Screenshot Post - What is Irrlicht really capable of?

[IrrWHAT?!]

Irrlicht is great!
At first glance the engine doesn't look flash compared to some commercial engines, but I love the way it is extendible, so that with additional work it can make games that are just as good as commercial engine games, if not better! Combining XEffects with shaders and high texture quality makes a pretty damn good start.

My question is, how good can Irrlicht be without changing the engine, only using what's already supported (including some extensions such as XEffects)?

Post up any screenies you have of using the engine in amazing ways (preferably stuff that could be rendered in real-time).

I imagine Unreal Tournament 1 and Serious Sam (first and second encounter) graphics are certainly possible with Irrlicht. But are Unreal Tournament 3, Serious Sam 2 (AWSOME lightmaps) and Doom 3 graphics possible? Maybe even (don't shoot me) Crysis graphics.

P.S. Sorry about limited example games. The graphics in these games I admire the most.

Thanks.

MAJOR EDIT:
I want to know/see exactly the sort of quality that Irrlicht is capable of, when used by a talented artist (I'm not trying to say talent is lacking in this community).

[JP]

I highly doubt that you could get UT3 sort of graphics without making a lot of additions and changes...

But the number one thing about getting great graphics is having a great artist.

There was a hovercraft game which was released last year i think which was a commercial game made with, i think, just the standard irrlicht and that had some really nice graphics.

I've said this before, that the media provided for the irrlicht examples is pish poor and really makes people think that irrlicht isn't capable of anything decent. But most people using the engine are hobbyist programmers who suck at art so they pretty much can't aspire to anything more than that level of graphics without getting a decent artist on board so maybe it's realistic and anyone who knows a thing or two about games programming will know that the example media doesn't reflect the power of the engine. Plus better graphics would bulk up the download considerably which is another reason for keeping the low quality stuff.

Also, note: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... hp?t=29496
which i would have thought you'd have noticed when posting this thread

[IrrWHAT?!]

I judged the engine on the screenshots of what people have made with it. But you're exactly right. They're not all artists, and they want their games to be a good online distributable size.

I wrote this thread hastily.

Really, what I wanted to know/see was exactly the sort of quality that Irrlicht is capable of, when used by talented artists.

I should have been clearer, I apologise.
That hovercraft game sounds really interesting.

[bitplane]

It really depends on how good your artists are and how many of them you have. There are quite a few good examples on the screenshots page.

If you have a full party of commercial grade artists then you'll be able to make something like this-


(Niko worked on this project)

If you're a commercial outlet and are targetting high end machines (so you have shader programmers to make nice materials), Orient: A Hero's Quest is a really nice example of what can be done-


If you're short on artists and shader programmers, something like CuteAlien's hovercraft game is a more realistic goal-


If you've got at least one excellent artist and are targeting low-end machines then Krabbit Online is a really nice example-


Galactic Dream is another indie project with a really nice artistic style


Your question is kind of like "What quality of drawing can I do with a HB pencil?", it's all down to how good you are with it! With a realtime 3D graphics what you can do is pretty much down to the skills of your artists and the graphics cards in your users machines.

[3DModelerMan]

Yeah I'm more of a modeler myself do with my game (wich will be called "Wolfpack" by the way) I'm really going for the graphics.

[Virion]

i am also an artist aiming the same goal. i'm doing a fighting game.

[3DModelerMan]

I'm actually going to do a fighting game after "Wolfpack" is finished, where you fight with this sword with life sucking capabilities. But anyway you could probably do good graphics with basic4gl if you had a good artist.

[Seven]

agreed!

graphics are nice, but they are a finished product requirement.

[JP]

Incidentally the first screenshot bitplane posted uses the Rabcat engine, which is based on Irrlicht, so that may have lots of extra commercial-quality goodies added to it to allow such good renders.

There's some really nice screenshots there bitplane... i'd never seen half of them and they look awesome!

[Virion]

for the second screenshot they actually modified irrlicht but they never contribute back to the community. how sad.

that project canceled though.

[rogerborg]

The post mortem is a valuable document by itself though.

Of course, nobody who hasn't had similar experiences will believe that it will apply to their project...

[IrrWHAT?!]

Thanks for the responses.
I am more of an artist than a programmer, so I like to set my goals high for graphics.
These are the sort of pictures I was after to see the potential of Irrlicht.

Your question is kind of like "What quality of drawing can I do with a HB pencil?", it's all down to how good you are with it!

True.

Some of these pictures aren't displaying properly on any of my browsers .
But what I could see of Orient: A Hero's Quest, in particular, looks awsome. And I like Niko's scientist

Just out of curiosity,
Is anyone using an alternate dynamic lighting technique to the default vertex lighting?

[lostclimategames]

yeah, you just need a shader that has per-pixel diffuse shading. not too hard to do.

[JP]

Aye, check out some of the shaders in the projects forum, got per-pixel lighting, shadow mapping, reflection, refraction, normal mapping etc.