• Features Index
• Submit Engine
• List All Engines

• List Recently Added Engines
• List Recently Updated Engines
• Frequently Asked Questions

Engine Details

OGRE

Show Details

Web page

Email author

Read Reviews

Review or Rate this Engine

Rating:

(64 votes)

Edit

OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) is a scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine written in C++ designed to make it easier and more intuitive for developers to produce games and demos utilising 3D hardware. The class library abstracts all the details of using the underlying system libraries like Direct3D and OpenGL and provides an interface based on world objects and other intuitive classes.

Author

Steve Streeting

Graphics API

OpenGL, DirectX

Operating Systems

Windows, Linux, MacOS

Programming Language

C/C++

Status

Productive/Stable

Documentation

Yes

Features

General Features

Object-Oriented Design, Plug-in Architecture, Save/Load System:

•	Simple, easy to use OO interface designed to minimise the effort required to render 3D scenes, and to be independent of 3D implementation i.e. Direct3D/OpenGL.
•	Flexible plugin architecture allows engine to be extended without recompilation
•	Clean, design and full documentation of all engine classes
•	Support for ZIP/PK3 for archiving

Scripting

•	Scripted material language allows you to maintain material assets outside of your code
•	Scriptable multipass rendering

Physics

Basic Physics, Collision Detection, Rigid Body:

•	Controllers allow you to easily organise derived values between objects
•	Includes bindings for multiple 3rd party collision / physics systems (ODE, Novodex and Tokamak)

Lighting

Per-vertex, Per-pixel, Lightmapping:

•	Can have an unlimited number of lights in the scene
•	Supported through vertex and fragment programs.

Shadows

Shadow Mapping, Shadow Volume:

•	Techniques supported: modulative stencil, additive stencil, modulative projective
•	Multiple stencil shadow optimisations, including vertex program extrusion, smart light and shadow caster culling, integration with mesh LOD, zpass and zfail methods, 2-sided stencilling, scissor region clipping
•	Texture shadows fade out at far distance

Texturing

Basic, Multi-texturing, Bumpmapping, Mipmapping, Volumetric, Projected:

•	Projective texturing automatically links with texture unit to a Frustum instance
•	can register external texture sources in order to feed texture data in from another source
•	Supports PNG, JPEG, TGA, BMP and DDS image files

Shaders

Vertex, Pixel, High Level:

•	Supports vertex and fragment programs (shaders), both low-level programs written in assembler, and high-level programs written in Cg or DirectX9 HLSL, and provides automatic support for many commonly bound constant parameters
•	Supports GLSL

Scene Management

General, BSP, Octrees, Occlusion Culling, LOD:

•	Highly customisable, flexible scene management, not tied to any single scene type. Use predefined classes for scene organisation if they suit or plug in your own subclass to gain full control over the scene organisation
•	Hierarchical scene graph
•	Scene querying features

Animation

Inverse Kinematics, Skeletal Animation, Animation Blending:

•	Skeletal animation, including blending of multiple animations, variable bone weight skinning.

Meshes

Mesh Loading, Skinning, Progressive:

•	Hardware-accelerated skinning
•	Flexible mesh data formats accepted
•	Export from many modelling tools including Milkshape3D, 3D Studio Max, Maya, Blender and Wings3D.

Surfaces & Curves

Splines:

•	Biquadric Bezier patches for curved surfaces

Special Effects

Environment Mapping, Lens Flares, Billboarding, Particle System, Motion Blur, Sky, Water, Fog:

•	Particle Systems, including easily extensible emitters and affectors (customisable through plugins). Systems can be defined in text scripts for easy tweaking
•	Support for skyboxes, skyplanes and skydomes, very easy to use

Rendering

Fixed-function, Render-to-Texture, Fonts, GUI:

•	Scriptable multipass rendering
•	Material LOD
•	Supports the complete range of fixed function operations such as multitexture and multipass blending, texture coordinate generation and modification, independent colour and alpha operations for non-programmable hardware
•	Support for multiple material techniques
•	Transparent objects automatically managed
•	Font system: TrueType fonts and precreated textures
•	2D GUI System with Buttons, Lists, Edit boxes, Scrollbars, etc.

Features:

Ease of Use:

Stability:

Support:

Date Added

Wed, 23 Jun 2004

Last Updated

Sun, 20 Jul 2008

There are currently 55 reviews for this engine

License Name	Price	Source Code	Comments
LGPL	Free	Yes
Other/Custom	Not public	Yes	OGRE Unlimited License - An undisclosed fee is required, and the licensee continues having access to the source. This would be for people and businesses who would like to be able to modify the OGRE source but without having to make those modifications openly available

Member Reviews

NOTE: The ratings and reviews below reflect the opinions of their respective authors and as such, do not reflect the opinions of DevMaster.net or its staff. The reviews are not moderated and some are completely inaccurate. Therefore, most reviews should be taken with a grain of salt. If you find any inaccurate or inappropriate reviews, let us know by stating in detail why you think the review should be removed and any links/documents that support your contention.

Good Rendering Engine

Posted by: Sean Doherty at Aug 14, 2004

As an Open Source 3d Rendering Engine OGRE is pretty good; but I don't see how it can be rated unparalleled quality for its features as a 3D Game Engine.

OGRE is only a Rendering Engine; it has no network support, built in physics (triangle collision detection), support for .x and .3ds files (without conversion), sound, etc. Therefore, it can not really be one of the best 3D Game Engines available.

