XNA or irrlicht

[bdpdonp]

Looks like another one of those posts, except I just finished reading them and would still like some input. I know XAN is NET based managed code like c# and irrlicht is for C++. The actual languge does not matter. I find if I go to the Creators Club forums, XNA is good for high performing games, c# is as fast as c++ now and even in some cases faster. Even found a post that an FP was faster c#/XAN than C++/DirectX. What I am asking for is some facts. I am waffling between XNA and irrlich and made some test programs in each. A few things I have found out:
1. XNA pipeline content adds some security to a model, whereas irrlich does not, but possible to code your own. This is of major concern as I have many models for my project. But irrlicht makes it so much easier to load differing formats.

2. Maybe I am nuts but I find irrlicht easier to use. The only issues sometimes is with passing irrlicht pointers from the main program to other classes, and that is probably my c++ skills are not up to that level.

3 Performance, well I do not have the time to write my full game in both and test it out. And XBox means nothing, of all the people I know using XBox. none pay for the Liv account to be able to get my game anyway.

As for what I am asking, is some input from individuals that actual have done something in both. So far my experience here has been an active forum with GREAT advice or assistance. Given that I value the opinions here. I did try Creators Club, and a question I posted there a week ago has no response, here I had a workable answer in less that a day. I guess I am leaning toward irrlicht but some wy to protect the mesh is pretty big. Another post is asking about binary irrmesh.

So please, tell me why you prefer irrlicht compared to XAN.

[CuteAlien]

Personal reasons? Well, first reason for me is that Irrlicht is opensource and I simply don't want to base my work on a proprietary foundation. And the zlib-license is really nice as you can basically just use the engine without any worries. Another reason was that Irrlicht has a good cross-platform support. And yeah - it was easy to get stuff running - which was also a big factor when I started out. I don't really care about security, there are copyright laws for that which are usually sufficient (basically no serious game creator will steal content - I only remember a single exception to that for the last years where some sub-contractor messed up - and if any amateurs re-use content it just doesn't matter and as soon as it starts to matter you can still talk them out of it).

What does matter is which features you actually need specific for your project. Try to find out those first, only then you can really know which engine is betters suited for your case. Example - I wanted cross-platform, that alone reduced the number of available engines seriously. But if I wanted for example landscape streaming then I might have decided on another engine.

[hendu]

Haven't personally used XNA, but based on what I hear from friends, it's really limited. It restricts you to a subset of features of your gpu. With irrlicht, you can just drop to normal graphics api in those situations.

Perf - a VM will always lose to compiled, barring some pathological case. Java is much better tuned than C#, and it still loses to C++.


As for XNA on Xbox - the perf there loses big-time to the native Xbox devkit.

[Mel]

The engines built on it show that it is fairly competent.

http://xen.codeplex.com/wikipage?title= ... Title=Home
http://www.synapsegaming.com/products/sunburn/engine/

For me, XNA looks like a DirectX wrapper in C#. The point is, why restrict yourself to a wrapper, when you can have the real thing with Irrlicht for the same price

The limits of XNA are as follow:
-DirectX only
-C# only
-Windows Platform only

On contrary, XNA has other advantages over Irrlicht, like the fact that it is an API for C# to build games, not only graphics applications, which means that it has full support for controllers, network comunications and sound. And it can use directly FX files, so, multipass shaders are also supported in XNA.

Why i prefer Irrlicht over XNA? i learnt to use it before. And i feel more comfortable with it.