Abilities of Irrlicht Engine regardind state of the art 3D?

Raziel_n2gc · Post by **Raziel_n2gc** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 2:49 pm

Hi,

I'm new to this forum, this engine and programming itself.
Regarding to its license, the features sounds like a miracle.
But I never saw some kick ass images or screens from products made with Irrlicht.
Why?
I know that the skills of the creator are at least as important as the angine's abilities but why there aren't stunning good looking pics on the web?

It whould be really nice if someone whould explain me what is possible with irrlicht, best with comparison and some pics.

Thanks

JP · Post by JP » Mon Jan 14, 2008 2:53 pm

There's not much in the way of good pictures as irrlicht used a lot by hobbyist programmers, doing their own personal projects on their own and programmers aren't usually very good artists so end up with pretty shoddy artwork, which, as you say, is the key to a good looking game.

You can sift through the projects forum and there's certainly a few good looking games in there. There was a hovercraft racing game done a while back which looked pretty good as i remember it.

If you look on the main irrlicht page (irrlicht.sourceforge.net) there might well be some links to decent looking projects.

Raziel_n2gc · Post by **Raziel_n2gc** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 3:02 pm

Thanks JP, I was suprised of the lack of projects like this.
But Irrlicht offers all you need to create such things, doesn't it?
If you use Irrklang, a physics engine and so on.
Or is Irrlicht restricted in features, speed or something else?
By viewing the main page I thought something like "Wow, this one could be an AAA commercial Engine" If you use seperate modelingtools and so on.

FuzzYspo0N · Post by **FuzzYspo0N** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 3:12 pm

There are a lot of great things irrlicht can do.
You can create incredible stuff with irrlicht. Its obvious shaders can do anything for graphics in terms of graphics.

irrlicht supports shaders.
Its a 3d rendering engine thats incredibly fast as well, the best iv found so far. I also noticed a lack of good looking projects tho there are quite a bunch of great looking test shots in the engine tho, finding them took forever.

Im hoping to change this with my game, using shaders and a cool style of texturing and lighting. This helps for showing what irrlicht can do, and sure as hell makes for great fun.

Raziel_n2gc · Post by **Raziel_n2gc** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 3:25 pm

Thanks for your fast answers. FuzzYspo0N, i wish you good luck for your projects and hope, that we will see a lot of material showing the engines power.

Keep working on it.

If you are looking for good artist to join in your projects I whould like you to take a look on this site. Or this one

There are a lot of good artists, willing to join a project.
I will start with irrlicht and hope to get some knowledge for an own little project. I used to do stuff with 3ds max and just want to try some realtime things now.

FuzzYspo0N · Post by **FuzzYspo0N** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 4:11 pm

I havent really been around on the forums for long but i have been using irrlicht since 0.1 its an incredible engine. Nobody is claiming its the best (tho i believe it is for free and awesome games) there is a HUGE amount of potential. As well as a huge amount of awesome already.

I will try collect all my projects for screen shots, just for fun.

I am an artist, maybe not good at it, but i always aim at makign my stuff look great...

Look out for more cool irrlicht stuff, it comes along

Saturn · Post by **Saturn** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 7:26 pm

Hm, I'm not so sure whether Irrlicht is ready for something like MOTORM4X yet.
One obvious problem: limited terrain size. Irrlicht's current heightmap based terrain scene node is limited to 127x127 heightmaps, which is tiny.
Another potential problem: Inflexible vertex format. This may be a problem, depending on the effects you want to use. E.g. with Irrlicht atm you can only have either tangents or two texture coord sets, not both for the same mesh. An often used technique for car demolition rendering is to have a car part in good repair and a destroyed version of the same part and blend between these two in a shader based on a destruction coefficient. (0: mint, 1: destroyed) A breeze in MOTORM4X' gfx engine, quite hard in Irrlicht, more so with normal mapping applied too.
Shadows are not nearly as complete as in MOTORM4X' engine. Actually Irrlicht's current shadow implementation is pretty much unusable, as it is butt-slow and there are a few situations when they don't work.
Other things missing compared to MOTORM4X' engine: Proper LODing, material system, background loading, post-production filter interface, etc, etc.

