“Make no little plans, they have no power to stir men’s souls.”
I’m feeling pretty becalmed. I really need to stir my soul.
I’ve decided to put my programming talents to work doing something that does stir my soul. I’m going to write a game. That should keep me busy for the next couple of years!
I just finished evaluating a few free game engines in depth. I wanted a package that was free, and done in C++.
I looked at:
- Irrlicht
- lightfeather
- ogre3d
My summary:
- Irrlicht: Very difficult to extend. The authors don’t understand inheritance and one guy on the forum said “he couldn’t understand why I wanted to derive a new class”. If your game only needs the features it has then you’re fine.
- Lightfeather: (revised comments) The authors were rewriting Irrlicht. I got the impression from their web site that this was a usable product, or close to it. There’s no organized documentation and no will to push this project to professional status. They’re nice folks but they don’t have a finished product.
- Ogre3d: Really nice! Reasonable management, good code, a thriving forum with the answers to lots of questions at your finger tips. The documentation is somewhere between poor and awful though. It’s unorganized and parts of it are just missing. Be prepared to read code to figure out what’s going on. “Use the forums Luke”
