1 reply to this topic

[devingprice]

I need help picking a rendering engine. I'm creating a world that will be nearly all natural environments; so trees, grass, water, and terrain are my priorities. I need to have some kind of system for dynamic weathering (rain, snow, wind, etc), and day/night cycles as well. I'm looking to make the environment look as real as possible.

I've been narrowing my search and have come up with several engines I like. UDK and CryEngine both look good.
CryEngine looks realistic, but appears like it would be very resource consuming. The game I want would be geared towards a little above average PCs and it seems like it may be a little to resource consuming. I like what it produces a lot though. The water seems very good in this engine, with a lot of realism features.
The stuff I'm seeing out of Unreal Engine 3 look really good, although I haven't seen very good water. The support for UDK is higher than anything CryEngine can offer, which is partly due to the age of the system. I'm not sure whether to go with the newer CryEngine or the older Unreal 3.

Ogre is a decent engine that appears to have a good community and a large number of plugins that would help development.

The plants may be created procedurally, and the rest of my models will be made in 3ds max if it makes a difference. I don't need any destruction, but decent physics are a must. Does anyone have any idea of what would work best for me?

[rouncer]

if you want it to look realistic, you pretty much have to target hiend pc's... unless maybe your megatexturing?