[DrEvil]

Been a while since I posted but I took the time to read through most of the posts in this thread. I still stand by my recommendation of using Ogre. I've been using Ogre since about January making an multiplayer RPG for my bachelors. It's a very well designed 3d engine that is very modern in terms of its graphics capabilities.

The material system supports vertex and pixel shaders so all those pretty effects like the displacement bump mapping shown in the unreal 3 movie have been do-able by Ogre for several months now. Skeletal animation is obviously needed for a shooter, which it supports the use of, and blending between animations. Just recently shadow support has been added, with modulative stencil shadows, additive stencil shadows, texture shadows, and possibly one or 2 more types for the next Ogre release, which should be very soon. From a graphical standpoint, Ogre can do about everything any other 3d engine can do, the difference being they have better content, better shaders, and are getting into alot higher poly models.

It is cross platform, supports DX7, DX9, & OpenGL.

I also noticed ODE has been mentioned as you guys seem to definately want to use a physics system as well. The BSP collision demo that comes with Ogre uses ODE for physics. There is also a community project called OgreTok(uses Tokamak physics) you can get from ogreaddons on sourceforge that is a very well developed. It can do ragdolls on character meshes and such. For our RPG, I've opted to use just Opcode for our collision, and it is working nicely. You would probably use Opcode for the non-physics related functionality like tracelines and possibly ground clamping for the character.

Something I should re-iterate, is that its a 3d engine only, and that is why it can be so good at the graphics side of things, because the whole project is focused on graphics related stuff. This means that out of the box it is not a game engine. It has alot of plugins for various scene managers, like a BSP scene manager, and several flavors of terrain scene managers, but Ogre doesn't do collision detection and such for you. Thankfully though these issues have already been solved by the community and are available for everyone to use. The BSP scene manager can even load quake 3(non team arena) maps.

Anyways, if anyone has any questions let me know. I've been learning Ogre for a while now. It's got a very active community and is top notch with its graphics capabilities.