Reviews - codewalker

This engine is ONLY for experienced C++ developers.

Ogre is a very powerful rendering engine with capabilities on Par with many commercial engines with a flexibility that can even surpass commercial ones. However, by no means this is en easy engine to work with, it is one of the hardest to use and can give you headaches from day one.

The documentation is pretty good but it only scratches the surface with a piece of silk. Trying to move past the tutorials can become a nightmare if you don't know what you are doing. You have to add GUI, network, physics and sound libraries on your own if you want to make something that resembles a game. It is a LOT of work for one person that wants to make games on the side for extra income. To add result to injury, if you are not careful your came code can become unreadable even for yourself.

I recommend Ogre for indie development teams with vast C++ experience or a single developer that wants to do something other than games. If you are a beginner and want to work with C++ I suggest you start with Irrlicht since you have a better start and then come back to Ogre once you have more C++ experience

This engine is great for starters that want to make the games in c++ with an open source engine that they can modify to suit their needs and pay absolutely no royalties.

This engine is incredibly powerful and fun to use. It's incredibly easy to make a working prototype that will eventually become a full fledged game for any desktop platform.

Documentation and tutorials are well made and explain the basics of what you can do with the game in both python and c++. However, python can be a bit deceiving if you don't learn python before working with this engine, or you may write very inefficient code that does more harm that good.

You can use any IDE to program in python and do your best jobs with it, you have no restrictions and the architecture is open as well so you don't have to use a defined structure for your game logic to making things work.

the big problem this engine has is that there is no default scene editor so you need to either look for one you can use, or, use a 3D software or write one in code. Or else you will have to do a lot of trial and error and this drags more expansive development

This engine is not perfect, but. It is ideal for many seasoned to experienced programmers that want to go into the world of videogame making.

If you use the SDK, you have a great set of tools at your disposal, a variation of Netbeans with the engine fully integrated. a small variation of Blender to make the 3D models and import them quickly into JME, and your games run on PC/Mac/Linux thanks to the power of Java.

The engine gives o standard on how you want to code your game. So you can use the method you find fits best to your game and implement it into JME using Java and it will work for you. The tutorials and JavaDocs are great with a very helpful community.

Two bad points that pits this engine at 9 and not 10:

- You nee to have some experience in object oriented programming languages, especially Java. If you don't know Java don't start using JME. you need to learn Java first, it is a must.

- the SDK has a scene composer that allows you to create scenes for you to use in your game and save you some good lines of code. However, there are many missing features like ragdoll creation. This is mostly due to the engine not having enough manpower to add more features as they have priorities in making this as stable as possible.

This engine is perfect when you want to prototype games or make simple ones. The feature list is very powerful and the scripting standard that is used is very straightforward. put a game object on a scene, put a script that you made on that object and you are all set. You cannot get any simpler than this!

As you might guess by now there is a big bad BUT. I reached this after working with unity for the past 6 years and many don't notice it or refuse to notice it because they already paid for this so there is a kind of "marriage" with the engine. If you remove the veil of what the engine can do for you graphically, you will start to see the problems this engine has from a more objective standpoint.

- writing monobehaviour scripts encourage bad programming practices that will make new programmers sloppy with many game code with many inefficiencies. You need to have some programming background to not fall into this trap.

- Simple scripts are the best choices for games with Unity. But then you need to add some complex code in order to add uniqueness to your game so it does not fall into a formulaic kind of game. Unity will eventually start fighting back and when it does, you are writing code workarounds instead of actual code features since you cannot control how the engine works, you just have to make the best with the behaviour of your game code.

- MonoDevelop is the default IDE (VStudio on Windows). MonoDevelop is very unstable and may crash while you are editing or debugging your game. I had to resort to use code text editors instead of IDE's for better performance and less crashes.

- Flexibility is a loose term when it comes to Unity, because many assets and plugins work on top of Unity's "black box" so your game performance can take a very serious hit.

- Games made in Unity, although powerful, they can turn your computer into an energy hog even though the game is graphically simple. The engine is not very efficient

- Unity Editor is way too centralized for an editor that does not edit game code without external editor, but you may find it almost impossible to debug an unity game from the code editor alone, you have to start the debug from the Unity Editor and look at the code in another program. This is not very programmer friendly.

If you want to start making games and you have little programming experience. Unity is more than enough for you. If you plan to develop simple to low complexity games. Unity is right for you. If you are an experienced programmer looking to make something extremely unique(game or application), I recommend you to go to another engine