Irrlicht 1.7.3 released

[polylux]

It's great to see an official release after all. Cheers to everyone who worked on it!
Lots of open source projects are only judged by the frequency of "big news releases" no matter what's happening behind the scenes on git/svn and the like. It's good to show such peeps some signs of life.

[hendu]

Hey there,

When I downloaded the new Irrlicht 1.7.3, I noticed there was no pre-built DLL or linker library for the Win32-GCC port. I had to go and compile Irrlicht through codeblocks so that I could use the GCC(MingW) compiler on windows. I'm just wondering why there wasn't a pre-built one for the GCC compiler?

Just my guess, because there are huge variations in the versions of mingw in use. With VS it's mostly the newest or second-newest one.

Imagine if the prebuilt lib was built with gcc 4.6. Then you have 4.5. "Why is the prebuilt lib not working, I have mingw".

[hybrid]

Sorry, I simply don't have an environment installed for gcc at all. For the MSVC version, we stayed with 2003 for the 1.7.x releases and will switch to 2008 or 2010 with 1.8. Since the gcc version always came without dx support, most users recompiled those libs anyway. So maybe it's not much loss here. We could think about a second SDK for mingw users, though, if someone from the dev team prepares such a package. This could then also include the examples precompiled etc.

[Cube_]

on that matter, I am not REALLY sure why the MinGW version doesn't have D3D support, can someone explain this?

[CuteAlien]

It has D3D9 support, see here how to enable this: http://irrlicht3d.org/wiki/index.php?n= ... 9WithMinGW
You can even get dx8 working with it (at least I managed to do that once), but I don't know the current state of dx8 support.

[hybrid]

The problem is a legal one. We are not absolutely sure if the externally modified d3d libs can be legally used to link the d3d in to the mingw version. So it's left out for our official version.

[Cube_]

ah, that's why, thanks!

[REDDemon]

for me precompiled binaries for mingw are not really needed unless there will be the C::B project file for compiling irrlicht. But maybe you should just indicates a "mingw standard" for us users. I'm referring to compile configuration.

For example a standard can be the actual "irrCompileConfig.h" but with _IRR_COMPILE_WITH_DIRECT3D_9_ commented out.. (I just kept only OpenGL and I commented out few loaders for now but every users will do its own configuration). without a standard is possible that users try to use Dll compiled with different configurations across multiple projects wich can cause Blue screens (infact I have renamed the DLL on my machine to "Irrlicht173Test" so that it can't be used in the place of another dll for wich a project was linked with the .def file.)

Also as side note why symbols are not stripped from release Dll? they are not needed unless we are using debuggin and without stripping them the final size is very big.