Horde3D

Hello, this is my first time on the forums and I'm wanting to know is Horde3D good for me?

I'm wanting to create a cross-platform game, (if this graphics engine is good for me) I'm going to make a game engine out of it.

I'm wanting to be able to script the game in Lua/(and maybe python), I'm going to use the PAL physics wrapper and build on top of that to enable Havok (and so I can use other physics engines like Tokamak), use OpenAL for audio, PerfStudio for debuging of graphics, FFmpeg or Xvid for video, and bzip2 for packaging of important files so no one can touch them for bad uses.

I am currently wanting to create a vehicular combat game (Racing around a track with cars that have guns and explosives), and a third/first person horror game.



What I'm trying to get at is if this graphics engine (is fast and can handle alot of stuff and) can have contents easily added/intergrated into it. Plus one thing I don't think there is with the graphics engine is a particle editor/creator(I'm not sure).


I was really looking between Irrlicht and Ogre3d, but Ogre3D looked nice but very big and messy, and so I looked more on the internet finding Horde3D, and it sort of jumped out at me, and thats why I'm on this forum asking my question.

You will not get any particle editor. And you will not get any simple GUI integration, although CEGUI (just like with Ogre3D) or guichan should work with little to no effort.

I don't particularly like the model converter either, but the blender exporter works well. Don't know whether that is what suits your needs for your engine in terms of resource importing.

Aside from that, Horde3D should be a good match for your needs in any case, and *way* easier than Ogre3D (I would always try to avoid that one, it just takes way too much work). Irrlicht is not really usable if you want more than just 1-2 shaders in your game.

Than how would we make particles?



Hmmm, I forgot about a gui interface. So those 2 Gui library's are easy to integrate.



Well that suits me because I'm using blender!

Don't know what kind of particle editor you are searching for, but the Horde3D editor should support instant reloading of particles. So you can change the xml files in the editor of your choice and see the results immediately after saving them within your editor scene.

A particle system is consisted of an emitter and many particle resources in Horde3D, which they are documented very well. Have a look at Knight Sample included in Horde3D SDK to see how they work. You can also create a handy application to play with values and see their effects or use Horde3D Editor as Volker suggested.

It's not "easy" to do any programming. If it was, it probably wouldn't be worth doing it for a job, you'd get 5 bucks an hour.
But more to the point, Horde3D has an extension mechanism. So extensions can be compiled into the engine. That is how the sound extension is made, same with the Terrain extension. So if that is what you mean by "content" then the answer is yes, you CAN integrate content.

I don't know about OGRE but I have heard that it is difficult to use and bloated, but I used Irrlicht for a year and in my opinion Irrlicht is a lost cause. It is not really advancing. They are concerned with supporting old drivers from the 90's, and the community is very active but most of the posts are crap talk and arguments, they have a lot of smart asses on the forums, and most of the guys running the show never want to fix or enhance anything. Actually, I'd even go as far as to say that 90% of the users of Irrlicht are graphic designers. Even though it is a fairly simple API to get used to, it is still sort of messy and convoluted as if it is being hacked at rather than planned. But it does have many tutorials and user contributions. It doesn't have a clear direction, that's my opinion.

Horde3D has few samples to demonstrate the basic usage of it, but most of the capabilities are still undocumented or should I say, un-sampled. So you will need to spend time working out details or specific functionality. The API is small so that helps, but the API does not obviously demonstrate what options are available and how to use them, such as if you want to set vertex colors on a geometry. Also, Horde3D is in Beta stage (beta5), so the API will change over time, not necessarily maintaining backward compatibility.

Personally, I'm sticking with Horde3D and growing with it because I get the feeling that it is going somewhere good!