3D and UI toolkit

Question

I have to develop a basic inventory system, and my client wants to see all the objects in the inventory in 3D and their positions in the warehouse. The thing is that I have to develop this as soon as possible, delivery time is my priority here. So I came to the conclusion that I would need a powerful 3D graphics engine and an UI toolkit that can be easily integrated with it. I've plenty of experience with C++, Qt, OpenGL, VTK, C# and WinForms. In my experience, VTK is not so good with textures and it would involve more work to add the eye candy my client wants (like animations, visual effects, etc). I've tried Axiom with WinForms. I went through hell making a sample load and run (framework incompatibilities, rendering engines not found, codec native dependencies missing, etc). I have been evaluating different options:

1. Qt + Ogre (C++)
2. WinForms + Axiom (.NET)
3. Qt + Irrlicht (C++)

Which do you think would be the best option? Could you recommend me some other possibility?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I spent a heap of time developing with Mogre (a C# wrapper around Ogre) and WinForms. In my opinion it's a good combination because you can develop the GUI much faster in C# WinForms than any of the C++ options.

If you don't mind using a C# wrapper around the C++ Ogre library I recommend using Mogre rather than Axiom. It is very stable, has some good maintainers and keeps up with the latest version of Ogre pretty well. Any code on the Ogre forums can easily be ported to C# because most of the API is identical.

Axiom is a pure .NET port of Ogre, although it lags a few versions behind and may have some missing features. I haven't spent a lot of time with it but I believe it's main strength is that it's all managed code, if that's important to you.

There's an open source project called Glue Editor that I started a while ago. It's no longer maintained but it has a lot of code you can use to get Mogre working with WinForms. You should be able to download the repository and compile it out of the box. You're welcome to take the code and use it however you like.

https://bitbucket.org/glue/glueeditor/src

If you decide to go down the Qt + Ogre path there's a project called Ogitor you might want to check out.

https://bitbucket.org/jacmoe/ogitor/src

You might also want to check out XNA and MonoGame. XNA is Microsofts framework for making games in C#. It is fairly bare bones but it has a much lower learning curve than Ogre, Mogre or Axiom. MonoGame is an open source implementation of the XNA framework that works on non-Microsoft platforms (e.g. Android, iOS, Linux).

http://monogame.codeplex.com/

Answer 2

I recommend Qt + Ogre (C++), although I have to confess this is the only combination from your list I have much experience with. The good thing about Ogre is the amount of documentation and the active community. So many questions are answered and documented. The graphics itself can probably be created in all library combinations. However, I like the easy intergration of object interaction in Ogre. The standard is based on bounding boxes, however there is code available for triangle intersection as well. Wish you luck!