When comparing Irrlicht vs CopperCube, the Slant community recommends CopperCube for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” CopperCube is ranked 15th while Irrlicht is ranked 49th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Lots of examples and docs
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.
Pro Free and open source
Pro Good polymorphic design
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.
Pro Lightweight
Especially if you compile it yourself, it can be very light in memory usage.
Pro Easy to entry level C++ experience
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.
Pro Support for multiple formats
This engine supports multiple formats for 3D objects and textures.
Pro Allows creating 3D apps and games without programming
Pro Good 3D editor
Includes easy to use 3D editor for quickly clicking together 3D games.
Pro Native WebGL support
Can create 3D games as real WebGL apps, running inside websites. Doesn't use a cross compiler, so WebGL apps are small and download quickly.
Pro Good terrain editor
CopperCube includes a terrain editor. Terrain can be drawn with height painting tools directly in the editor, textures can be painted quickly with automatic texture blending into the terrain. There are also tools for placing grass and bushes, and for distributing meshes automatically over the terrain.
Pro Exports to irrlicht
It was also written by the founder of irrlicht, although it is not open source.
Pro Available on Steam
CopperCube is available on Steam It was Greenlit.
Pro Easy to learn and to use
Pro Fast prototyping
You can quickly develop an experimental working model of the product (prototype), because the engine gives you access to a lot of prefabs, plugins and settings. And, you can use the visual programming to speed up the process, even if later you have to write code in order to improve the final product.
Pro Oculus Rift support
Supports both DK2 and DK1.
Cons
Con Outdated
Obsolete over 5 years ago. While the engine is being worked on with plans for new features and support, the movement is slow, leaving many engines far more advanced in certain areas.
Con Not a game engine
This is a 3D graphics engine similar to Ogre3D. Thus, it doesn't provide any pathfinding or physics support. Support for those will have to be added by the dev.