Sure, everything is solvable, and may not even be a problem for your specific project and probably will be addressed by the team in the future. But till then working around these (partly potential) issues will make things more complicated.

JP · Post by JP » Tue Jan 15, 2008 9:11 am

Certainly i've never seen anything done in irrlicht to the standard of that game above, but if you were commited to it then i'm sure you could get not far off... Though i guess that game had a big team so you'd need a big team too.

But basically irrlicht has limitations as Saturn has suggested which might stop you from achieveing that sort of game, but irrlicht is opensource. That means you can just get rid of these limitations yourself basically and change the source to fit inline with exactly what you want to do.

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 11:25 am

I like Irrlicht, but think the 16-bit indexing is restrictive.

I like Irrlicht, but it has no DX10 support yet.

I like Irrlicht, but it has no hardware buffer support yet.

I like Irrlicht, but skeletal animations are currently borked (the animations work, but you can't retrieve the correct animated meshes).

I like Irrlicht, but the Hello World app still showcases a Quake 2 model which was cutting around 1879 or so.

Did I mention that I like Irrlicht?

I also like the Irrlicht derived or inspired IrrSpintz and Lightfeather, which address most (all?) of the above. Horses for courses.

Raziel_n2gc · Post by **Raziel_n2gc** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 4:33 pm

Thanks guys, maybe someone should update the "Hello World" example and attract more people to Irrlicht.

What do you think about Irrlicht compared to Conitec 3D Gamestudio A7 or Virtools?
Many people told me, that A7 is a really great engine too, but if you can get the same or better things for free, why buying it?

Saturn · Post by **Saturn** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 4:52 pm

Irrlicht is not a game engine.
Comparing it to A7 is like comparing a bare sport car engine with a complete compact car, pretty much meaningless.

I don't know enough about any of the two mentioned game engines to be able to say something meaningful.

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 4:54 pm

I like Irrlicht, but it has no DX10 support yet.

Neither my machine and card

I like Irrlicht, but it has no hardware buffer support yet.

I guess that would be interesting, but hey. For a free engine...

I like Irrlicht, but skeletal animations are currently borked (the animations work, but you can't retrieve the correct animated meshes).

well...if the poster asks (i dunno) only for graphic quality, then that above would render the same, is more of less flexibility for the programmer..

I like Irrlicht, but the Hello World app still showcases a Quake 2 model which was cutting around 1879 or so.

hehe, pay me to make something cool

I mean, that's artists' stuff, not the engine actually...
I post 'cause I think...The impression of any engine that newcomers take when they arrive to whatever the comunity...is more heavily influenced by the artwork content of demos, etc, that we may think...
I keep seing lots of demos with repetitive procedural textures of like 256 pixels covering the area of a village... Or characters that are cilinders... while any experienced person will separate one concept from the other, is amazing how many times ppl tend to link one thing to another that has no relation...I've worked in companies where the engine was quite underpowered compared to irrlicht...but they had some of us dedicating all of our human strenghts and skills to produce content that did hide everything and give the gamer a faked reality, with...lower than quake 2 specs, some times. A good texture and the right vertices do more than a 50%, some ppl (not talking about you, am thinking of it generally as it maed me think of that) do never understand this...

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 4:58 pm

conclussion: very few artists in this comunity. very few wanting to work for free in the whole world. And yep, the nice pics could be PERFECTLY done with an irrlicht of a bunch of versions older than the current, even. There's no hard limit to be unable to do kick ass games, graphically, with irrlicht. So , don't let the ...euh...pics... be your guide.

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 5:02 pm

Any comercial game engines out there have terrible limits, and I know them well in their graphical related pipelines. Funnily, irrlicht has better support in certain graphical features than the comercial game creation tools I have now in mind. Wont speak about them, though.

MasterGod · Post by **MasterGod** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 6:48 pm

If I may add Irrlicht is very programmer-friendly, with its easy API and design anyone can jump on and program with it in no-time..