Hello.

I had very brief previous experience, about 10+ years ago with game engines (used Ogre for a university project, and also used SDL + OpenGL for various small projects), but nothing serious.

I have multiple years of C/C++ programming experience, but nothing game related.

A friend recently got into learning Blender, after using other commercial modelling software for years, and got me thinking about trying game development a bit more seriously - still on hobby level tho.

For starters, I would need help to select a game engine, that best fits my needs and this is where I'm looking for suggestions:

• nothing high-level (like unity or such)
• open-source - obviously
• C++ preferably
• I would like to incorporate Bullet as physics engine
• graphics-wise, I'm interested in doing per-pixel lighting and also shadow calculations
• it would be nice to use an engine, that can work on older hardware (talking in a ~10-year span), as I'm not planning something resource-hog anyway
• also possibly looking for something lower-level (game-dev-wise), so I don't just create a scene and throw in entities, something that also let's me optimize/tinker with the pipeline

I was thinking about using Ogre, Irrlicht or even OpenScenGraph (as it was really nicely used in OpenMW), but these initial choices are based on old knowledge.

Thanks