That said, it is a good 3D Rendering Engine; and if you want to build a game using OGRE as the rendering sub-system it will certainly meet your needs.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Great renderer, and a few notes

Posted by: fyhuang at Aug 6, 2004

First of all, I would like to say that the OGRE engine is great! Second, OGRE is actually not an 'engine' in itself, but rather it is a graphics rendering engine, although the demos and samples included do include some physics integration, scripting, etc.

The OGRE engine is basically at the very top of the feature spectrum. The material/overlay/etc. scripts are intuitive and powerful, and prevents hardcoding in game assets. The code is very understandable, but building OGRE into your engine is harder than building your engine around OGRE. The engine's performance and stability is also very good. Also the community is very helpful, and the tutorials and API documentation is usually enough to keep you away from trouble for a long while.

Overall, this is one of the best choices for a renderer out there today!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Ogre is amazing

Posted by: BernieRoehl at Aug 7, 2004

I've been using Ogre for a year or so now, and I'm very impressed. It has an active development community, all the features I need, and it's completely free and open-source. The forums are a great source of information and tech support.

If you haven't checked it out yet, I strongly recommend it. You have nothing to lose by looking into it, unlike most of the other engines on the list that require you to shell out big bucks.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Very good graphic rendering engine

Posted by: evgeni_popov at Aug 7, 2004

The main point you have to understand with Ogre is that it's a *graphic rendering* engine, NOT a game engine. So to make a game from Ogre, you may have more work to do than just using a true game engine (though, the community is very strong and is working on frameworks to be used with Ogre - physic / sound engine, etc). But as a rendering engine, Ogre is really good, it may compare to commercial one, and even be better ! It's well written, have good documentation and very good support. It has all the top rendering features you can think ok (like vertex/pixel shaders, shadow support, ...). It's not currently very easy to use for the beginner because there's no binaries yet and you have to compile the project yourself, but that something which will be addressed for the V1.0 due before the end of the year.
So, if you look for a graphic rendering engine, don't go farther and get Ogre.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

4.999/5 Stars

Posted by: Robomaniac at Aug 7, 2004

+ Awesome
+ Great Graphics
+ Clean Code
+ Easy to work with
+ Love the material formats (very very easy ;))
+ Greatly separates the coders from the artists in terms of content and such.

- Complex
- Big
- Some Quirks
-/+ Its just a graphics engine

All in all, an amazing engine. There are some quirks in the way things are done, but other than that, its awesome!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Just the best rendering engine ever

Posted by: Kencho at Aug 7, 2004

This engine has grown quickly in a really small amount of time. It's just a rendering engine, but I've found it more useful than many other engines out there.
About it's features, it has a extensive list of features supported, many of them related to the latest technologies.
Usage: Amazing. I didn't have to burn my brain to include this engine in my programs, and the script files are really helpful too, allowing to customize overlays, materials and many other parts with just a text editor :)
About the stability, it's the best designed engine I've ever seen. It has no comparation even with commercial engines. This is a proffessional work that assures a high stability and the best performance
Regarding to the support, OGRE has an unparalled community supporting it. It's not official support, but the help of almost 2000 (registered) users is better than any tech support team ;)

Summarising, this engine is priceless, and that's exactly one of its best features -- it's free!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

OGRE

Posted by: anubis at Aug 7, 2004

OGRE certainly is one of the most promising open source engines out there and also probably the engine that collects most of the praises these days. this holds true especially after it got rather quite around crytalspace. the code is very easy to understand and therefore OGRE would be my first recommendation for learning a thing or two about engine design if it wasn't for the NEBULA device

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Rendering Engine

Posted by: Nek at Aug 7, 2004

This is a "number one must" recommendation for any seasoned C++ programmer who needs a powerful rendering engine flexible enough to allow you to define your own rules without forcing you to support any unnecessary overhead, such as physics, networking, or sound. For a pure rendering engine, Ogre is unmatched by anyone period!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Ogre

Posted by: johnhpus at Aug 7, 2004

Ogre is incredible. It does almost everything that I could ask for. The community is great and very helpfull.

And you can't beat the price ( free ).

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

The Best

Posted by: Dorkula at Aug 10, 2004

I have tried many many engines. From Genesis3D, to crystalspace, even TND. Nothing comes close to the feature list and ease of use of Ogre3D.

I think it is the first commercial quality open-source engine to arrive for quite some time :)

- Anthony

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Ogre is Wonderful

Posted by: ahsile at Aug 11, 2004

Ogre is a great rendering engine to use. It is highly customizable, easy to use, and the design is great. It's always easy to find what you're looking for, and if you want to know how something works you always have the source. Excellent job!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Promising Engine

Posted by: john at Oct 22, 2005

OGRE is an excellent piece of software for learning. It is nicely designed and actively developed. Most engines die off after some time of development. But this doesn't seem to be the case for OGRE. It is probably the best open source graphics engine (not game engine) out there in terms of features and design.

However, OGRE is not designed for games. It is designed for graphics rendering and demo making. If you want to make a game, then I don't recommend using OGRE. Although there exists an engine (RealmForge GDK) that provides the components necessary for making games using OGRE as the rendering component, it is not recommended for serious game developers since each component (Physics, AI, etc) is developed separately and hence, things tend to get sloppy trying to make each component interact with each other.

