Skip to main content
GameDev.net gamedev.net
🔒 Locked

Which one should i get, 3D Engine or Game Engine

Started by Eric kim Dec 11, 2005 at 1:41 AM 7 replies 950+ views
Original Post
Eric kim
Eric kim
I'm planning on making 3rd person shooter with both indoor and limited outdoor environments. eg. Max Payne So far, my top 3 engines in my list are OGRE, RealmForge GDK and YAKE. At this point, I'm thinking about using OGRE because it has biggest community out of them and there are a lot of indie commercial games using OGRE out there. Any advice is welcomed.
Hello
Spoonbender
Spoonbender
With nothing whatsoever to base this on, I'd say you should step back and get some programming experience.

Maybe I'm wrong, but your post sounds like the too-common belief that you just need "an engine", and then you can basically drag and drop your game together. That "an engine" is something you can use instead of programming.

The fact is that you are going to have to code your game, with or without an engine. An engine is nothing more than a handful of functions you can call to perform specific (usually hardware-related) tasks, like rendering a model or playing a sound.

But all that means is that you have to bee a good enough programmer to:
- Code the actual game yourself
- Understand the engine's API
- Plug the engine's API into your game.

All three of these require you to be a *good* programmer. The kind of programmer who could make the game without a 3rd party engine, if given enough time.
An engine is supposed to save some time for the programmer, not magically allow non-programmers to make games.

Of course, if you're already a programming god, all this is irrelevant. In that case, ignore me and go ahead. [wink]
Eric kim
Eric kim
Actually I've made one 3d game using only VS C++ and DX SDK.
I have read a C++ book with 1k pages and I've learnt DX SDK by myself.
I realised that My post is too simple after I just read it again.

Anyway I'm now thinking about using OGRE with other libraries.
So far, I'm planning to use
Tokamak as physics engine
OpenAL as Audio library
and AI engine which will be by myself

would it be easier to use combined game engine like YAKE?
Hello
Omid Ghavami
Omid Ghavami
Quote:

would it be easier to use combined game engine like YAKE?


I haven't tried YAKE, so I can't tell you whether it's good or not, but if it would be easier, yes probably.
If you look at YAKE's features page you will see that YAKE's Audio system is based on OpenAL. This means that there's code for interaction with OpenAL which might include some nifty stuff, which would waste your time if you were to code it yourself using the OpenAL library directly. Same thing also applies for physics (YAKE apparenly plugins Novodex and ODE). And graphics is OGRE as you probably already know.
Also there's a net module, and scripting e.t.c

So I guess it should be much easier for you to use YAKE. And since your goal is to make a game, and not make "YAKE", I think that using YAKE would be a wise choice.

Hope this helps

Regards,
/Omid
Best regards, Omid
l3mon
l3mon
Just to give you another option: How about Tourque? It's a 100 bucks for an indie developer and comes with an fps starter kit already. The community is also very helpful and plenty of resources are available.
Flimflam
Flimflam
Quote:
Original post by l3mon
Just to give you another option: How about Tourque? It's a 100 bucks for an indie developer and comes with an fps starter kit already. The community is also very helpful and plenty of resources are available.


When I first saw that engine a while ago I was amazed by the price and what they were offering. Then I realized it was bound entirely by a scripting engine and you had to work to change various things you'd want to do yourself.
daerid
daerid
I guess I don't understand how you are "bound" by a scripting language. In my experience, Torque's scripting language makes for extreme flexibility.
daerid@gmail.com
l3mon
l3mon
And being able to change the whole source code which is delivered, I don't really know what makes you "bound" to the script engine?
GDKnight
GDKnight
Quote:
Original post by l3mon
Just to give you another option: How about Tourque? It's a 100 bucks for an indie developer and comes with an fps starter kit already. The community is also very helpful and plenty of resources are available.

I agree with this, torque is a nice engine. And you are not bound by the scripting language you can pretty much mod the engine as much as you want. It's an incredible deal.
GDKnight

Topic Locked

This topic has been locked by a moderator. New replies are not allowed.

Sign in to reply to this topic.