ENIGMA Development Environment vs Irrlicht

Almost full support for GML,
The ability to create and access C++ types, templates, and functions, compile DLLs and other C/C++ scripts

Support for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Enigma can support over 90% of gamemaker's GML language

besides the powerful combination between GML and C++, beginners can also use drag and dropping.

Written in C++, many features have been demonstrated running much faster than interpreted equivalents in GameMaker (up to 10-20 times faster than GM 8.1).

Changes are made daily to add new functions/fixing bugs.

A full stack trace with available cores and memory information as well as operating system and Java version including file names and number is generated whenever an exception is encountered, with a handy link to submit the issue to GitHub.

Many working examples to study and learn. You can easily experiment modifying an example code to grok in full how the engine works. In the beginning of your learning curve, the example code will offer you many useful code snippets.

If you are considering writing your own engine with openGL, you might want to consider Irrlicht instead. It makes many features of any engine worth its salt easy, including events, serialization, nodes, animators, materials, logging, and animation. Bring your own sound and networking.

Especially if you compile it yourself, it can be very light in memory usage.

If you want to start game developing with C++, then Irrlicht is a good candidate since it removes most of the complications in game making in C++. It will let you obtain experience in programming and games at the same time.

This engine supports multiple formats for 3D objects and textures.