Re: Newbie seeks guidance

[Jan Ekholm <chakie@infa.abo.fi>]

On Mon, 22 Nov 2004, [ISO-8859-1] Frédéric Lopez wrote:

>John Moore a écrit :
>> Although I'll probably tend toward QT for cards/chess (since I'm familiar
>> with QT), I do appreciate all the advice I've been given. I was a little
>> hesitant to stick with Linux because I'd prefer not to have to switch
>> platforms; I'd like to focus on the games. So I'm pleased to hear ANY
>> suggestions, including libraries,tools,etc that'll come in handy later.
>> Thanks all!
>
>For 3D action type games, I think the best option is the OGRE library
>for rendering, coupled with SDL for input management, ODE for physics
>and OpenAL/OpenAL++ for sound/music. If you don't want to do 3D, you can
>still use Allegro or SDL, or use OpenGL as has being said by others.
>About the tools, I think Wings3D (modeling) and Blender
>(texturing/animation) are the best candidates for 3D modeling, Gimp
>being the best tool for 2D texture editing.

Is OGRE mature and ready to be used at this point? I've been looking for
something like that for ages, but so far have found nothing that really
fits my needs for a 3D scene graph & extra cruft:

Crystal Space:
Never really stabilizes and far too complex.

Neoengine:
Looks nice, but isn't really feature complete and in a flux right now.

OpenScenegraph:
Very powerful and quite mature, but a bit too complex for game work. This
is what I've used so far though.

PLIB:
Seems to be simple, but it somehow feels weird. You still seem to be
forced to use a fair deal of raw OpenGL. Not looked at it for a year or
so, is it still maintained?

OGRE:
Is this one stable?

Commercial toolkit:
There is one commercial toolkit that I saw, one that cost single
developers something like 100$ and had versions for at least Linux/Win. It
however (AFAIR) had only support for models created with some Windows
applications, so it's not really an option for a Linux developer. I'd be
more then happy to pay 100$ for something that works and has good docs and
examples.


After having found a toolkit that works comes the task of trying to find
something that can create models (such as the apps mentioned above) AND
trying to get the toolkit to grok the models. If you're forced to write
custom object model loaders/exporters then then development effort rises
quite a lot.

-- 

        Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the same time.
                                             -- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods