When comparing Urho3D vs ApertusVR, the Slant community recommends Urho3D for most people. In the question“What are the best game engines for Virtual Reality development?” Urho3D is ranked 7th while ApertusVR is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Urho3D is:
The entire engine is open source and makes use of other open source libraries. Source code is licensed under MIT and available on [GitHub](https://github.com/urho3d/Urho3D).
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and fully open source
The entire engine is open source and makes use of other open source libraries. Source code is licensed under MIT and available on GitHub.
Pro Good documentation
The documentation for Urho3D can be split in two parts: auto-generated from class references and documentation written to cover the various aspects, features and systems of the engine. The written documentation is pretty good. It covers most of the aspects of the engine in clear and understandable English.
Pro Includes a lot of samples
There are a lot of sample projects included with the engine for both C++ and Angelscript. They are mostly very simple applications built to demonstrate the engines capabilities and features.
Pro Fat-free codebase
Only use what you need.
Pro Small turnaround times while developing
Builds are quite fast, aids in rapid development.
Pro Very high code quality
Urho3D is written in a modular and super-clean way, so that it can be integrated into the other parts of your game seamlessly.
Pro Good 3D level editor
Pro In constant active development
Bugs are usually fixed that same day. Core devs are very active on forums. New features are always being worked on. HTML5, DirectX11, and OpenGL3.1 support have recently been added (as of 4/15/15).
Pro Does not require an editor to get going
Pro Flexible rendering pipeline
You can configure rendering pipeline.
Pro Multi-Lights
There are no lights limits per mesh.
Pro Unofficial Oculus Rift support
Information on enabling OR support can be found here.
Pro Embeddable
ApertusVR is not a framework. It's a set of embeddable libraries that can be integrated into your new/existing project.
Pro Framework-independent
You don't have to integrate your application into other frameworks. ApertusVR extends your product with AR/VR capabilities.
Pro Platform-independent
You can use different AR/VR devices, operating systems and platforms thanks to C++.
Pro Open-source
The open-source, MIT licensed code-base grants you full control of the source code.
Pro Network-topology independent
Use Server-Client or even Peer-to-Peer topology.
Pro Distributed
The configurable ecosystem provides you a wide variety of plugins for different computation tasks, that can be distributed among the computational participants.
Pro IoT supported
ApertusVR uses ApertusCore which is an abstract, distributed database to create ad-hoc networks and share data across participants.
Pro MultiPlayer
ApertusVR supports multiple participants in the same scene/space.
Pro Sharable
You can invite other users to join into the same scene/space.
Cons
Con It has been stopped developing
The owner has moved to build new 3D engine, however, that is also experimental stage, not for production.
Con Little documentation and small community
There are some high-level design docs and a bunch of examples, but code is poorly commented and nothing much more can be found.
Con The UI can be hard on the eyes
Urho3D's UI could cause eye strain.
Con There is no support for reflections
Neither SSR nor cubemap parallax correction are implemented in engine.
Con Bad Android support
You can not compile this engine using latest Android Studio.
Con May be a bit hard to get started
To install Urho3D you need to get the archive from GitHub (be careful to download the master branch) and extract it. After that, you need to compile the engine with CMake. If all the dependencies are installed, then it should be a straightforward process, otherwise you will need to track down and install all the missing dependencies.
For people who don't have much experience with CMake this whole process may seem a bit like magic. For people who do have experience with CMake, the whole installation will be relatively easy.