Many people often confuse the term "rendering engine" with "game engine", while in reality, they are very different. A game engine normally consists of multiple components, seeing as a game consists of many different elements. This includes audio, graphics, scripting, physics, and input. Rendering engines focus on the graphics component of games. Taken together with audio engines and physics engines, they make a complete game engine.
In the category of rendering engines, there are many open source options. The most powerful and predominant engine is th OGRE Engine. This behemoth is, by far, the largest, most mature, and most extensible open source rendering engine. When OGRE was not as mature, a competitor by the name of Crystal Space was another alternative. That project, however, died out, and has not been updated in a while. Recently, a new project by the name of Horde3D was started, with a huge focus on simplicity without sacrificing ability. While currently, it seems like a possible contender, it is simply not mature and developed enough to be a permanant solution. It's worth checking out, however.
The reason that OGRE has become so popular is because of it's amazing organization. The entire engine is object-oriented and a highly customizable plugin architecture. This flexibility sets it as the engine of choice for even many commercial game engines, for example the NeoAxis engine. By far, OGRE is the most flexible, powerful, and customizable rendering engine.
No comments:
Post a Comment