On the other hand, if you just want to make a cool looking demo, create a simulation, or even just learn how an engine is designed, then OGRE might be a good choice.

As for OGRE as a graphics engine, it is relatively advanced. It tries to support the advanced features of the latest video cards, but at the same time providing backward compatibility with low-end cards, which is a good thing in most cases, although tradeoffs in doing so tend to affect performance.
For beginners, OGRE is relatively hard to set up initially, especially the fact that one would have to recompile the whole engine. Binary-only releases don't exist. OGRE has significant dependencies on 3rd-party libraries (for images, fonts, STL, etc.) in support of the open source concept.

Performance-wise, OGRE is not top-notch. It lacks OS-specific and processor optimizations (MMX, SIMD, 3DNow, etc.), which is hard to find in open source projects anyways. Most commercial engines do support these advanced optimizations, which leads to stellar performance.

The support is limited to forums. Support is excellent though, and you will most of the times get support from the lead developer himself.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Yeah!

Posted by: coder; at Aug 13, 2004

The best free rendering engine out there...no question...
With a bit stronger connection to other open source middleware like ODE and some networking it will beat many commercial engines as well...

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

very good engine

Posted by: iloseall at Aug 13, 2004

Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine is the best rendering engine in my life.
But the gui system is not good,beacuse GUI is not a part of Rendering engine.
We can only use a 3rd party GUI system.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

OGRE rocks!

Posted by: Harlequin at Aug 15, 2004

Evaluating most free 3D-Engines when our Team went from producing a simple Mod to a full flegded 3D-Game, we tried CS, Nebula and others, but finally stuck with OGRE. This was about one year ago, and I never rued our choice.

Ogre is not only easy too use, it also has all the features one could need, and is always developed further. The c++ code is easy to read and understand and offers greatest flexibility and also performance.

As Kencho said above, the forums and the help on the Ogre homepage exceeds others by far and makes Ogre what it is, a great 3D Engine for everyone.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

The best 3d engine I've encountered

Posted by: Phantom88 at Aug 16, 2004

Ogre3d is the best 3d engine i've ever encountered. It has all features you could possibly want, an active user forum, and has been written very good. It's Fast and reliable and very easy to understand. If you ask a question on the forum The main developer of the engine will most probably answer. Where else do you get such support? I'd say it even beats commercial engines.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

A good promise!

Posted by: Chariot at Feb 7, 2007

Ogre is incredible. I think it is the frist non-commercial quality open-source engine to arrive for quite some time. I wait that the engaged implementations are deliver quickly.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Excellent learning tool

Posted by: iceweasel at Sep 2, 2004

When I started becoming interested in programming a 3D engine, I went to all the usual books and websites. My search quickly became frustrating as most of what I found only gave snippets or techniques for doing one thing. I wanted something to teach me how the engine components should interact with each other.

Then I found OGRE. Wow! I could not believe the depth of documentation and pure elegance of the code. I am a professional programmer, and I was embarrased by how sloppy and unstructured my code is compared to Steve Streeting's.

OGRE is loaded with rendering features (this is only a graphics engine). The strong point for me was the fact that all materials and rendering techniques are defined outside of the code in scripts. You can change how an object or group of objects looks with just a few kepresses, and no recompiling. Everything is optimized out the wazoo to give you super performance.

I definitely recommend OGRE to learn how a rendering engine should work, or even just to learn how to masterfully code.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Great Engine

Posted by: fenris at Sep 8, 2004

As stated by previous reviews, OGRE is a graphics engine, and a good one. Robust, fast, felixible and with quite a few features. But, you have read that already. So, let me say that although it is a graphics engine, and not a game engine, it still made our pick for creating a game.

Why? Well we took a look at all those other engines and yes physics, AI (so to speak) and networking are included in many... But, ask yourself this. Do they really do what you need? Pretty much unless you are creating a fairly simple game, the answer is going to be no.

So, if you are going to re-write or expand this or that part of a game engine, you might as well simply spend time tacking on tested/completed 3rd party libs to OGRE. A complete game engine does let you prototype out the gate faster. But, in the long haul, I doubt you will lose any time from choosing OGRE as integration is easy in comparison to expanding (hack) quite few of the engines I have seen.

To me the real advantage of some of the other game engines is in the tools / tool chain. That is they have more utilites like editors and such done and ready. But, truthfuly the community around OGRE is slowly and surely filling these gaps. I would not be surprised to see OGRE being comparible to a mid-grade commercial engine in all but cost in a year or so.

In short if you are starting development now, you would be foolish not to give it a look.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

very good

Posted by: Jazz at Sep 13, 2004

i tried irrlicht, neoengine, crystal space before then at the end found ogre and very happy now :) it has a very good community. People help each other, i love ogre :)

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Amazing Engine and Community

Posted by: Goosey at Sep 29, 2004

Reading my review keep in mind I have only had experience with OGRE and another Open-Source engine, Wild Magic (http://www.wild-magic.com/).

Coming from struggling with Wild Magic OGRE is a godsend. The engine is capable of from very pretty eyecandy, and seems too have pretty good performance.

The code is fully OO and very easy to get a grasp on. The design of this engine is so good that when you get a feel for it you can practically guess how to do things you havn't even learned yet.

I think the best feature of this engine however is the great community surrounding it. Very large, very active, and very friendly.

