We are thinking about using this In the future.

The licence fee is 50k, as I understand.

We are currently using OGRE Rendering Engine, what do you guys think about this ?

OGRE is an awsome opesource engine but as with any opensource software it can be tricky when you're trying to sell a game containing the technology.

Why is it tricky?

Well, licensing terms, mostly. Many open source projects are released under a license that you need to also have YOUR project be open source in order to use it. Then, it's hard to charge people for a game that's open source.

Ogre and Gamebryo are the rendering engines we're looking at very seriously to replace Renderware. The third option we're considering is to roll our own.

With Ogre, you only have to post the source code that you change. If you add a feature to the engine, you must share that feature with the community. However, any other code you write is your own.

(Disclaimber: This is my understanding based on talking with the Chief Architect. I'm not involved in the actual decision or evaluation process.)

-Rez

Rolling your own is a pretty horrible idea, if you can avoid it.

Our game takes place in an office building, so we really don't need any spectacular effects. But yeah, it's at the bottom of the list. I don't think it's happening.

-Rez

We have found OGRE to be great for our needs.

The cvs build of OGRE has been our current development engine, and so far we have not found any issues with it.

What do you all think of Torque engine?

I'd say currently it's pretty outdated. They're working on the new TSE, but as far as I can tell, it's not really close to release. TGE is a good engine for a good price, but I wouldn't say it's something that you're going to make a commerical-level 3D game with. I mean, consider the feature sets between TGE and OGRE, say. OGRE has more active development, a bigger community, and more modern technology. Torque is an old engine that's constantly getting overhalls and really doesn't have the number of features that people consider standard these days: e.g. dynamic shadows(via stencil shadow volumes or shadow maps), bump mapping, normal mapping, a good shader-based rendering pipeline, etc etc. So, if you're looking for something to mess around with, Torque probably comes with a much better intro-level (they have a lot of tutorials, open forums) but it's not with the newest generation of engines by a long shot.

any reason not to use a physics SDK?

Usually it's cost. We use one at work (AGEIA's PhysX) and it beats having to write your own, unless you're into that sort of thing.

If you're new to game programming, I would suggest writing your own. There's no better way to learn.

-Rez

Ogre just switched to the MIT license; this basically just says, "Merry Christmas! Here's your present and you can do whatever you want with it."

So now you can edit the source and keep your secrets to yourself. (even though it would be nice to help out)