My situation: I'm blind. Earlier this year I was surprised to find 3-D games that were designed to be playable without seeing the graphics, using audio cues and additions to the interface to auditorily render various aspects of the environment (check out companies like <a href="http://www.gmagames.com/">GMA Games</a> and <a href="http://www.adoraentertainment.com/">Adora Entertainment</a> for examples of this.)
I thought I could write a game engine and games of my own, so I began. My current engine uses Crystal Space, and while this is working somewhat, I have some issues. CS seems somewhat complicated, sometimes requiring 30+ include files to compile a single class, and sometimes I'm not sure which combination to use. This is somewhat annoying. Its sound support also doesn't seem to meet my needs, and I'm thinking that it would be better for me to use OpenAL myself and roll my own. I also recently became obsessed with doing the game logic in script, while coding time-sensitive bits in C/C++.
Today I found Irrlicht, and it seems to meet some of my needs. It seems a bit simpler than CS in some respects. I'm also toying with the idea of writing a ruby OpenAL wrapper and integrating OpenAL with Irrlicht in script. I do, however, have a few questions about its internals.
One thing I like about CS is that its level/map files are pure XML. As my mapping needs will be very simple (all rooms will be squarish/rectangular, for instance) I've been writing a level-creation tool that, when given room dimensions and specifications for how to connect them, would spit out XML level data. All of Irrlicht's formats appear to be binary, though, so I'm thinking I need to create a custom scene node. Is this right? If my needs are simple boxes, can I use the aabox class to create rooms? If so, how do I make openings in the sides/walls of these boxes for doors and windows?
Has anyone written a howto on interfacing OpenAL with Irrlicht? It doesn't seem terribly difficult, but it'd be nice to see any work done in that direction.
Has anyone successfully built Irrlicht on OSX? Is it possible?
I've been looking through the examples, and am a bit confused about movement. Specifically, the movement example uses a few alphanumeric keys to move the camera, but what about using arrows for turning, forward/backward motion and strafing? Is that actually handled by the FPS camera? If so, is there any way to change its handling to implement different models for turning?
I'm sure I'll have more questions, but these should be good for now.
It'd be nice if Irrlicht met my needs; I'd love to use a simpler API for 3-D game development.