And of course, it is fully Open-Source and Free to use under LGPL (Which means you could use it as the rendering end of a commercial 3D game with no problems).

A++ engine :)

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Ogre rocks!

Posted by: beau at Oct 7, 2004

Ogre has amazing capabilities, and is easy to use. Additionally, the ogre community if fair sized and always quick to provide help when needed. As a senior project Computer Science & Engineering Game Devolpment course at my University our group of 10 students was able to successfully develop two complete games within a 10 week period. This was done completely from scratch. Ogre's ease of use allowed fast development and its awesome features enabled remarkable results. Keep in mind that ogre is not a complete game engine. Support for sound, networking, etc. must be found elsewhere. The use of other libraries with ogre presented, for us, no difficulites whatsoever. Our team spent significant time researching available game engines and Ogre was undoubtedly superior.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

OGRE is the way I choose to go

Posted by: sputnick at Oct 29, 2004

I've been using Ogre for a few months now.
And what really impressed me at the beginning is the very high quality of the design. The API documentation is at the same level of expectation; although the user guide and the tutorials could be more furnished.

For an open source engine, it's amazing to be able to count on the latest features like GLSL or Cg shaders.
As the engine has lots of features, it takes some times to enter into it for non-professional of the game industry. But once this step is done, it is a pleasure to use all its flexibility.

About performance, I was really amazed when I could first display half million triangles meshes and keeping a frame rate above 100 fps on a standard PC. Now I got used to it. ;-)

The support is very effective with the forum. You can usually expect to have a solution or an advice within 24h.

As a conclusion, Ogre is, for me, definitely the way to go for non-commercial or low budget 3D projects. The only thing missing is a high-end demo to show that it can easily compete with commercial engines.

Sputnick

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

A mature engine for mature developers

Posted by: zolaar at Mar 22, 2005

I highly recommend the OGRE engine, but do so with one caveat: it is very much intended for *mature* developers.

By 'mature', I mean that it is absolutely *not* designed for new C++ programmers looking to make their first game.

If the programmer is not familiar with:

- The in's and out's of their compiler's build settings and how to manipulate those settings properly
- The finer side of C++ (single/multiple inheritance, STL, abstract interfaces, templates)
- Design Patterns c/o the Gang-of-Four (patterns like Singleton, Creator, Controller, Dispatcher/Listener, to name a few), and when best to use them
- Intermediate- to Advanced-level graphics structures and algorithms (scenegraphs, octree/BSP culling, intricacies of a graphics pipeline, vertex/pixel shading)
- How to read and understand how a given library functions via an *unfathomably* large amount of documentation (API reference, manual, tutorials, samples) and source code

Then, frankly, this is not the graphics engine you are looking for. Learn them, love them, then come back to OGRE.

OGRE involves a *very* steep learning curve and, while the OGRE team is readily available via their forums (which are extremely active and helpful, I must say) and *gladly* assist new users with problems, they are often forced to recommend a change of engine to programmers who do not demonstrate (at least) a basic knowledge of the items listed above. I will not go so far as to say that it is difficult to use, but using it properly definitely requires more know-how than, say, the Irrlicht engine.

Having said all of that, we game programmers are *so extremely lucky* to have such a powerful, flexible, modern graphics engine available to us under ANY open-source license, let alone the extremely liberal LGPL. The term "object-oriented" is one that is tossed around very haphazardly by some libraries. Offenders claim to be OO, but often stray from their initial design principles as development continues. The first principle of OGRE is that it is not only *completely* object-oriented, but it is also *properly* object-oriented. Its very effective design is a result of the developers' years of experience in the software development industry. OGRE's developers have been doing it *right* from the very beginning. I cannot stress how much I respect and admire the OGRE team for their work. This is a graphics engine of the highest caliber.

If you have the guts to read through lots of documentation, ask a lot of questions, and make use of some of the most advanced techniques in both C++ and graphics programming, you have found your engine. Get to work!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

How do I compile it?

Posted by: gardon at Feb 21, 2005

I've used it on a friends computer, and it's totally a 5 in every category, but how do I compile it for myself?

Thus, I'm rating it a 3 in ease of use, but will greatly change it once I finally compile it correctly.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

A very good Engine

Posted by: amlug at Apr 17, 2005

It is a very good engine for graphics and sound.

You can make very good games and it has a lot of good tools.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

OGRE

Posted by: Nemae Znachennya at Apr 26, 2005

If you wanna use Ogre in Linux(OpenGL) - it's not that you looking for. Ogre architecture just incompatible with OpenGL pipeline.

For OpenGL pipeline your program must working like that

while(bRun)
{
clean_back_buffer

draw_all_geometry

do_all_cpu_works

swap_buffer
}

Ogre not working like that, so it slow and have CPU lags, becose have blocked for a long time in swap_buffer.

But for Windows(DirectX) Ogre is probable very good.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Ogre 3D, the best 3D engine ever.

