Ogre3d

Some features that you may want in the future, but which I didn’t see on the features list: (Note: Ogre may still support, but I didn’t see in my cursory glance.)

- Animation, independent animation scripts for face (talking) vs. arms (combat) vs legs (movement).

- Fog - Is RGB attenutation independent so that mountains become purplish in the distance?

- Footprints in the sand/snow

- Fur

- HDRI

- Landscape, overhangs - Is this possible? Most landscape systems don’t allow overhanging textures since they’re only 2D maps. Also, can the landscape have holes?

- Landscape, textures - How well does it blend two textures? Can textures be rotated? This is particularly important for the roads.

- Light sources - How many point light sources can be in an area? How many infinite light sources? How are shadows affected?

- Materials - Can you customize the materials enough such that faces don’t look like plastic? Is a more complex surface like a Blinn model possible? (I suspect so because they’ve implimented fresnel reflections) You also might want to look for irridescent surface like beatles (as in EQII beatles).

- Multicore support - Dual-cores are almost standard issues. Quad-cores coming out in a few months.

- Particles, lights - Can particles incorporate light sources?

- Physics, cloth - Hair, tabbards, etc.

- Physics, character - Characters “feet” should automatically level with the terrain. This is particularly noticable with 4-legged animals on a hill where 2 legs are floating, and 2 go through the hill.

- Physics, particle - If your character stands under a waterfall, do the waterfall particles go right through him, or bounce off him?

- Radiosity

- Rain, snow, etc.

- Shadows, Z-buffer - I can see they’re supported, but I don’t know if Z-depth shadows are supported like in Assassin’s Creed and Conan.

- Shadows, colors - In real life, the are in shadow is bluish, and the sun-exposed light is yellowish. Is this possible?

- Skelton - How well does the skeleton code handle shoulders, wrists, elbows?

- Skydome - While it’s supported, do they have automatic cloud/sun/moon rendering to make life easy?

- Textures, animated

- Textures, volumetric - Marble, wood, stone formations

- Transparencies - I think this is a flaw with all DX cards, but having semi-transparent objects in front of semi-transparent objects may not be supported without first having to do a Z-sort, which can be limiting in your design.

- Tree support - My initial impression is that speedtree does a better job

- Trees, animated - Grass and trees that wave in the wind

- Trees, culling - Quickly cull distant grass. Cull trees in the distance, etc.

Some of the things Mike Rozak mentioned are quite basic for me to play a graphic game nowadays. Or is the graphical part of your game downplayed intentionally?

With Hero’s Journey to be released as the first “graphical mud” (Simutronics) the standards are going to be set quite high I think (acording to the screenshots and stuff I’ve seen from them and their propietary engine).

I hung out on their forums for about a month in the recent past and was much impressed. The engine itself seems to have an excellent reputation, and under continuous development. The community is active and healthy with steady participation from the developers. The documentation had been kept up to date.

Runescape is also a “play-anywhere” browser game, though…

Matt wrote: “Yeah, we have no need for virtually all of those features. We’re aiming well below what you’re thinking in terms of graphical sophistication.”

It’s your call, but I’d remind you that you’re aiming at a moving target. Runescape now has free-to-play competitors that actually have good graphics.

The other thing is to always be thinking about features you’ll be needing in 2.0 so that you don’t accidently code yourself into a corner. Make sure you don’t sign into an engine that’s going to become unsupported or hit a brick wall. (From what you describe, this doesn’t seem like an issue in ogre.)

I forgot one feature; I suspect Ogre has it though:

- LOD blending/faiding - Trees (and all objects) aren’t drawn if they’re further away than 500m. As you approach from 510m to 490m, the tree should fade in over 1/2 sec so it suddenly doesn’t pop into view. Then, as the tree gets closer, its LOD improves, and at the transition from a low LOD to a high one, the images are faded together.

EQII has a really neat (and comical) LOD fading where equipment appears over time. When a character first appears in the distance, the character is usually “naked”. Then, as textures are loaded and the object gets closer, armor, shields, etc. appear on the character.

I have been using Ogre for small hobby projects, and it is a well-designed API with way more features than I would use as a hobbyist. The community is excellent.

I don’t think that one more week of evaluation is long enough… But that’s your call of course. I would spend some time looking at implementing GUI’s in Ogre. Ogre uses the CEGUI (Crazy Eddie GUI) system, but you can implement your own from scratch too. You might find CEGUI to be weak, although it is fine for my purposes. CEGUI still has not reached version 1.0, so its interfaces may change as it pushes towards v1.0.

Matt, I disagree to an extent - people are more willing to put up with poor graphics if the game’s portable. Quite apart from the entire handheld market, people play flash games etc. all the time which they wouldn’t touch in a paid box…

I think Runescape’s much the same. Because people can pick it up from any net connection, and on any very moderate spec PC… Sure, people ARE starting to see past the shiny, but it’s only starting as of yet and they need other benefits like portability or a constanconsistant themed graphical style to do it.

Hey Matt, I have found the same slowness with CEGUI. I believe it is because the cursor is not a “hardware cursor”. It lags behind your movements with the mouse, which can make users somewhat frustrated with the lag. CEGUI is rendering the mouse cursor as a graphical overlay, which means it is tied to the overall framerate of the application. (Or something like that.) I don’t know how to fix that, but most games have the problem solved somehow.

Good luck!

Matt -

Take a look at Panda3d… its Disney’s engine and is released open source with a very open license. It is built with Python and so is very easily scriptable and extendalbe.

Having downloaded the demos from Ogre’s site, I’m pretty impressed. In particular, the “Facial Animation”, “Grass via Static Geometry”, “Physics Integration”, “Shadows”, “Skeletal Animation”, and “Water Simulation” demos seem to really show off the capabilities of the engine.

I obviously have no idea what you envision your final product looking like, but for an open source engine, my immediate reaction to this is “impressed.” In terms of projects that have used Ogre, I only see The Blob and FragFist listen on their site, but I have played The Blob and it is both (1) lots of fun and (2) artistically gorgeous, and FragFist looks very attractive from the screenshots.

Comment Necromancy!

I know of one commercial MMORPG that is switching from its own proprietary engine to Ogre, and the preview video that they released looks really, really good. Since it hasn’t been officially acknowledged that they’re using Ogre, I figure that I should better not say which game it is, but I expect that the new engine gets released in 2008