Game Engines

Hay guyz

I'm a third year cs student wanting to start my own (small) 3d game project. The trouble is I can't pick out what engine to choose. I skipped out on my graphics paper so I don't know much about 3d mathematics. I know how to program in C, JAVA, perl, python and (sigh) ActionScript. Don't know much about C++ but have written a few classes in it.

What 3D engine do you recommend?

I have tried some one the clunker ones, such as ORGE and Irrlicht(sp). I managed to write my own program in C that makes basic polygons, but looking at the math required to make it into a 3d model just confused me.

tl;tr

Irrlicht.

There aren't many choices as far as BSD/zlib 3D engines go, and if you go with an LGPL engine you're forced to comply with the "new version" clause, which is pretty risky because 3D libraries are something that can easily break or at least be inconsistent across versions. The only other copycenter engine I know of is Lightfeather, and last time I used it it had essentially no media import path so it's a nightmare to get even basic animation into it.

Irrlicht is pretty limited and not very fast, but unless you're planning on rewriting Far Cry or something, it's certainly good enough for anything a group of CS students could write (no offense). It cross-platforms amazingly well; if you use GCC and MingW, there is literally not a single line of code needed for compatibility, not even an #ifdef. It's also fairly well documented, and there's a surprisingly large community for the rather disappointed number of projects that use it. Maybe I'm biased because I have a certain familiarity with it, but I quite like it (even though I've had to dive in and modify the engine on several occasions to make it do what I wanted).

The only other LGPL engine I can think of off the top of my head (besides OGRE) is Crystal Space. Never used it.

Good luck on your project.