Posted by: nikki at Nov 27, 2005

I have been using Ogre for more than 2 months now, and I must say it is very stable, extremely feature rich and very easy to use. It is very easy to learn Ogre because it is very Object Oriented. For example, if you have learnt well about one type of particle emmiter, you have already learnt about 90% of the rest of them. It heavily uses C++'s most important feature, object-oriented programming. I myself have tried other engines like Crystal Space, Panda 3D, Irllicht and Jolt 3D and they either produce too many bugs, have lack of documentation or just don't have the features you need. But, there are so many people using Ogre and contributing to it that if you want some feature to be added, its usually already added by another user. The fact that it is only a rendering engine doesn't make it worse than other engines. In fact, it makes it better because you have the freedom to choose you favourite physics, networking, pathfinding and other libraries that you might need. There's no question in the forum that's left unanswered. Ease of use is one of the things about Ogre that greatly impresses me. Creating an Entity is as simple as calling the function called createEntity(). Ogre also allows you to describe materials, overlays and GUIs in seperate scripts so that your code is not a big mess. Alternatively, if you want to, you can describe them in your code.

Apart from these adventages I have mentioned, there are a million others too. There isn't a better way of appreciating Ogre than using it, so give it a try!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

The best!

Posted by: R-12 at Jan 2, 2006

This engine is the best !! im developed a MMORPG with this engine and this is the best..!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ammm!!!you can visit my web www.inmedia.cjb.net!! no yet.. the web is in procces!!!lololololol!!! enjoy this great engine!!!!!!!!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Ogre == sex

Posted by: haxorphreak at Jan 18, 2006

Good:
There's a reason it's been at the top of the Open Source Engines list, and this particular engine delivers. It has mucho features, and can make nearly any game made with it look great. I also swear that I see the Ogre head in my sleep.

(Slightly)Bad:
However take heed, as it isn't for the average newbie programmer. It can be difficult to set up, especially if you're used to simple engines such as Irrlicht. I even had to modify the sample project files to suit my needs, but it's worth it now. Also it only supports its own model format, but there are importers/exporters available for various 3D editors.

Other than the initial bump in the road, it's a very great engine. I highly recommend!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Great!!!

Posted by: broken_sword at Mar 5, 2006

5/5 for Features
With these features and pay nothing for it, I couldn't ask for more.

I'm a XSI user so I have to mention that... This is the Only FREE 3D Engine with Proper exporter for XSI 4.x and 5.0!!!!!!

5/5 for Ease of Use
Well, I spent sometime to read the docos and configuring - setting up CodeBlock (I can't afford to buy Microsoft's VC++) and it's dependencies, compiling the source and etc etc etc.
It took quite a while to set up, but it's okay. After all, only through struggle we could find rest :)

5/5 for Stability and Performance
I'll find a way to crash the engine beside my poorly written code.

5/5 for Support
Well written documentations and tutorials, this is a BIG Plus. OGRE has a great learning curve for those who are not familiar with 3d engines, scenegraph, bsp, etc etc etc... but help can be found quickly on the forum or in the docos.
(considering that I've been using other 3d engines with poor documentations and tutorials scaterred all over the forum threads)

To sum up:
It's free, and able to use GCC, and works with sophisticated 3d packages like blender (Free too), maya, 3D studio max and Softimage.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Ogre is best !

Posted by: Troglodit at Jul 22, 2006

OGRE is the best 3d engine i've ever used. You can make very good games with it. This is the first commercial quality open-source engine. Also OGRE has very friendly community. Enjoy this great engine!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

OGRE is cool! :)

Posted by: max_ at Jul 23, 2006

Yes, OGRE 3D isn't a game engine - it's a 3d rendering engine. But this is not a minus. The graphics are exellent and any other game engine feature may be plugged in if needed. All-in-one engines with integrated physics, sound and etc. are too complex and their authors cannot make all parts of their creation equally good. But when any part is developed by a single team and when there are several different variants of physics plugins or script plugins etc., you can chose what do you need and the overall quality of the resulting game engine will be awesome!

Now everything depends on your talents and abilities. Good luck! :)

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted by: DarkCoder at May 20, 2006

Ok, so this isn't a Game Engine.
That said, it can be in minutes with the ever growing "Free" plug ins mostly/all open source too!
From Physics to sound there will be a plug in somewhere i'm sure.

I am working with ogre & a number of plug ins for Sound & Physics and i have to say,
using all 100% free stuff you can make a top quality game with this, some imagination & skill.
The 2 pics shown don't do much justice to the engines ability in my eyes.

I'm not sure its missing anything a High Quality game doesn't have, Bump/Normal mapping, Stencil shadows, lights..
Its all there...

And its a lot easier than a lot of other Game engines than i have used to set-up & learn & they aren't open source/Free either!

Oh, and the community is very supportive & helpful.
Just make sure you've read the manual & docs before you ask something basic & make yourself look like a noob :)
So, Go on, give it a try, you wont be disappointed!!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

mixed feelings

Posted by: Wannes at Dec 29, 2006

I've worked with 4 engines (irrlicht ogre, panda and sdl) and I must say OGRE is the most complete of em all, alot of advanced effects & techniques avable.
Downside of it is that those more advanced things are bad or not documented and ogre in general is very user unfriendly.
So I don't recommend it for small amateur dev teams
Some people complain its not a full 3D engine but imo thats not really a problem, there are very good input handlers (sdl for example) and networking & sound & physics libraries avaible that can easily be integrated in ogre

If ogre had a better over design and user friendlyness, and maybe better documentation (community is ok tho) this would indeed deserve the title of top ranking free engine ...

basicly the choice you ahve to make is do I want very advanced features (OGRE) or fast development and user friendlyness (panda3D, ...?)

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Ogre is the best open source rendering engine!

