Why OGRE over Irrlicht?
Hmm. A couple of years ago I did quite a bit of research, together with some colleages, into the usability of open source rendering/game engines for our game technology department. We selected OGRE because of the large and active community, the amount of samples and documentation, and the availability of sound, UI, physics and AI plugins. Irrlicht has a good reputation as well (came in second in our evaluation).

As for cloth, softbodies and ODE - I don't know. I know from personal experience thad ODE handles rigid body physics pretty well, not only primitives but also actual meshes.

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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