Irrlicht vs Leadwerks

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.

Good API tutoials, workshop elements which can be loaded from steam.

Has an acceptable 3D map editor that is easy to use.

Leadwerks's flowgraphs resemble flowcharts where each box represents a function or value, with connections between them representing program flow. This provides a better at-a-glance indication of game logic than a simple list of events, and makes complex behaviors easier to accomplish.

It makes game developing much easier if you have someone backing you up when you run into a bug or other issues, and get replies within hours .

Standard edition of Leadwerks costs 92,99€. Additionally, it often goes on sale on Steam.

The terrain editor allows sculpting, paint, vegetation placement and importing of external maps. Especially the painting is done very well and can lead quickly to very professional looking results.