Irrlicht wxWidgets driver?

Gothi[c] · Post by **Gothi[c]** » Thu Feb 28, 2008 9:05 am

I was working on trying to get Irrlicht to show inside a wxWidgets widget on Linux. So far all methods proposed only work on windows. I tweaked the irrlicht linux driver so i could pass the x11 window & display, and commented out the x11 window creation parts. This worked to some degree. I was able to make the irrlicht window attach to my wxWidgets widget, but the rendering seemed to appear behind my widget. (Maybe wxWidgets was drawing over the irrlicht rendering? i tried disabling that by overriding OnPaint but that didn't do much).

All in all, it seemed a very hackerish way of doing things. Then I remembered wxWidgets has that opengl widget. This had me wondering if it would be possible to use the wxWidgets opengl widget, and somehow make Irrlicht render in it. It's possible to set the glx rendering context to the wxWidgets gl window, so is it possible to emit the rendering context stuff from the driver + all the window creation stuff, so all OpenGL commands are sent to the wx window? Or maybe even go further and make an irrlicht driver derived from wxWindow, with event handlers and everything?

I'll keep experimenting with this, but I would greatly appreciate help/ideas/comments on my stupidity/etc...

Gothi[c] · Post by **Gothi[c]** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 4:57 pm

It worked

I created my own irrlicht driver which doesn't create it's own x11 context and window, and I used wxWidgets' GL canvas ->SetCurrent() to set the rendering context. I have a rotating cube working sofar. Now i'll have to see if i can port the events.

MasterGod · Post by **MasterGod** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 5:18 pm

Good news!
Just don't forget to keep the Irrlicht code style because even so I don't think it will be accepted into the core library - MAYBE - us users could use it a lot.
Also I think it won't be accepted because Irrlicht doesn't use external libraries so if you can somehow make it like #define compile with WxWidget and it will work it might actually get in

Anyway I'd like to see it finished and working as bugless as it can be

Gothi[c] · Post by **Gothi[c]** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 8:33 pm

Yep, I did add a #define so you can add a compiler switch to compile in the wx stuff.
I haven't had much time lately, but I'm still working on the events.
I'll upload here when finished.

netpipe · Post by **netpipe** » Mon Jan 04, 2010 11:21 am

how is it comming along ?

cheshirekow · Post by **cheshirekow** » Fri Mar 26, 2010 5:51 pm

I had the exact same thought that you did, about passing around the glcontext used by wxWidgets. I'd love to see the code you have so far. Can you post it? Or at least pm me with it?

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Fri Mar 26, 2010 5:55 pm

Try to check out the new beginScene version first. With Irrlicht 1.7 you can pass an ExposedVideo struct, which holds the window, context, etc. This should work from within Irrlicht.

netpipe · Post by **netpipe** » Sun Apr 04, 2010 3:58 pm

hybrid can you elaborate a little more, i'ts kind of confusing hehe.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Mon Apr 05, 2010 7:32 am

You can pass in the OpenGL context and window together in this struct. This should be enough to let Irrlicht automatically change the context. Just note, that you will have to create the contexts shared if you also exchange ressources among the contexts.

netpipe · Post by **netpipe** » Mon Apr 26, 2010 8:12 am

still no luck getting this to work with wx... maybe its cursed.