Irrlicht vs Wave

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.

In addition to online API documentation, the Wave Engine team provides tutorials via IndieDB, plus sample projects and "QuickStarters" via GitHub.

Wave Engine explicitly supports all three core .Net Platform languages.

The Wave Engine team provides an official, open-source Oculus Rift extension via GitHub.

Several core components and official extensions of the Wave Engine are publicly hosted on GitHub.