For the last couple of days I’ve been looking around for open-source 3D engines, comparing and reading. This is an early step in my crazy plans of making an open 3D game. If the game ever will be realized is yet to be seen, but the research is very interesting though. There are a bunch of open-source 3D engines out there and the ones I’ve been looking at are Crystal Space, Irrlicht, Ogre and Panda. Since you probably don’t want to change the 3D engine in your project once on the road, you’ll have to do some research before the project is started. It isn’t easy to compare these engines, you’ll have to have good knowledge about your own project so you know your exact needs - now and in the future. It’s painful to walk in too small shoes.
Below is a table over the 3D engines mentioned above. This table is not ment to be a comparison between these 3D engines, it’s just a summary. The data was collected at mars 14th, 2006. The last column is just the number of hits on Google and thus doesn’t really say anything.
| Name | Version | License | Language | Popularity | |
| Crystal Space | 0.99 | LGPL | C++ | 274 000 | Features |
| Irrlicht | 0.14.0 | zlib | C++ | 490 000 | Features |
| Ogre | 1.2.0 RC1 | LGPL | C++ | 29 900 | Features |
| Panda | 1.1.0 | P3PL v2.0 | C++ | 22 200 | Features |
Some of the 3d engines also have wrappers so that you can use your favorite programming language to develop software using the engine. Since the wrapper only handles the communication between the 3D engine and your code the loss in performance isn’t overwhelming. The actual loss depends in the implementation so I’ll say nothing further about that.
Do you know of another 3D engine or did I miss something? Then let me know.