[Algorithms] Good drop-in renderer?

[Michael S. <ms...@ms...>]

Hi everyone,

I would like to develop a simple game framework for my own
research/prototyping purposes. I'm trying to come up with a compromise
approach - somewhere between the roll-your-own-everything method and
using a complete engine. Ideally I would like to cobble together a
variety of libraries that perform specific purposes into one engine,
while concentrating on writing the parts of the engine that I care
about.

It seems like such libraries exist for quite a few areas, such as
physics, pathing, networking, etc. However I haven't found a good
solution for rendering.

Ideally I would like a renderer with the following features:

* Small, free from code bloat (is a mark against most of the ones I've seen)
* Relatively easy to integrate (in particular it would be nice if I
could pass in meshes in memory that I have loaded/computed, rather
than have the renderer load them)
* Not too many dependencies, but this maybe not so important
* Support for multiple platforms - preferably consoles

The actual technical capabilities of the renderer aren't so important
for me - if it did shadows that would be great, but if not its really
not a show-stopper. Just very basic stuff so that I don't have to
spend time writing my own stuff.

Of course if it's free that would be nice, but I'm just kind of keen
to see what options there are, even if they are commercial. Of course
I've looked at Ogre and a few other well-known open source renderers -
I just get the impression that they are a bit overkill for what I'm
after.

Any suggestions?