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

[Thomas Hogarth]

I've made a few games in OSG and in Unity.

In my experience OSG blows Unity out of the water then it comes to render performance. Also with unity and game engines in general you have to learn a lot of quirks. Like learning that in unity turning objects on and off is actually really expensive (well if you're doing it to dozens of them per frame)

I think tools like Unity come into their own for prototyping and allowing non technical people to try out assets in a real world test environment. The issues I've had using osg for games is the assets designers often struggle to understand the dos and don't and you find you have to write them little standalone test apps.

Personally if I was making a simple little game I'd use unity. If I was planning some galactic scale simulation I'd use osg as a foundation.

The other big difference and one I think a lot of games developers don;t like is it's a lot of work to set up additional renders. Say I just want to quickly render a model as an icon. In a scene graph I need to set up a new camera, attach it to the graph, render a frame, deactivate the camera etc. In a game engine I can often just say redner this model with this camera to a texture right now.

Anyway that's my two cents.

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Read this topic online here:
http://forum.openscenegraph.org/viewtopic.php?p=66926#66926