[osg-users] Why isn't OpenSceneGraph used in games?

[Chris Hanson]

AAA Games tend to not use ANY off the shelf engine technology, because they
like to be able to hack up and optimize everything down to the lowest level.

A scene graph such as OSG (or any other scene graph, really) tends to be
setup to work well for a large number of general cases, which means it may
not be totally optimal for one particular case.

Many games aren't totally free-roaming "sandbox" environments and as such,
can make optimizations to culling and LOD that a general purpose scene
graph does not support. I worked on a vis-sim project where the viewpoint
was literally "on rails". It could only move along certain paths. They
struggled a little bit with culling in their general-purpose scene graphs
(like OSG, but others too) that do full general purpose culling on every
frame. It just wasn't necessary.

Short answer: Scene Graphs of all kinds, including OSG, are often too
general for the violently performance-competitive realm of AAA game
development. Titles like those usually get customized tweaks put into the
actual GRAPHIC DRIVER in order to maximize performance. Long before they
got to that point, they would have wanted to strip down and redesign the
entire scene graph to remove ANYTHING they didn't need and optimize the
rest to one single goal and architecture.

OSG _does_ get used in a variety of independent and lower-tier games where
development time and cost and efficiency may have a higher importance than
absolute raw blistering performance.
​
For your project, OSG should be excellent. Look at Virtual Planet Builder
and possibly osgEarth for large free-roaming environments. osgEarth could
save you a decade of man-years of development of high-efficiency large
terrain area roaming algorithms and code, and it utilizes OSG in the most
high-performance ways available.


If you want consulting assistance on your project, that's what I do to put
bread on the table every week. ;)
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