Help in choosing a 3D game engine

Question

I am not new to programming, I am quite good in C++, Windows SDK , VC++; but I am new to game development .

I want to start this as a hobby in developing a desktop game . I have found several engines, but I am not sure whether it does the initial job I am looking at .

Initially I want to do the following :-

1. Create a figure (avatar) , and let the user dress the avatar
2. Load the avatar in the game

In later stages I want to develop this as a multi player game.

Can anyone help in giving me the right direction.

Thanks in advance. Sujay

Answer 1

You might want to take a look at http://www.crystalspace3d.org/ - I have to admit it was more of an exploratory matter for me, but it seemed like a pretty nice engine - with physics and scripting included. They have an project which shows the avatar walking in the spacestation-like building with very smooth camera effects.

OTOH: depending on how far you want to push this, you might find yourself recreating the SecondLife(tm)-like kind of environment. If that's a fair assumption, then you might take a look at OpenSimulator and the associated opensource viewer projects and see if this may be of interest to you - and work there with the existing team to develop the code further, rather than working on your own.

Answer 2

No engine is likely to do this for you. What they do is generally allow you to load and render 3d models. But combining them, the way you'd need to do to "dress them" is up to you. And creating them, or letting the user do so, is ultimately up to you. The engine might offer a number of tools to make the task easier (for example, rendering the model while the user is designing it), but a game engine is not a magic "make a game" box where you just have to press a button, and your custom game comes out.

Answer 3

If you good with C++, I suggest the C4 Engine. From my experiences, existing game engines are either too rigid or just nothing more than a collection of libraries.

Answer 4

If you are good with C++ you should use Ogre, it's the best open-source engine, continuously been updated by it's creators, with a lot of tutorials and a very helpful community.

http://www.ogre3d.org/

It's more of a GFX engine, but it has all the prerequisites you desire.

Good luck!

Answer 5

I also recommend Ogre. Ogre can do this, it provides everything needed in regards of mesh and animation support, but not as a drop-in solution. You have to write lots of code for this to be done.

For our project we implemented something like you do. The main character and any other character can be dressed with different weapons and armor and the visuals of the character avatar change accordingly.

As a start hint for how to go about this: In your modeling tool (Blender, Maya, 3ds max, etc.) you model your avatar and all its clothes you need and rig them to the same skeleton. Then export everything individually to Ogre's mesh format.

At runtime you can then attach the clothing meshes the user chooses to the skeleton instance so that they together form the avatar. This is not hard to do via Ogre-API, but for even easier access to this you can use MeshMagick Ogre extension's meshmerge tool. It has been developed for exactly this purpose.

If you want to change other characteristics like facial features, this is possible too, as Ogre supports vertex pose animations out of the box, so you can prepare pathes for certain characteristics of the face and let the user change the face by sliders or somthing like this. (e.g like in Oblivion)

One thing to be aware regarding Ogre: It is a 3d graphics engine, not a game engine. So you can draw stuff to the screen with it and animate and light and in any way change the visuals, but it doesn't do input or physics or sound. For this you have to use other libs and integrate them. Several pre-bundled game engines based on Ogre are available though.

Answer 6

Ogre is a good way to go if you are just interested in getting something to show. As some have already stated here, Ogre is a rendering engine. There are lots of add-ons and functions to complete common tasks like Audio, Input and whatnot. This is perfectly fine if your just aiming at playing around or creating a prototype.

Should you want to start a long-term project that will be developed over a longer period of time (which would be pretty likely considering you probably being the only developer and games being complex applications), you should really start thinking about what it is that you want to do. Then, based on you're goals, look for several engines that can tackle your needs (there's always some API to accomplish XYZ). Then it's up to you how you manage your game and where you use existing libraries - you'd basically tie up your own engine according to your needs.

It get's a bit more difficult if you start looking for a real game engine in terms of "engine for all my game-dev needs". Check out the nice list of 3d game engines at devmasters (http://www.devmaster.net/engines/), you'll find lots of alpha status game engines trying to accomplish this, although you should keep in mind that support and documentation usually isn't first class in those cases.

I personally never used it, but I evaluated the open source engine Delta3D (delta3d.org) for my project and was impressed by it's cool architecture. It encapsulates a whole bunch of other quality open source frameworks for stuff like graphics (OpenSceneGraph: openscenegraph.org) or physics (ODE: ode.org). That's probably as close as you'll get to a free and flexible game engine as far as I know. It was developed at an air force university, and due to it's academic background comes with lots of detailed documentation.

Answer 7

A couple of people have said Ogre3D, I'll offer up Irrlicht as an alternative.

Answer 8

One engine that you could try is the Torque 3D game engine www.garagegames.com which, although not being freeware, allows for out of the box usability. While the functionality that you seek in terms of being able to fully customise the character is not instantly available within the engine, if you are willing to create the models yourself it should not be too hard to add them into the game and the utilise the game engine to change the 'skins' of the avatar. One thing that I feel will set this apart from the other engines is the fact that it comes with networking functionality pre-installed (from what you have described in your question I am guessing that you are attempting to either make an RTS or MMO, and if so I wish you good luck).

While it may seem strange that the engine is based around a shooting game, there are guides witin the Torque forums that allow you to add the coding for sword based combat and other things associated with a fantasy based game (if, that is, what you are planing on making).

But anyway... good luck with your project. If you are attempting what I think you are attempting it is no easy feat. But I'm sure you know what you are doing =)

Hope this helped

Answer 9

If you are interested in using the Irrlicht 3D engine, you can find a number of tutorials that step you through the process of creating simple 3D applications here.

Answer 10

I also suggest Irrlicht (irrlicht.sourceforge.net/)
Its easier to begin with, but does not have half of the Ogre3D support tho.
hope it helped

Answer 11

If your good with C++ you write your own engine :P

Ogre is the best out of Irrlicht and Crystalspace, the reasoning behind that is simple Ogre has actually been used in a production pipeline by the game industry. It actually has allot of weight behind it, where as Irrlicht and Crystalspace are more or less applications that don't do allot out of the box. Crystalspace however has a branch project that implements a game engine right into Blender 3d allowing the artist to play the role of programmer without leaving the actual software.

I'm not very big on Irrlicht, there is allot of sneakiness behind it's motives. For an open source project it branches out into many different derivatives that are either complete game engines or WYSWYG editors and they find ways to lock you into paying somehow.

Ogre excels at being a graphics engine rather than a library, it has to be compiled to individual needs. The trade off is you can implement Ogre into any design work flow or even create a new one, where it takes the load off your shoulders is having to write graphics code of any kind thus making it a very slick rapid prototyping engine in its basic form.