There's a zip release of irrlicht with the lib already compiled for windows. I understand the basic reason why there's not one for linux, but macOSX is a little bit like windows if we speaks in terms of applications no ? Since we all run the same OS (ppc ...
The problem with using a sphere is that sphere tends to roll. When your cube might bounce a little resting on the ground your sphere will roll and your character will most likely follow your sphere movements.
isn't it possible to stop a physics controlled object from bouncing by applying a certain ...
I think there's some problems with physics and user controlled meshes on most physic's engines.
For exemple if your ground isn't "flat", if it's a terrain generated from a heightmap then you can make the character jump and fall down by the physic ...
We're writing a kind of robot's simulator using irrlicht for all the 3d, and we decided to record simulations video. It's the same idea of the demos in quake3 for example. I've done this using the built-in xml parser in irrlicht. And suprise ... it works ... and it's really fast ... much ...
Depends on what you really want to do and what you can do.
If you want to keep things simple you should probably use irrlicht built-in collision system (there's a tutorial for this on the homepage http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/tut007.html).
Another possibility is using a physic engine, in that ...