Posted by: Psih at Jul 23, 2006

As for me OGRE is the best engine i've ever used.
Try and be convinced that I am right.
Wisit screenshot galery to see that ORGE is realy cool -
http://www.ogre3d.org/index.php?option=com_gallery&Itemid=55

We will wait you !!!
eng. community - http://www.ogre3d.org/
rus. community - http://www.ogre3d.org.ru/news.php

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Go OGRE Go!!!

Posted by: Beatheart at Jul 24, 2006

One of the most powerful game engine of all I ever seen? and it's a grate pleasure to use it for free! OGRE have a good community and it is easy to use. GO OGRE GO!!!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Pretty good so far

Posted by: cRookie_Monster at Aug 1, 2006

I'm not exactly that far with it yet but I've liked what I've seen so far.

I will say the main reason I switched from Irrlicht was because I found a world editor(FreeWorld3D) that I like that works with OGRE.

I was having a lot of issues finding a level editor I wanted to use with Irrlicht and it eventually sent me searching for other options.

I initially tried Jolt3D because it had a world editor and was a full game engine but hit a lot of issues with stability and found the support to be lacking.

OGRE is not a full game engine(and that turned me away at first) but there's a lot of support for integerating other engines for other features. I don't plan on using any networking so I don't care about that. I've planned on using another sound engine anyway so I don't care about that. Physics will be the biggest thing and it looks like it will be pretty easy to hook in ODE. I've already seen collision detection demos in OGRE so that's easy.

I haven't had to go to support yet because I find what I need in the forums, docs, and samples.

The setup is a little daunting at first, especially if you compare to the extremely easy to understand examples in Irrlicht. I've found it worth figuring out though. Their whole scripting thing is starting to grow on me. That's really nice to be able to configure so easily just from the content side of things.

I wish there were samples showing how to do things without the ExampleApplication class because I'm too lazy to start off with my own setup from the start...It's ok I guess. I'll just tear it apart slowly as I need to grow beyond it. I know I'm going to want to use multiple scene managers eventually...

I've had to use a lot of support for 3rd party Freeworld3D but so far the author (Soconne) has been completely awesome.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

the loud achiever

Posted by: WoOdSpEaK StUdIoS at Oct 1, 2006

Here we come to the louder and prouder open source engine. A great rendering subsystem, with basic physics features, expect great things from this small time GNU sdk.

One of the many sdk's I have installed into my copy of Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition, I find ogre easy to use, brilliant, and quite a good subsystem.

As with Shrek, this green ogre has more to it than meets the eye, featuring mostly on areas such as realtime lighting and normal maps rather than physics and dynamic gameplay.

Thus said, it is easy to program using ogre and C++, and I find it simple and quick to create 3d win32 apllications using ogre as my rendering system. It is not suited to be used solely in games, instead you will need another physics system, and will end up having to compile your engine with bits and peices from Ogre as well as using another system (such as irrlicht) for your main engine.

Although it has slight quirks, anyone who knows basic c++ can use the helpful tutorials and forums to quickly be up and running. Useful for any new indie programmer.

All in all, this is one impressive renderer and a great way to create the ever annoying night-day sequences and be able to have high detail models AND fast gameplay.
People of Duloc, I give you YOUR CHAMPION!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

I need it sooo

Posted by: ThunderWorm at Oct 10, 2006

I am a beginner and i want to learn an open source engine and i thank i can find it here.
i hope a chossed well.
Thanks for this soft.
In the screenshots i've seen that this engine is very clever
and it has much to add for me.
If i will make a first game in this engine i will be very happy

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Best Engine Available and its Free!!!

Posted by: cybereality at Mar 4, 2007

This is a serious 3d engine. The code is clean and actually makes sense just by reading it. It supports all the fancy new shader effects and more, the performance is good and it is generally a pleasure to work with. There are tons of 3rd party libraries and community add-ons that can extend the features of this engine far beyond the list shown above. I have been looking at this engine for quite some time, but the ogre team has made significant progress in the last 2 years. This engine is under active development and it shows.

Unlike some other 3d engines, this one actually has accurate documentation. The wiki and forums contain very up-to-date information. Everyone in the community is also very helpful and there are no questions that go unanswered. The problem with many of other engines isn't their features, but their documentation. Who cares if an engines got a bazillion features if none of them work as listed?

Ogre is a great engine and is general enough that it can be used for any type of 3d application. Please understand though, the engine has a learning curve. You should be fairly comfortable with C++ and 3d programming before jumping in. Thats not to say a beginner couldn't learn, but this engine is targeted at intermediate to advanced programmers. It is also not a game engine, it is just a graphics engine. So some of the things you'd expect from a full game engine (like an official level editor) are absent. However, what it does do, it does best. There is no question this is one of the best rendering engines, open-source or otherwise.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Very nice

Posted by: Grellin at May 17, 2007

Without a doubt a capable graphics engine in all regards. The pro's I think are evident in the screen shots on the site. The renders are fantastic.

The con's are really based on the developers level of understanding of C++. A first time user with a moderate level of understanding is going to jump thought some hoops to get this engine up and running. Then when it is all said and done, they are going to have to find other methods to make up for the lack of features found in a true game engine.

