The ZBuffer : Irrlicht

12/2/2005: Updated with details of new version

v0.14.0: .Net version now supports shaders and the code now supports VS2005 including the free express editions.

The Irrlicht Engine is an open source high performance real-time 3D engine written and usable in C++ and also available for .NET languages. It is completely cross-platform, using D3D, OpenGL and its own software renderer, and has all of the state-of-the-art features which can be found in commercial 3d engines.

We've got a huge active community, and there are lots of games in development that use the engine. You can find enhancements for Irrlicht all over the web, like alternative terrain renderers, portal renderers, world layers, tutorials, editors, bindings for java, perl, ruby, python, and so on. And best of all: It's completely free.