An easy to use 3D graphics engine for a simple game? [closed]

Question

There's tons of lists of 3D graphics engines out there, but my needs are a little restrictive and I can't decide on one by myself.

I'm about to start working on a fairly simple (C++) game that simulates realistically the motion of a spacecraft in the solar system. As you might guess, the graphics needed are very basic:

• The planets are just spheres with textures;
• The spacecraft have few or no moving parts (rotation and translation only);
• I might need a few lighting/animation effects to make it pretty.

Celestia is aesthetically very close to what I'm thinking about.

Now, the problem is that until now I've only used C++ for scientific simulations, and I have no experience whatsoever in graphical interfaces and games in general. Also, I don't want to spend months learning how to use a complex engine.

My question is: which engine is easy to learn and use, while still producing nice-looking graphics? I'm looking for the best balance.

As far as I can tell, the 3 most suggested OSS engines are Ogre3D, Irrlicht and Crystal Space 3D. By comparing a few youtube videos, Crystal Space's graphics look the best, but it's apparently a bit messy to use. They say that Irrlicht is easier, but to me it also looks inferior in terms of graphical results. Ogre3D looks good but I don't know how much beginner-friendly it is.

I would really appreciate suggestions on this!

Answer 1

I like Panda3D for this kind of quick rendering of simple scenes. It has both a C++ and Python API, and provides a lot of useful utility types (animations, simple collision detection, etc) which should make the task of writing your game easier.

The aesthetic appeal of the graphics rendered will largely be a factor of your own art quality; the engine is only displaying what you're giving to it and the feature lists (shaders, scene management, etc) are similar between the various open-source engines. I don't think YouTube videos are a good way to compare.

You should make the decision on what you personally like working with, as the time you spend making a more complex/difficult engine do what you want is likely better spent improving the game.

Kerrek is correct in that none of them are truly easy to use.