The OGRE SDK comes with input support included (through OIS) and has examples on how it's integrated. It also comes with GUI and physics packages included. A sound package isn't included as far as I remember, but you can download OgreAL package that integrated OGRE with OpenAL sound system (haven't tried this so can't tell much about it though).

All are licensed in a way that you can use them in commercial software, Ogre, OgreAL and CEGUI are LGPL, OIS is zlib license and ODE (if you want to use physics) BSD. They seem to work pretty well together (although again, I personally didn't get further then OGRE, OIS and ODE together in 1 project), so this will probably allow easy and fast development. As for XNA, while it is probably easier and faster to use then pure DirectX (mainly for smaller projects), XNA is not an engine.

In the same vein as "don't make an engine" - don't worry about performance. (Aside: for practical purposes, Java and C# can be considered to be about as fast as C++.)

Ogre is C++ native, and so it's not going to be ideally suited for Java or C#. That being said, I have not looked at the C# or Java versions in great depth.

Using C++ is going to make your project take 2-4 times longer to program.


While the above poster says that "XNA is not an engine" - it's worth pointing out that Ogre isn't really a "engine" either (in the "game engine" sense) - it's more of a glorified scene graph.

The main difference is that XNA doesn't have any built-in scene handling. It will load and render models for you - but you have to tell it when and where.


It's worth pointing out the benefit of the integration in XNA - it includes support for 2D and 3D graphics, sound, networking, etc. This will improve your development time (because, for example, everything can use the one content system).