[ODE] Irrlicht or OgreODE?

[Robert Borchers]

Hello Tobias,

I did not try Ogre yet, but Irrlicht and OpenSceneGraph in combination 
with ODE.
If you need to load 3d meshes from external files its the easiest method 
to use the Irrlicht engine. It has a good tutorial for the way how to 
convert Irrlicht meshes to ODE trimeshes and its easy to get the 
bounding boxes from the meshes to generate the box, circle or cylinder 
ode objects in the right size. The disadvantage of Irrlicht is the 
graphic, thats only on a Quake3 level and the GUI that has a load but no 
save dialog. The reason for me to chose another engine was the unability 
of Irrlicht wo work together with any GUI toolkit under OS X.
If you want to generate meshes by yourself directly in the graphics 
engine, then it should be easier to use OpenSceneGraph (OSG). It gives 
you state of the art OpenGL graphics and is, like any other graphics 
kit, a Scene Graph. The disadvantage of OSG is that its difficult to 
find the functions to get bounding boxes and trimeshs from objects you 
loaded from external sources like .3ds files. But I could send you the 
needed functions (or build a tutorial if I find some time) to convert 
OSG objects to ODE.

So you have to choose either an easy to use toolkit or a good looking one.

Robert

> Hello once more!
>
> I'm currently reading through the pages of irrlicht and ogre (and 
> crystal space) to find out
> which one to choose. I found examples for both, but they are both not 
> really up-to-date.
> In the OgreODE-forum is a very actual post saying, that the wrapper is 
> not really supported
> anymore.
>
> So: Does any of you use one of those two possibilites and knows about 
> the support?
> I don't really want to start learning the new environment and then being 
> confronted
> with a lack of answers to my sure-to-come questions. Also if somebody 
> has tested
> both possibilites and has a simple answer to the quesion: "which way is 
> easier to
> just graphically enhance an existing ODE-simulation?" I would really 
> appreciate it
> to read that answer!
>
> some regards and best wishes to all of you,
> Tobias
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