
-Landscape support is worse than Tvs
-OO design forces you to write OO code

[Kale]

You can also use any .NET language with OGRE:

http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/OgreDotNet

Or use the full C# OGRE port:

http://axiomengine.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

[petrus]

Whell I have to say with the newest version OGRE (Eihort 1.4.1) they have made alot of improvements. I agrea with everybody OGRE is alot more difficult to learn than TV3D.

C++ is not a problem... and OGRE does support managed C#. If you are planning to make games for a living, you can't keep on using VB... C++ is a much better option - seriously.

Ogre gives alot more power to the developer than most open source engines... And it's not slow... The samples run slow only if they are run in debug mode- try running in release mode.

The application layer alows you to use ODE physics... but there is also an addon for newton physics.

Now I don't have TV3D 6.5, but I would say the two are pretty much the same.
Anyway -darkforever- any serious game developer will use an Object oriented design.

[petroz]

Yeh, I'm probably going to be using OGRE at work, it sounds reasonably solid so it should be interesting.

-Petroz

[petroz]

OK, i've been using ogre at work, it's extremely powerful. Being open source everyone adds something. The smaller operations are easier. Almost every operator is overloaded for almost every object. You want to add vectors just use vec1 + vec2, this is nice.

The drawback is it's setup to doing amazing things and it's really hard to get started and get basic functionality out of it. It's really amazing how much work is involved getting things done. In addition it redefines bloat-ware; there is a million and one methods for every object. Being open source there is never the consideration that something *could* be in there but is better left out because all these other function are going to crowd the more important fundamental functions. Quite the opposite, every time i wanted to do something i found myself traulling through 100s of pages of docs and through the forums and about 5 feet of intellisense. If someone requests a feature they usually are expected to add it themself, and forums seem pretty unhelpful toward new users for the most part.

-Petroz