So in the end, nice graphics engine but if you are looking for a fully functional game engine, keep on looking.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Praemonitus praemunitus

Posted by: at Feb 25, 2009

Ogre, Ogre, Ogre... So many people are using it, so many people are speaking about it, so many people are getting involved. But do they really know what they are getting into? Don't let your eyes be cheated by all those positive reviews, sit down, relax, and be prepared to hear the real story.
First of all, not everybody knows that Ogre is a cult. Seriously, think about it - people, who join it simply can't ever get back to normal life. They spend night after night staring at myriad lines of code with their red eyes, consuming caffeine - gallon after gallon, and there is no end to it. Be warned, you don't want this to happen to you!
Now, one might wonder, what are all those people so much attracted too, like errr... Well, let's have a look.
OGRE - Object-orientated Graphics Rendering Engine (or Open-source Graphics Rendering Engine). Wow, look at that, it's not even a proper GAME Engine! I mean, seriously, who cares that it does its job as a rendering middleware perfectly and provides you with the full source code, so that you are totally unrestricted? Nah, that's nothing, considering that it ain't a GAME engine. And what are all those game engines, which are based on Ogre? Oh, that's a myth, I tell you, they don't exist!
Now let's have a look a OGRE's overall structure. Surely, the API is very... what's the word... ah, clear... and easy to understand. Moreover, it is possible for one person to actually understand more or less the entire engine's internals. But, come on, who needs that? A truly production-ready engine should aim to have an API, which requires several years to study. Who needs this well-written code style, when real engines have a code, which needs an entire gang of programmers to decode.
DirectX, OpenGL... Did you think OGRE supports them? No! Not really... Kinda no... Well, actually, OGRE does not support them, because it doesn't care which rendering system will be used, and you don't even need to change a single line of your code for that... But who needs that, anyway? Come on, a real engine would only support a single rendered, and would require entire rewrite to support an alternative one. That's power, I tell you!
Vertex & pixel lighting, stencil & texture shadows, decals, soft shadows, SSAO, material/mesh LOD, shader support, customizable post-effects, particle effects, anti-aliased RTTs, you_name_it... all those fancy words are written on the OGRE's website, and apparently the engine supports them. But, seriously, who needs all that? After all, what is especially bad about OGRE is that it can actually be used to create AAA titles. Surely, we don't need that!
Now, what else? Oh, the GUI. Can you believe it, OGRE doesn't even have a GUI! (ignore those so-called overlays, they are useless). And what kind of an engine would actually make you choose an external tailor-made GUI library? Just think about it - there's a dozen GUI libraries made for OGRE, fully maintained, mostly free... We don't need it! A true engine must have one (1) GUI library built into it, preferably a slightly buggy one, so that it can be patched sometime later. After all, who wants to waste time choosing amongst all those GUIs? And guess what, they have more libraries out there! They have physics wrappers, editors, dozens of importers/exporters, day/night lighting managers, realistic sky & water managers... What a waste of time even looking at those, not to mention actually using them!
Ahh, almost forgot - the community and support. Never ever have I seen anything like that before. You know what? They actually respond to nearly every single question asked, they actually waste their time reading and implementing feature requests!! That's nonsense! Serious developers don't do that, even if they are paid several thousands $$$.
So, hopefully now you see, what OGRE really is - purely a Rendering Engine, which require YOU to stick it to a framework, strap on a GUI, Physics/Network/Sound. Who cares about the great community support? Who cares about all the 3rd party libraries written for OGRE? Who cares about the free LGPL license? What truly matters is that there is NO way an experienced programmer with a huge experience playing games can make a great MMO using OGRE in one week.

P.S. if after reading all above you are still not convinced, that Ogre is NOT what you are looking for - remember, I warned you, once you'll start with Ogre, you won't get out. Just like me, I've been with Ogre for many years now, and despite constantly seeing other engines, Ogre just wouldn't let go =) Seeing how all those lines of seemingly meaningless code actually turn out to be living 3D worlds is an incredible feeling. But beware, that might change your life forever!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

An excellent engine, but still needing some features

Posted by: ScurvyKnave at Sep 11, 2007

I've been using Ogre for about 2 years, and I've grown to love it. It really is an excellent, stable engine.

People sometimes claim it is difficult to use, but I disagree. I found it ridiculously easy to use (especially if you come from an OpenGL / DirectX background).

Ogre is essentially a wrapper over DirectX and OpenGL, and it is therefore possible to achieve AAA graphics quality with it, but it does not offer this 'out of the box'. That is, you can use Ogre to achieve any degree of graphical quality, but it will require some work.

Ogre is also constantly under active development, so it keeps very up-to-date.

However, I find the most helpful reviews are those that are honest about an engine's shortcomings, so let me dwell on that awhile:

> The engine has excellent support for outdoor scenes. It provides a TerrainSceneManager, several easy to use sky rendering options, examples of how to do AAA quality water effects etc. But unfortunately it doesn't provide much support for indoor scenes. The indoor scene managers are either outdated, or in progress.

> There is no well-defined pipeline for creating and getting game levels into Ogre. It doesn't merge seamlessly with any existing level editing tools, so you end up having to make your own. This makes the game creation process require a significant amount of work. However, having said that, several tools are in the works, and so this problem may be solved soon. I just wish one of these tools would be 'officially' adopted.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Excellent 3D Graphics engine!!

