Being able to load plugins in irrlicht

[hendu]

There is no forced need to use the irrlicht scene manager; if you need deferred, LOD etc you can easily do it in your code. Or distribute your scene manager class to be used by others.

You can even use them all in the same app without issues.

[REDDemon]

there's no need for a plugin system. I've been already using Irrlicht + plugin system (so I create new concrete classes from irrlicht abstract classes) and I add their factories/istances to Irrlicht using plugins. And I achieved that easily even without Irrlicht directly supporting plugins. Irrlicht design allows to easily add new dynamic objects using plugins (but not limited to plugins) so why mess it up even more with a plugin system?


If you want to add another scene manager, you just create it and give it the reference to IVideoDriver, and IrrlichtDevice. And then you call drawAll on it instead of calling that on old smgr. Irrlicht already creates it's own scene manager, but no one forbids to create your own. You have just to use the abstract scene manager class. For drivers, I don't think that Irrlicht wll have 11 drivers. But probably there's just the need to add a method for "registerDevice" or "registerDriver" so that you can provide your own factories from your plugin system. So that you can expand Irrlicht, but you are not forced to do that with plugins.

[hybrid]

Even if the dx11 driver were available in binary form, it wouldn't be working with current Irrlicht anymore. And if sources were available, it would be easily possible to maintain this with or without plug-in for anyone. But since no one did, chances are good that even with the plug-in system no one would have done. So there's no point in discussing the plug-in system based on the driver development discussion or maintenance issues. Either the plug-in system gives clear advantages (as it does in irrEdit, where automated loading of unknown scene nodes is supported) or it has only very low chances to become adapted.

[serengeor]

If you want to add another scene manager, you just create it and give it the reference to IVideoDriver, and IrrlichtDevice. And then you call drawAll on it instead of calling that on old smgr.

Of course you can use your own scene manager easily, but irrlicht still creates it's default one no matter what. So it would be nice to be able either to pass your own scene manager, or tell irrlicht not to create it's own. That also applies to windows, gui environment, etc.
I'm sure there is very little overhead if the scene manager/ gui environment just stays there unused, but still

[hybrid]

Yeah, but such changes only make sense if someone makes good use of it and we know why and how we should change the API. We can spend tons of work on such features, and in the end no one ever writes an own scene manager and we've lost all these hours for nothing. So if you need a configurable scene manager, just tell us and we'll see how to come out with this.