Irrlicht Engine - A free open source 3D engine

Welcome to the Irrlicht Engine

The Irrlicht Engine is an open source realtime 3D engine written in C++. It is cross-platform, using D3D, OpenGL and its own software renderers. OpenGL-ES2 and WebGL renderers are also in development. It is a stable library which has been worked on for nearly 2 decades. We've got a huge community and Irrlicht is used by hobbyists and professional companies alike. You can find enhancements for it all over the web, like alternative terrain renderers, portal renderers, exporters, world layers, tutorials, editors, language bindings and so on. And best of all: It's completely free.

Using ODE With Irrlicht

There is a new tutorial available in theĀ tutorial section, showing how to use Irrlicht with ODE, the popular open source physics engine. It was written by Gorgon Zola, a lot of thank you’s go to him. šŸ™‚
Note that the tutorial is available on hisĀ homepage too. I uploaded the demo and the source of the tutorialĀ here, but I’ll move it to the sf.net servers later.
So now Irrlicht officially works with both popular physic engines:Ā Tokamak and ODE.

New shot of the week

I uploaded a new shot of the week, it shows a nice Quake3 level rendered by the engine. There is a lot of snow in that level, reminding you to keep on coding for the winter demo contest (see news fromĀ Nov-21). šŸ˜‰
Tom Williams sent in a tutorial showing how to create your custom mouse cursor with Irrlicht. It can also be read at hisĀ homepage.
Some personal news: I think I’ve most of the hard work behind me for university, so expect a new release soon. šŸ™‚

IRC Channel

Sirshane set up an IRC Channel for Irrlicht. The channel’s name is ‘#irrlicht‘ and it is located atĀ irc.freenode.net. Happy chatting. šŸ™‚
In addition, Sirshane created an SDL device for the Irrlicht engine. This allows Irrlicht theoretically to run on all platforms that SDL works on. This includes embedded devices, video game consoles, Windows, Linux, Irix, MacOS X, *BSD, Solaris, and more. You can download this deviceĀ here. Sirshane only tested the device on Linux, and is asking for sending in enhancements or modifications to this device. Or just post them into the forum.

Winter Demo Contest

Saigumi announced a Irrlicht Engine programming contest in theĀ forum. Make your best Winter Demo, try to use as many base Irrlicht functions as possible. The winner will receive aĀ license for Milkshape.
The rules are:

  1. All content, libraries, and tools used to produce the demo must be legitimate. No warez or stolen artwork and models. You may share artwork or models from other demos if the original author gives their expressed permission.
  2. It must use Irrlicht, preferably version 0.4.1 or 0.4.2 when it is released.
  3. The source code must be included with the entry. This is to raise the available examples of Irrlicht usage as well as allow other OS’es/Systems other than the one that was used to compile the application to run it.

On December 20, 2003 12:01 AM, saigumi will grab all the demos and announce the winner before December 25th.
For more informations, visit theĀ forum.
The new shot of the week was sent in by KnightoFlight, it shows hisĀ new snow tutorial. Maybe a possible contest candiate. šŸ™‚

Article in C’t about Irrlicht

Seems that the Irrlicht Engine is getting more popular these days. In the currentĀ C’t, a very popular german computer science magazine, a big article about Irrlicht can be found. It is about game programming, and Irrlicht is introduced next to only 3 other game dev kits: Microsofts DirectX, Conitec’s 3D Gamestudio and TGC’s DarkBasicPro. Irrlicht is reported to have lots of mature features and very clean and good documentated code. Arudil scanned the whole article and posted it into the open discussionĀ forum.
There is also a large screenshot of Irrlicht in action in the article. I think it is a very nice article and I am a little proud that my name appears in it. Gives me lots of motivation to keep on coding. Cool!
Last update I forgot to add a link toĀ zenprogramming on the link page, I did this now.

Curved surfaces

Ttom sent in some demo code for or picking up items in 3d. You can download the code and demo fromĀ here. Thank you ttom!
I corrected some small typing errors in theĀ Splitscreen tutorial causing code fragments like <s32> disappear in the code.
The external terrain renderer has now it’s own homepage, it can now be found here:Ā zenprogramming.tripod.com. I added this link to theĀ download section.
And finally, as you can see on the screenshot at the left, I had some time to work on 0.4.2, and built in curved surfaces. Dean P. Macri sent in code for this, and I adapted it a little bit. Looks really nice. You can find a big version of this shot in the screenshot section.

Splitscreen tutorial

Lots of users are waiting for version 0.5 of the engine, and I have to say sorry for the long waiting time. I’ve got a lot to do, currently. I’ll create a small release (0.4.2) including the terrain renderer for those of you who can’t wait. Hopefully coming this or next week.
Max Winkel
wrote a tutorial on how to do splitscreen games with the Irrlicht Engine. It is now available on theĀ tutorial page.
Scott Brundage sent in a shot of a multiplayer deathmatch game he made with Irrlicht, looking forward to a playable demo. I made one of the shots the new shot of the week.
And last: I added the ‘Welcome to the Irrlicht engine’ thing on top as you can see. I’ll start a small discussion in theĀ forum about it. šŸ˜‰

Portal Renderer, new SotW

Brian Conner sent in some impressive shots of a project he is doing with the Irrlicht engine. I made one of the shot of the week, you can see it to the right. I also added the shot to the screenshot section.
If you would like to use theĀ portal rendering method with the Irrlicht Engine, you are now able to do this:Ā Maarten Bosma sent in an Addon to the engine, which does portal rendering. It is not yet finished and a little bit unstable and Maarten is asking for help to bring it to an end. You can find a link to it in the offtopicĀ forum.

Iso LevelLoader, forum moderator

Torsten Damberg published the source of his Iso-LevelLoader for the Irrlicht Engine on hisĀ homepage. (Beware, it is in german language.) Maybe a good place to learn how to create games with the Irrlicht Engine.
Another news item: We’ve got aĀ forum moderator: After creatingĀ eve-corp.com providing free web space for Irrlicht Engine related projects, writing lots of tutorials for the Irrlicht Engine at hisĀ homepage, and helping hundreds of Irrlicht Engine users in the forums, he finally became the official forum moderator: Who can it be, if notĀ saigumi. I don’t know how to thank you, guy šŸ˜‰

Tokamak integration and orthogonal 3D

I added some new tutorials on theĀ tutorials page:
If you need a physics engine in your program or game, you should take a look at the newĀ tutorial, which was written byĀ Matthew Couch. It shows how to integrateĀ Tokamak into Irrlicht.
Saigumi wrote a Howto onĀ orthogonal 3D rendering with Irrlicht. You can find it at this homepage,Ā saigumi.net. It shows that it is quite easy to create isometric games with the engine. I added links to all his tutorials on theĀ tutorials page too.
And as you can see, we’ve got a new shot of the week. I stole it from Shane Parker’s venom page. It shows a scene created with venom (a phyton binding using Irrlicht) with onlyĀ 13 lines of phyton code.
And last but not least: There are a lot of new game projects using the Irrlicht engine: “Project 84 Shadows of the past” made by Carlos Jose Ortiz and his team, a fps/RGP game, located atĀ sls.webcindario.com. “Raptor“, which will be a remake of the cool game by Cygnus/Apogee, there is already a small demo waiting for you atĀ the raptor homepage. “Heartland” by saigumi and pharoseer, which uses the orthogonal 3D technique described in the new tutorial. You can find some nice screenshots of the game on theĀ homepage of heartland. In addition, I added links to the already mentioned projects “Monsoon” and “The Scout“.