Posted by: DodongoXP at Sep 25, 2007

OGRE3D is probably the best 3d engine out there..

ogre isnt a game engine.. it is a multi purpose 3d graphics engine..

for those claiming its difficult to use.. well knowing how to program is mandatory .. because its a 3d graphics library...

i find it extremely easy for what it is in comparison with directx or opengl...

only if you need very advanced or specific use of 3d graphics would be needed to use directly graphic apis like directx or opengl.. if not ogre3d will fit nicely..

although ogre doesnt include other system than the 3d rendering engine out of the box.. the commnunity has made many addons to make it more suitable for game development.. like physics integration, gui systems, sound systems, input systems,scene managers, mesh and scene exporters for 3d apps..

if you are experienced enough to integrate all these addons into ogre you can make a very nice game dev platform ...

there is also a modified version to be able to support .net languages called MOGRE.. it is not just a wrapper but a specially modified version of native ogre to support .net languages with as much features and perfomance possible..

this version has addon to support gui systems, physics integration, sound system and input systems ..

its free for commercial and non commercial use if you respect the LGPL license it has

all in all .. ogre its a great solution for general 3d apps and game development for already experienced C++ and C# programmers..

it is not suitable for beginners for its nature of been a library not game engine for beginners...

Cheers

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Very disappointed!

Posted by: pro-rsoft at Dec 27, 2007

I've tried this engine out for some while since it was the #1 on devmaster, but I am disgusted. It's complex, messy, sluggish, you name it.
It's just a rendering engine and at that point it sucks.
Doesn't have much to offer either.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Best of the open source engines

Posted by: coldacid at Dec 31, 2007

I've not met another general-purpose, open source 3D engine as good as OGRE. Compared to the other engines I've used, OGRE is the most featureful (with the possible exception of Crystal Space) and certainly the easiest to start using out of the box, even if you compile from source rather than use the prebuilt binaries.

The performance of the engine is amazing. I've never had a performance or stability problem with OGRE that didn't happen to be my own fault. And when problems come around, the quality documentation (including the source docs) and the OGRE community were always available to provide expert advice!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

This is the best an powerful = DirectX 10 Renderer added

Posted by: AliyerEdon at Mar 25, 2008

this is the best engine that i found in the internet. ease to use and powerful structure whit fastest update and very good update.
if you have a free and powerful engine , you can find this a best engine.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Great, flexible, easy to use 3D engine

Posted by: calvarez at Aug 7, 2008

I've used OGRE 3D in several projects now in the last 2 years, both at school and for work. It is extremely fast, easy to develop, well documented, well supported by the community, etc.
It's simply the best there is if you take into account all free and low-cost 3D engines, and I've looked and tried a lot.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Not easier that D3D itself

Posted by: Makumba666 at Aug 12, 2008

I gave this engine one star on ease of use, that is not because it is "near impossible" to use - but because it's programming model and API is not easier than D3D itself. We all heard that D3D programming model is terrible, and of course it is complex and hard to use. I am rather experienced D3D programmer and as soon as I viewed tutorials, I saw that this engine makes things even harder. Programming model of ORGE is simply abominable; and it takes even more lines to create simple "hello world" application in ORGE, than in D3D. It is not a middleware - it is veeeery low level engine. So what's the point learning whole new very complicated and badly realized API? Scenegraph? Other minor features? - all those may be easily realised straight in D3D. 3d engine is supposed to make things easier, but ORGE does not. I can point many examples, that require 1 line of code in D3D and several in ORGE.
Nowadays, many other free engines exist that are much easier to use and learn.
So I simply do not see why use this engine at all. The only reason may be - if someone wants to port gamo to several different platforms. But, even then still better choices exist.

P.S. In addition - it simply has not even 3ds max exporter. wow!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Really Good Open source Engine

Posted by: ajgamester at Nov 5, 2008

WoW !
It is really awesome engine for free of cost , i tried some engines , compare to those engines it is good and cool graphics engine, easy to use , and mapping with textures
creating game environment very easy , unfortunately it doesn't have editor , but we can use the some tools like
3dsMax,and some other tools for editing purpose

forum support is good , lots of examples are helpful for creating High level shaders. who wants to create the game for first time using engine , i am recommending this engine

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Amazing!

Posted by: sisyphus at Nov 6, 2008

I have used most of the different engines available out there, including the Torque Engine, the Torque Engine Advanced, the Irrlicht Engine, the Crystal Space Engine, and the Panda3D Engine, and I can say without any doubt that OGRE is the best of them all.

It is not a Game Engine per se, but rather a rendering engine. There exist a number of different components that are necessary to plug into the OGRE rendering engine in order to have a functioning game.

However, it is not an easy engine to use, you HAVE to have fair level of expertise with C++ in order to be able to use the engine.

If you are an experienced C++ programmer this is by far the best engine to use. Just go to the gallery on the ogre3d.org website and see what is possible with this amazing API.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Praemonitus praemunitus

Posted by: Alfvir at Feb 25, 2009

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

great engine

Posted by: LeonDev at Jul 3, 2009

This engine for graphics rendering, not Game engine
and of course this engine can be for games,
until now, Ogre is the best engine, Powerful , FREE, and Open Source.
you can't believe? download Demo and Watch it!

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Excellent for a free engine

Posted by: Cowabanga at Nov 20, 2009

Can't say that OGRE is crap, but can't say that OGRE is good. It looks nice in the screenshots and demos, but very very messy if you're gonna try it.

Overall Grade:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Stability:
Support:

Write your own review for this engine