[vos-d] 3D engines

[Peter Amstutz]

The developer of the Lightfeather 3D engine (an offshoot of Irrlicht, 
since rewritten) has expressed an interest in working with us, so I 
wanted to mention the idea of moving primary development from Crystal 
Space to another 3D engine.  Since I am rewriting Ter'Angreal either 
way, I don't have a strong opposition to changing engines, but I don't 
(presently) have a strong reason to switch, either.  The crucial 
features are that it be cross-platform, fast, unobtrusive (easy to 
subordinate to the WxWidgets or VOS event loop) and support a few 
crucial features we need, like portals and skeletal animation.

Other 3D toolkits I have considered include Open Scene Graph and Ogre.  
I suspect that at this stage of development, most 3D engines are more 
similar than different -- they all use OpenGL and the same shader 
languages (Cg or GLSL), which accounts for about 90% of the end result 
of rendering.

Many of the support features of various engines (map editors, or support 
for certain modeling programs) are less useful for us, since we will 
ultimately need to convert data to and from the engine-neutral A3DL data 
model for transmission over the network.

Thoughts?

Lightfeather:
http://lf.mmdevel.de/news.php

Crystal Space
http://crystalspace3d.org

Open Scene Graph
http://www.openscenegraph.com

Ogre
http://www.ogre3d.org

-- 
[   Peter Amstutz  ][ tetron at interreality.org ][ peter.amstutz at gdit.com ]
[Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet]
[ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ]
[ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey:  pgpkeys.mit.edu  18C21DF7 ]

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