Need some info about free 3d game engines...

You may also consider unity3d
It is not completely free, but its standard version is free. Pro part is free for first month.
What is good about unity in comparison with UDK, the former is very compatible with blender. So if you are am hobbist, and do not want to buy maya/3ds max, than unity would be better. For the rest, it is a personal choice. Instead of looking for an advice, go ahead and download SDKs.

If you are familiar with C++, it won't be a big problem for you using Java or C# or even Python with unity.

www.blender.org

I use Irrlicht. Although it's just a graphics engine and has no builtin physics or sound or network there is a big community where you can find integration of a lot of other engines for physics and sound (like ODE, PhysX, Bullet...). And it's licensed under the terms of the zlib license.

http://www.ogre3d.org/ (render engine rather than game engine but good start)

http://www.neoaxisgroup.com/ (technically not free if it is a commercial release and very good although not C++ but C#)

http://www.panda3d.org/ (very good open source ex-disney engine)

http://www.devmaster.net/engines/ (good source of information, take with pinch of salt as site is owned by Garage Games, owners of Torque engine)

http://www.terathon.com/c4engine/ (not free but you can get source access for $350 and it really is a good engine for a programmer)

[Edited by - donkey breath on September 2, 2010 10:49:02 AM]

So, if i wish to use a render-only engine, are there any free/open-source engines for physics, networking and audio features?

Don't forget Esenthel ;)
http://www.esenthel.com/

It's difficult to help someone else to choose a game engine, as everyone has different needs. For example, you might need access to the entire source code of the engine, which narrows down the possible choices (some want tens of thousands of dollars before letting you download the source code).

I would suggest that you make a list of everything you need, and another of the things which would be nice, but not essential. You can then work your way through the ones listed here and here.

Quote:

Original post by Tibor So, if i wish to use a render-only engine, are there any free/open-source engines for physics, networking and audio features?

For physics there's for example Bullet or Nvidia's PhysX.
For anything else I'd always recommend SFML ( www.sfml-dev.org )

Thank you for the replies, helped me make up my mind.
I'm going to use Ogre3d as the rendering engine, OpenAL as audio libraries and Bullet as physics engine.
Now i need only to make these libraries work together and it's done.

Check out the wrappers section of the OGRE wiki. Someone is already working on or has finished making wrappers for the external libraries you want to use.

PixelLight is a new open source Game Framework. and I think it is the best open source engine.Look at it.

http://www.pixellight.org

Hey thanks for that thread... theres are some really good pointers

Loves playing web games and maybe try to make an 3d game on my own =)

[Edited by - Timbob on September 8, 2010 3:18:58 AM]

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Original post by Yuki001 PixelLight is a new open source Game Framework. and I think it is the best open source engine.Look at it. http://www.pixellight.org

Thanks...i just googled about it, but looks like it is still in developement, right? also, there's only a mailing list and no forums, the wiki is still empty...maybe i'll check it later, because judging from the screenshots it looks pretty cool :) .

Quote:

Original post by Tibor Quote: Original post by Yuki001 PixelLight is a new open source Game Framework. and I think it is the best open source engine.Look at it. http://www.pixellight.org Thanks...i just googled about it, but looks like it is still in developement, right? also, there's only a mailing list and no forums, the wiki is still empty...maybe i'll check it later, because judging from the screenshots it looks pretty cool :) .

PixelLight is in development since 2002 and was already used in multiple commercial projects (see http://developer.pixellight.org/wiki/index.php/Projects_using_PixelLight) - but until a few weeks ago, we kept the development of PixelLight a kind of secret to have something decent and field-tested when first publishing the project to the public. As a result, you won't find that many information about PixelLight through google at this point - but to be honest, this also makes it quite difficult to get people interested in PixelLight, because there's no real community, yet. Over the years, we already filled the PixelLight developer Wiki (so it's not empty, the Wiki like bugtracker is empty :) to support the gathering of a community... which is quite difficult because today, there are more engines out there as in 2002 when we started. We're having a lot of plans for the further PixelLight development, but without a supporting community and just 2 developers this is quite hard because the project is already quite huge (because it's a complete application framework, not just a rendering engine).

Quote:

i just googled about it, but looks like it is still in developement, right?

Engines are always in development, except the developers abandoned the project. The IT world is constantly changing, new demands, new hardware, every month new GPU drivers and so on, as a result, an engine needs to evolve constantly as well. We gave PixelLight 8 years of closed development to get a robust framework with a solid base and ready for frequent extensions and changes, without the need to change to much interfaces every time which would just annoy people using the engine.

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here's only a mailing list and no forums

There's currently no forum because we're just two developers, and you really need to moderate a forum in a decent way to delete posts like spam, posts with illegal content and so on (if you don't, you can really get terrible legal issues, especially in Germany - so, a forum is a legal risk if no ones helping to moderate it :/). If we find one or two people which will have a look at the PixelLight forum, we would add such a forum and of course also answering questions there.

[Edited by - AblazeSpace on September 17, 2010 8:11:29 AM]

Have a look at ClanLib - http://clanlib.org/wiki/Examples .It can also be used on commercial games (BSD style license)

It contains OpenGL 1.3, OpenGL 2.x to 3.x support.

Also it has a software renderer (known as clanSWRender) that uses SSE2 intrinsics via Interlocked Variables for maximum speed on multicore CPU's. (1920x1080 RGBA screen displaying around 2000 sprites runs as 180fps on my PC)