Greetings. I am farely new to game development as a subsection of development. I've dabbled here and there for the last 6 years, but have not made anything to write home to Mom about. I have had an idea growing in my head for a game and I want to begin to get going on it ASAP so right now I am in the planning stages to set something down. I am looking for suggestions on an engine, library, SDK or combo of these to use to get something out there fast. To be honest, I have not had time to play games or write much code in the last year so I'm rusty on the latest technology. I am the director of development for a consulting firm that does quite a bit of custom development so I do have a lot of general development skill under my belt, so I will be comfortable with things that require any level of coding and/or project experience. I am also a HUGE proponent of OOP. So with all of this in mind. What would you recommend I use to get a 3D (Diablo II)esque game out there to show a proof of concept as quickly/seemlessly as possible. Assume money is no object, however resources may be. This would be an independant project and anything requiring a long application process would not work (example xbox devkit). Some of the things I've had in mind are using the Half-life engine, Unreal engine, or even an old quake engine. I would like whatever I begin with to allow as much encapsulation as possible. In other words, I'd like to be able to write something that after I get my PoC done, I could switch to using another engine or write my own. Any suggestions, links, reference to other threads, etc would be MUCH MUCH appreciated. Thanks.

Quote:Original post by dbruns
I am also a HUGE proponent of OOP.

Ogre(Object-oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) is calling you... [grin] It is just a graphics engine mind you, but you can easily add in more stuff to it to make it better, such as your own input, audio, etc...

For some more infomation about recent discussions on engines:
Ogre3D
Irrlicht Engine
What all is required for a working game engine?
Engine?

Notable Links:
Free Game Development Libraries(Thanks Kylotan)
DevMaster Engine Reference
C4 Engine(Thread)

Ok that should get you going. I'm using Ogre right now, and I love it! If you search my profile, you will see lots of advocation of it, I think it's great. It's all OOP too. Although it is at a mature stage, it's still a very young engine that is constantly being developed and improved. However it has the best community I've ever seen for a product - take a look at the forums sometime.

Now my opinon on what you are wating to do is very very possible and rather easy to do with Ogre (don't forget, advocate of Ogre and never used anything else engine wise). Ogre is made for just about anything really, it does not focus on any one thing particular. The way it is setup, you can pretty much do whatever your heart desires, but there are a few advanced things that might not be done yet in it nor be possible, you will have to see what you want to do.

But, since it is Open Source, you can modify it all you want. It is release under the LPGL license and is free. If you want to make changes for it and don't want to realese it, then you will need to do what you want to do via plugins. Right now there is already a commercial plugin that provides hardware occlusion. So you can do something like that as well.

Finally drawbacks is that there are a few aspects to using this that kind of bummers. Since it is a graphics engine it provides nothing else. So for physics you will have to use an add in. However, there are lots of 'Ogreized' libs for physics API's, such as OgreDex, OgreNewt, and OgreODE. There is alos more little libraries that you can use, such as the OgreOP Code that makes collisions easier. Now this may seem all good, but they are still under development like Ogre and are done by people in the spare time (which seems like they have too much of [smile], but that's not a bad thing for us).

Well that's about it from me now. If you want something up and coming with lot sof features, give Ogre a try. Note though, it can be very troubling at first, very very troubling! I think the new version, 1.0.2 will be out in a few weeks, so updates do come at a good pace. But if you really do need something pre-done complete and tested and you have money for it, don't bother with Ogre. Good luck!

Great response. I will check it out. Any other suggestions. What would ya'll suggest if I did 'have the money'.

What about torque?

dbruns: If you want to see results fast then start with a proven engine (e.g. Torque) which comes with a complete set of tools (editors, exporters/importers etc).

Otoh, if for some reason you want to invest more resources (read: time. something which you said is pretty scarce) then you could use the (excellent!) OGRE for rendering. That still leaves you to worry about the game engine as OGRE is for rendering only. Yake would be a possible candidate as a 'game engine' using OGRE but it's quite young and this shows in the number of available tools etc.

-codeandroid