Exactly 365 days ago, the first version of the Irrlicht Engine (0.1) was released. This means, the Irrlicht Engine today celebrates its first birthday. Time for some statistics:

• In the course of the last year, Irrlicht evolved from a totally unknown C++ project to one of the most popular open source 3d engines. As for example sourceforge’s software map reveals.
• Thousands of programmers downloaded the Irrlicht Engine SDKs. Unfortunately, the sourceforge download statistics currently do not work, but for example: During only 2 months, version 0.4 has been downloaded 14000 times.
• There have been 10 official releases: 0.1, 0.1.5, 0.2. 0.2.5, 0.3, 0.4, 0.4.1, 0.4.2, 0.5 and 0.6. This means one release about every 35 days. That was a lot of work. Really.
• We’ve got a constantly growing community. Every day, there are 45.66 new posts in the forum. The database already has a size of 24 MB, and 2.5 new users are registering every day. Soon we’ll reach the 10000th post in the forum. 😉
• In version 0.1, there were 28.512 lines and 739KB of code in 183 source files. The latest version, 0.6 has 116.000 lines and 3473KB of code in 455 files. The engine now consists of 4 times more code than a year before.

As you can see, the engine is very young, compared to other open source 3d engines, but it is evolving rapidly.
A brief overview about my future plans:

• Head for version 1.0. Within the next year, we should find an end of adding new features to the engine and try to make everything stable and run without bugs.
• I’ve got an idea of creating a donation button on the homepage using paypal or sourceforge’s system to be able to buy more hardware and books for further development. But I don’t know yet if it works fine with austria, where I live. And also, I don’t think a lot of money would be donated, so I am still guessing.
• Maybe a top level domain for the engine would be cool. But I am unsure in this case too. irrlicht.sf.net is also cool.

Thanks to all users and supporters of the engine! All this would not be possible without you. Lets go on, for the next release. 🙂