Irrlicht Engine

I don't know Ogre that much but from the short look into the source code it seems to me that it uses more templates than Irrlicht and also boost. These causes longer compilation times but improves performance at runtime.

Rust might be interesting in the future, thought again a little weak on the metaprogramming side from what I read so far. Only c++ competitor which got that right seems do be D. Rust's generics are quite powerful and it's the best system i have ever seen in an object oriented language. It combines ...

I would agree to C++x11, but only on the condition that you implement atomic reference counting and rework the API-doc into clearly indicating the thread-safeness of each class and function/method. I completely dislike irrlichts way of doing reference counting because managing the object's lifetime...

2) Keep the containers. It sounds odd, but the containers can be extended and modified without building whole new classes etc. just for things like string modification. Personally, I like having the function implementations all in front of me rather than trying to figure out the STL. Though while w...

I don't think that other games load the mipmaps first but instead have a low-detail texture which is displayed on far objects, so that the larger textures don't need to be loaded for far objects and only when used.

1. Use alphachannel
or
2. calculate the alpha value (e.g. white isfull visible, black is invisible and grey is half visible) - does not work with different colored fonts.

Is the filesize the problem or the memory usage?

You said, that it causes server problems, do you mean that the texture files are too big for a download? Then you don't need compressed textures, just "advanced" fileformats like png.

No, you shouldn't use delete. Just call remove, which automatically removes it from it's parent's list and calls drop. If another grab exists, the scenenode won't be deleted, so no access to an invalid object access will happen, but if no other drop exists, it will be deleted. But after a creation w...

I don't think that recreating is a good solution. You can grab the SceneManagers and reuse them for the new device.

Instead of numVertices use buf->Vertices.size() because it is much clearer what you are doing. The arrays need to grow several times. Call realloc once and allocate the maximal possible number of vertices and indices. After the mesh generation you can shrink the array so you only have two reallocati...

Also cmake is a convenient tool. Once you make a cmake project file cmake can generate project files for serveral different compilers making an easy transition between development environments. This is also possible with Code::Blocks because it is just the IDE and one can build the project with any...

You won't see anything because you need a camera.
Then the resulting position depends on Cameraposition, target, field of view, cubeposition, etc.

I could do this to the inside of the shop, as the light will not change much, but I can not do it to the outside as there will be day/night loops.[/quote] A lot of modern games like Risen and Skyrim also have a day night circle but they still use lightmapping. The have a set of precalculated maps an...

You need per pixel lighting. Oddly enough Irrlicht does not have per pixel lighting as standard material but it has more complex materials which are based on it . You may try to use the material bump map with a grey texture as heightmap, but for the best solution you should write an own shader. For ...

Is there any reason why both drivers should be different? I think you can use two OpenGL drivers at the same time, at least the OpenGL specification says that multile contexts are possible and I don't think that Irrlicht has problems with it. I think you can also use OpenGL and DirectX because there...