Let's COMPARE Crystal Space to OGRE!

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
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ahem!

The release of CS 1.0 and CEL was quite a surprised to me, personally, and now I find myself in the unusual position of possibly having to deviate a bit from the path that I thought I was going to take on my journey of learning of blender and it’s GE.

I know that comparing the two is like apples to oranges but like most people I haven’t a clue of what that is supposed to mean in this case. What is the difference between OGRE and Crystal Space, in relation to blender of course?

Is there any good reason to hold out on learning Crystal Space for the promised OGRE?

What are some of the pros and cons of both?

I probably knew about Cyrstal Space years before I knew of blender or Ogre - and for some strange reason Ogre just seems more stable or something - I don’t know… well anyway

I understand that most people are unqualified to really contribute much to a comparison, but I feel as though there are a few people who might be able to shed some light on the situation if they so choose.

thanks

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CS is here today, and works today :slight_smile:

why not play with CS or the current BGE untill ogre in in our hands?..

I am doing a game in both right now.

Looking verry forward to seeing what ogre has in store for us, I dont know programming, and Logic bricks make so I can do solo projects…

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I think it’d be cool if they combined their efforts…along with Illrichit…or however you spell it :stuck_out_tongue:

BTW, this is the FIRST post I make on my FIRST linux distro—Ubntu 6.06.

After a long discussion in the Linux help-desk thread on this forum I finally have it setup and running!

w00t!!!

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It’s “apples and oranges” when you talk about just OGRE as a render engine. However, when (or maybe I should say if?) OGRE is integrated with the BGE, then I think the 2 options can be compared as “one gamedev environment, to another”

That’s “apples and apples” for those of you that think in fruit.

That said, I don’t see a reason for you to “hold out” for anything. Learn what’s there now, it can only help you.

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what we should do is take all the features and put them in a hat…
then whatever one overflows first, is the better rendering engine.

Or

Hold a poll and see how many people think ogre is cooler!

Wait even bettter!

lets take all the features and make 2 piecharts!!

hmm… I think all VS threads do is really start flame wars…

most of the forums I frequent dont allow them…

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well thanks for the comments -

I don’t want to know which is better, I just wanted your thoughts on the features.

I concede that they are different but they are still the same in some ways

For instance, is Ogre planned to be an exporter like CS is, or is it supposed to be a replacement for the default GE?

Is Ogre planned to rely on an overlay like CS, or will it just use the current Logic Bricks setup?

I wasn’t trying to create an enviornment of flames, but one of learning. O’ fountains of knowledge, please flow upon this humble thread. =(

I guess it’s the ol’ wait and see type situation…dammit

I’d just not like to work a lot on learning the paculiarities of CS only for Ogre to come out and be the bees knees and then I’d have to switch over…again

but also, it would’nt make any sense to wait on Ogre, which may never come out, when CS is here today (and looking fantastic)

oh boy…

I’m still learning blender… and python… and now CS… and then Ogre

okay!! I’ll try!

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Ogre is ony a rendering engine and from what i understand itll replace the BGEs current one(not the ENTIRE GE), their would be no reason to do a system like the Crystal2blender overlay system, because ogre has nothing else to offer.
And if Ogre intergration is just a rendering engine replacment it should work in the exsact same way as the current GE , logic bricks and all so no worries about having to learn ogre.

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thanks man, that’s a very clear and concise way to put it - now I think I understand =)

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Actually I don’t think ogre is really being developed as only a rendering replacement. From what I have seen, the ogre plugin really takes over and exports all the logic bricks etc to python and runs the whole thing through pyogre. However, from a user perspective, all this happens behind the scenes, so it doesn’t feel like an export.

As far as the two engines go themselves, I only have experience working with ogre, and I must say it seems extremely well designed. It’s a fairly fast engine, although it focuses on features rather than speed. It has good support for shaders, but goes beyond that allowing you to create fairly complex materials without shaders using simple definition files. Combined with CEGUI (you might as well consider them combined anyway) it has an unsurpassed gui library, if at times confusing to use.

What I have seen of crystal space, from a rendering side, it seems to have better support for lower end systems, but this comes at the expense of features. It also has physics and input etc all in one, where as with ogre you have to get those things seperately. Although in my opinion, being able to choose your own physics engine when there are many good ones, choose your own input library, choose your own sounds, etc is better than an all in one package. Most of the popular external libraries have ogre wrappers built and all you have to do is link them with the project.

Crystal space is older, whether that’s a good or bad thing I don’t know :slight_smile: It’s definitely a bigger project than ogre, on it’s own, as ogre is just for rendering.

But I LOOOOOVE ogre. It’s the best!

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Lol - okay. I know that Ogre has water shaders and real time water physics just like Wave Race for gamecube

and screenfilters and bloom and HDRI? or whatever that shiney effect is

I stress tested Crystal Space last night - I got up to 40,000 polys (not tris) so I guess that’s 80,000 tris, at 60fps

max resolution.

so they are both pretty sweet, I just hope that the guy above is correct about Ogre being intergrated so well into the GE

thanks for the input:)

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Yeah even if that is the way they are doing it, it STILL doesnt change the fact that you wouldnt have to learn ogre.

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yes, but I think his point was that it could possibly be a little less seemless than if the blender engine was actually being replaced with ogre

which is important to consider because I am getting some pretty long ass exporting sequences using CS right now - making it slightly less appealing for a cumbersome noobie - as opposed to simply pressing -p-

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From what I have read, Ogre will simply replace the GE rendering engine. And you will use the pyOgre to script for it( Much like the now but with slightly different commands).

