Horde3D

I innocently tried to write an update post on what has been happening with Horde3D in a thread about Horde3D vs Ogre3D located on the Ogre3D forum, but this quickly escalated into a OOP design discussion, and other tangent issues... So if you see any Ogres headed this way with pitchforks RUN... lol, just kiding, all the comments are in good humor and there is nothing offensive or any flames for that matter.

Thanks for the link. An interesting discussion indeed.

i've posted in that topic myself some time ago. but I've quit because when in another-engine-land, when advertising other engines, something is bound to happend

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Paul

Don't worry, no pitchforks.

Hehe, thanks Daniel for advocating the Horde design so bravely

The main point of criticism seems to be the generic interface, e.g. for setting the light color. However, Horde is designed to be integrated in a game engine. Usually setting the light color in game code will be done on an entity which in the end calls transparently the appropriate Horde function. So the Horde function for setting the light params is just used once in the whole game/engine. Because of that, I think it is ok (I personally would say preferable) to have the functions a bit more low-level and have a more manageable API (regarding size) in return.

Horde and OGRE are quite different in their philosophy (I don't want to write too much about that now since it would take forever ). Of course, like with everything in the world, none can manage to be perfect and so I think both have their right to exist. Greetings to the OGRE community and kudos to Steve Streeting for his impressive work on establishing a respected open source graphics engine.

Hehe. Actually i posted on that thread just to mention that Horde3D had some great improvements since that thread started and the last post from May 17, 2007 by beaugard. Stuff like occlusion culling, etc... that at the time where planned features are now implemented.

Welcome kojack. I hope some of you Ogre3D guys cross over to Horde3D
Well at least give it a second look, now that it is more feature complete.

I have nothing but respect for Steve "Sinbad". Ogre3D is a great achievement in open source and it's community has some of the most talented people in the Indie game industry. I do like the compactness of Horde3D API, the goals and philosophy of the Horde3D project but that does not mean that it's perfect. Both have strong points and weak points, and they can learn from each other mistakes and successes.

Here's to healthy competition and prosperity of both communities.

Exactly. When I was criticizing the Horde api for things like lights, I wasn't trying to say that Horde was doing it wrong, but that people who liked the Ogre style of API probably wouldn't feel comfortable with it. Both are valid and have advantages. I prefer the heavy OO style, but hooking ogre to another language is a massive task. It looks like using Horde with other languages (such as Falcon PL, my new favorite scripting language) would be extremely easy.

Yes, that's right. There are already several wrappers for different languages (C#, LUA, D, Haskell, and some more) and writing a new one is usually done very quickly. BTW, I never heard of that Falcon language but it looks interesting...