Hello.

I had very brief previous experience, about 10+ years ago with game engines (used Ogre for a university project, and also used SDL + OpenGL for various small projects), but nothing serious.

I have multiple years of C/C++ programming experience, but nothing game related.

A friend recently got into learning Blender, after using other commercial modelling software for years, and got me thinking about trying game development a bit more seriously - still on hobby level tho.

For starters, I would need help to select a game engine, that best fits my needs and this is where I'm looking for suggestions:

• nothing high-level (like unity or such)
• open-source - obviously
• C++ preferably
• I would like to incorporate Bullet as physics engine
• graphics-wise, I'm interested in doing per-pixel lighting and also shadow calculations
• it would be nice to use an engine, that can work on older hardware (talking in a ~10-year span), as I'm not planning something resource-hog anyway
• also possibly looking for something lower-level (game-dev-wise), so I don't just create a scene and throw in entities, something that also let's me optimize/tinker with the pipeline

I was thinking about using Ogre, Irrlicht or even OpenScenGraph (as it was really nicely used in OpenMW), but these initial choices are based on old knowledge.

Thanks

Have you looked at Panda3D? (https://www.panda3d.org/)

It supports C++ development (as well as Python), is open-source, is very much programming-focussed, and does indeed support shaders.

As to Bullet, I know that it has integration for that engine on the Python side, but I honestly don't know whether it does so on the C++ side, too--I primarily use the former of those sides, and so am less familiar with the feature-set on the latter.

I would pick SFML because it runs on basically anything, got bindings (c, c++, c#, python, node ect…) for a lot of languages and Bullet Physics 3 got already an example which uses SFML. It uses the zlib/png license as well as having many tutorials, examples, a decent documentation and is modular.
Here is the Link: https://www.sfml-dev.org/index.php