Transport Tycoon Forums

Are we planning on going with a homebrewed 3D graphics engine for the game or should be go for an LGPL based engine such as Irrlicht or Ogre3D?

In summary.
Irrlicht
- Very easy to use!
- Young in its development.
- Current in-built terrain engine not suitable to our needs but could be modified with a bit of effort (which i have almost done...).
- LGPL license means we can use its DLL's without any restrictions.
- Mesh loader capable of loading Maya, DirectX, 3DS, etc (not blender, yet)
- Support for OpenGL and DirectX 8 and 9.
- Inbuilt keyboard/mouse handling without use of SDL.
- Fast but not lightning (as it claims on its website)
- Fast linking/compiling and loading of scene.

Ogre3D
- More complicated but more features.
- Mature in its development, strong community.
- Terrain engine available and suitable.
- LGPL license.
- Limited model viewer.
- Inbuilt keyboard/mouse handler.
- Very fast.
- Scripted interfacing.
- Seems to be slow at linking/compiling and loading before the scene starts, this is an important factor for coders!

Homebrew Engine
- Have to create own frustum culling.
- Have to implement mip-mapping, LOD, chunking.
- Have to create own mesh loader/animator.
- Will be a specific engine built to our needs and nothing more hence may be slightly faster? But will it be as optimised as Ogre?
- Have to implement mouse/keyboard handling, no automatic node collision. (i.e. which tile did we click on?)

I found an extension to Ogre3D on their community forum and built it so as to be LGPL compaitble (i.e. a DLL we link to exists to LGPL code) which seems to be fitting to our needs however (in my opinion) it requires more work.

Both options are still open for discussion. Unfortunately, there aren't many people to discuss with.

I myself have no objections against using a library for the UI.

Well, we have an engine developed by XeryusTC and Senlitai available for use too. This also has the advantage that they are thinking of us as they build it and I've already had discussions about it with them.

Please note, our engine is still in a alpha state, if not pre alpha. This means that it isn't always stable or optimized (although we optimize features as much as possible when we finish one). And our engine is meant to be a complete engine, this includes network handling, a skinnable GUI, terrain renderer, scripting and A LOT of other things.
We are still early in the development state, this means that the engine is highly addaptable to work with other games too, we were originally going to use it as a MMORPG but as TE will be a totally different type of game, our engine will have a wider coverage area which is a good thing IMHO.

BTW, we are not forcing you to use our engine but it might be usefull to both sides .