Good rendering engine

I don't necessarily want the "silver bullet". I just need something that can hit the target without having to build the bullet from scratch.

I just wanted some people to drop some names, maybe talk about their experience with renderer X, and why they like it.

The quake engine is 5+ years old. ...there's a reason nobody does anything with it now...

Take a look at DevMaster's Game and Graphics Engines Database. Might give you some ideas what's out there - both commercial and free.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster If you think getting the right game engine is a silver bullet for making a game you are wrong. Ogre is easy to use and I suggest starting with that because it seems to have the least bugs. It is far from perfect. Quake engine is probably best in terms of quality code and speed. Everyone was buggin JC for the source code years ago now no one does anything with it.

Quality code? Have you seen it, or dare I say, worked on a "revitalization" project with that code? It's horrible and full of hacks everywhere. Sure, it worked.. but it was a mess to try and interpret.

I worked on a revitalization project (QuakeLives) long ago, and there were a bunch that popped up all of a sudden when the code was released. QL, QWF, QF (I think..) and there's a number of things still out there.

However, it's rare that anybody does anything with it NOW because it's horrendously old and not practical anymore. the nightmares I still have..

I'm not too knowledgeable about all this, but I'm of the opinion that pretty much any engine will be as good as another, at least for most ameteur projects. It just depends on what you get used to and can work with. I started out using Irllicht, because it's self-contained and VERY easy to get started with and get something on screen (and it's supposedly quite fast, too). I started doing something in OGRE 3D, but decided instead to write my own engine, which, while horrendously time-consuming and difficult, has also been a positive learning experience.

I'd say, unless this is a big project or you're planning to have 100,000-poly models or soemthing, just pick one and roll with it.

My needs are strictly game design oriented. I looked into writing my own renderer, but god knows when I'd actually get done...DirectX 28 would probably be just coming out and my crap would be outdated.

Thanks for the link Will F. Exactly what I was looking for.

I've always been biased towards the Nebula Device, which also has "quality code", but people also generally recommend Irrlicht and Ogre. Ultimately it depends on the features you need, but for a full featured engine any of these will probably do fine. Look over their feature lists and see if any of them are missing anything you need.

Irrlicht doesn't have:

- great rendering quality
- the best speed
- quality of design
- pretty GUI
- proven scalability

but it:

- is self contained
- is an older, established, engine
- has an easy API
- is quick, with simple results

So I think I would recommend Irrlicht.