Irrlicht vs GameApi

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 order to enable creation of 100 different kind of games, GameApi features are fully supporting all combinations of the existing features. This allows for huge amount of flexibility. The API carefully documents all dependencies between independent plugin-like modules and allows for combining their features in c++ code.

The library is based on constructing opengl vertex arrays for 2d and 3d features including changing mesh colours, attaching textures, building larger worlds from smaller meshes, selection of predefined meshes like spheres, cubes and cones, Model loading from .obj files. Font support, gradient and other 2d bitmap operations, creation of 3d objects from bitmaps, Manipulation of points, lines, faces.