The logic bricks will work near exactly the same but will probably find that over time you will see more features applied to the logic brick system.

It should in theory work exactly the same as what we have the now, but faster & better.

Although to implement such a massive engine and everything else is a huge task.

And its most likely we wont see Ogre in Blender until the Bullet physics engine can be used with it.

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But we already have OgreBullet right? So it maybe is only a matter of time:D

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okay listen Ogre is a rendering engine… not a game engine right… !! Crystal Space is a game engine… so the only thing to compare would be the rendering engine of crystal space with the ogre rendering engine… because that’s the only things similar between the two…

…ogre is going to be used as the new rendering engine for the blender game engine… thanks 2 snailrose…so when that happens… we can all compare crytal space to the bge that uses ogre as a rendering engine… you can read about the plugin snailrose is making on his website… he says it’s going to use xml to setup shaders and other things I think…?

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So whaddya got?

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OK, before things start to get to crazy, Mr. Myshu, you gotta download the Ogre demos to see for yourself what the OGRE realtime rendering engine can do. (My personal fave is the water…wow.) It looks like its only win32 at this point. Then read over Snailrose’s Echo plugin page for information on how it will work with Blender. Then look at what Blender 2.43will offer within the game engine - Bullet and assorted other goodies. I gather you’ve already done the Crystal Space thing pretty thoroughly.
I think the thread you’ve started is worthwhile to discuss, once all the info is at hand. At this point, it appears that the OGRE graphic engine is a bit more feature-laden than the CS graphics engine, but as I think someone mentioned here already, that can mean that others can’t play the game you make without the graphics card to support it. Thing 2 is that CS is also developing, right alongside OGRE, so perhaps it will gain features much like Blender does - with input from us! And Thing 3: the Echo plugin is still a somewhat of an unknown, and it might take just as long or longer to churn out the graphics when compared to CS. Personally, I think the thing to do is invest your time in reading all there is to read on the two (I’m not done, that’s for sure - I’m not a source of info, just a facilitator) and decide what you need for your project, then do tasks for your game that can proceed without an advanced graphics engine for a while (modeling, etc.) That’s what I’m doing, anyway.

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Done that already. Your info is appreciated.

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If I were you I’d start learning Blender GE by itself and get a few of the gameplay aspects worked out - it uses Bullet physics so there should be no difference (well, not much) between that and an OGRE version. That way, when the integration is complete, you’ll have a great game with great graphics!
Going down the Crystal Space path will tie you more to the CS way of working, but the advantage there is that you can start working right now.
Remember, the key is that OGRE is just (a very good) graphics engine whereas Crystal Space is more of a graphics engine with scripting abilities that just happens to be able to use Blender objects.

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umm this is not true,

Crystal space has a very special exporter that enables you do do some very powerful things from inside blender.

Crystal space dose not use blender Objects… It ports them to CS factory files before running the walktest.

Cades has done lots of great work for this project, it really is a nice game engine exporter.

I find it just as easy to use as the BGE in most cases, in some even easyer… Like automatic generation of lightmaps, and a true terrain shader system.

on another completely different note/ topic,

I too am looking forward to the Ogre integration with the BGE, it sounds like Snailrose is doing a nice job.
The BGE really needs this to bring it into the 21st century.
I am looking most forward to the material system we where promised, it should allow the non-programmers to use some of the high end GLSL shaders. (which is how it should be, most of the artists I know are not programmers, and most programmers I know, are not artists.)

Wishlist::

hopefully someone makes a python script, so we can just hit a button and bake shadows on all our level geometry by giving it a flag of some sort.
CS dose this with a Genmesh or a Thingmesh flag, so after you set the flag you can move your models , lights and level geometry around, and the lightmaps get baked accordingly before the game engine is run.

I hope that we get a particle/emitter system like Crystalspace soon. (yes we can do this with logic bricks, but is a pain in the a$$ )

I hope we get a real first person shooter template like crystalspace has. (the last FPS that did not allow ducking I remember was in the late 1990’s. I never remember one that only had 1 gun…Monsters, NPC’s and other pawn AI logic kind of make a FPS too IMHO.)

I hope we get a Terrain shader system like crystalspace has.

I hope we get a logic brick for mouse movement , CS you get a few different templates if you decide to use CEL, all of which allow customizable mouse movements without scripting.

I hope we get more ways of culling like CS has… portals are quite nice to have.
Unreal tournament 2003-2004 has a great way of hiding things called Anti-portals, which would be nice to have too…

it would be nice to be able to use OGG,MIDI,or MP3’s too…

a improved animated texture/movie player is a must.

constancy between the keyboard and joystick and mouse movements, so we can link them all together with a single OR brick.doing custom bricks for every device makes it very difficult, and time consuming

make the joystick have a default value so it is not “broken by default”

Screen shot logic brick

vehicle , hovercraft, aircraft templates.(I think someone is working on this for the BGE)

a set of logic bricks for a inventory system, that allows you to keep the data between scenes, and also has the ability to save inventory and scene names to disk would be nice too. (See quest actors for crystalspace CEL)

a way point/path node/AI system… (see Crystal CORE game)

well thats it, sorry for the novel.

I bet we see most of what is on my wish list soon, blender and Bullett are getting verry good publicity right now.

I hope it arrtacts more developers for Blender and the BGE…

Right now the BGE is the crown jewel in my plans. mainly because of the logic bricks and the excellent physics. not to mention the ease of having your real time engine integrated into your 3d application.

with CS and the BGE, my future is looking very bright right now 8)