Horde3D

Hi, I am a final year btech student who is studying shadowing techniques currently used. For my experiments with shaders, i used a GLFW framework + my custom engine to drive my test framework. the framework could load simple models and had decent shader management system. It is written in Opengl and GLSL.

However, I desire to create more complicated scenes to get more insight. Unfortunately, setting up a scene itself seems a laborious task. It seems to be a waste of time too. Creating complicated objects,importing them and debugging too are things I don't want to focus on now.

So i decided to use a simple game engine to do the dirty work. I came across OGRE and Horde
What i want from the engine is simple:
1) Seamless integration with GLSL
2) Simple scene creation. Mostly static scene. Some dynamic scenes too although they can be done by simple rotation of the objects.
3) simple way to navigate the scene
4) ScreenShot!
5) Allows me to write shaders without abandon!

Any help or suggestions on this?

I guess Horde3D should fit your needs

Horde3D currently only uses GLSL for shaders.

You can create a scene in a modeling tool of your choice, as long as it supports export to a collada file.
After converting it to Horde3D with Horde3D's ColladaConv tool you can then later adjust this scene using the Horde3D Scene Editor.

Just take the samples' code for navigation and integrate it into your app, or use the knight sample and convert it to your own sample application.


Alt + PrintScreen under Windows
But you could also readback pipeline buffers and store them into e.g. a bitmap.

You could write shaders in the editor of your choice, although marciano has released some syntax highlighting profile for Notepad++ so it may be your favorite choice if you are using Windows. If you have loaded your scene in the Horde3D Scene Editor it also supports hot reloading of your shader code (see the editor's video in the wiki for more details).


If those answers couldn't help you, I guess you have define a bit more specific what kind of help you need.