Author Topic: SFML but 3d (Read 5299 times)

Kingdom of Fish · « **on:** March 20, 2008, 02:54:04 am »

Hi, i'm curious if there are any sfml-like libraries for 3d graphics instead of 2d, and i don't mean sfml with opengl calls but a library with good structure, different fil format loading capabilities, shaders and such?
I've used ogre3d earlier but it's just too big for the stuff i want to do, i want small, easy and pretty... just like sfml.

Lord Delvin · « **Reply #1 on:** March 20, 2008, 01:03:46 pm »

I did hobby game development for about 8 years now and I would be REALLY surprised if you can do a simple and fast whatever in 3D.
3D is not simple and if it has to look good its far from being fast.
Maybe in 10 years computers are powerfull enough to build something like that but as you might have noticed there simple and fast enaugh libraries for 2D are just coming up, as they were impossible when I started.(You could do fast and nice 2D games these days, but it was not that simple)
By now you can just push a texture of (nearly) any size and draw as many quads as you want and you will still end up with over 40fps.

Have a nice day:)

tgm · « **Reply #2 on:** March 20, 2008, 03:51:13 pm »

you should have a look at Irrlicht... Its way less complex but ogre (tbh its less powerfull, too) But its capable of loading a whole bunch of Fileformats, supports shaders and all the stuff... + realy easy to use

Redien · « **Reply #3 on:** March 20, 2008, 04:12:27 pm »

If you want a 3D graphics engine with a clean and simple interface, you should take a look at http://www.horde3d.org. It's still pretty early in development but has got a lot of nice features already implemented.
It is fully shader driven and has got SM2.0 as a minimum requirement. (GeForce 6600 >) It has it's own custom model format and supplies a COLLADA converter which should make it easy enough to load your assets into the engine. I can't recommend it though since I haven't used it more than messing around with the examples, but it sure looks good from what I've seen.

If you want your game to run on older hardware I would recommend Irrlicht too. It's far less bloated than Ogre3D and it's fairly simple to use, got a very unrestrictive license (zlib/libpng) and the documentation is pretty good also. We use it for one of the projects I'm currently working on, the only thing we've been having troubles with is creating/importing animations for our models.