Irrlicht's power and capability.

[Infinity]

Hello everyone. I am new to this site and i want to say thank you to the IrrLicht team for creating such an amazing and fast engine, it worked very well when i was learning it , i am also a quite experienced programmer with C++ for 3 years.

I wanted to ask a question as well , currently i was in a position of what engines/libraries to use for my game portfolio. I was first going to create a game with OpenGL +other libraries however, learning a graphics rendering API as well as 3D Graphics takes a long time so i decided to try to use a engine such as Irrlicht or Ogre with a IDE and not something like UDK because i always prefer a programming type of development environment as programmer(Though Unity 3D was excellent but presented no challenge for me).

I was in a situation of choosing between Ogre 3D, Horde 3D and Irrlicht 3D. I fairly tried each of those to see which one would be the best for development. I compared how long it takes to load a model on all 3 and Irrlicht's was the most simplest and fastest when loading models. Its code is quite clean and light weight, Ogre 3D is quite bloated and has a lot features but for me its quality not quantity.

Having chosen Irrlicht i would like to ask something. Do not get me wrong i am not underestimating IrrLicht but i just wanted to ask some more expierenced users if Irrlicht's rendering capability is able to produce pictures such as Final Fantasy XIII's or Final Fantasy XIV ARR's? Or is this completely up to the developer on how they implement it?

[hendu]

It is completely up to you.

See Build a world for nice recent screenshots.

[Infinity]

Thanks for the reply i will check it out.

[devsh]

you need to tinker with irrlicht insides quite a bit to get a Modern OpenGL engine (indirect rendering, occlusion queries, good driver support across AMD, NVIDIA, Intel)

but the difference is that Horde3D is nothing but a very simple wrapper around OpenGL which offers little exposure
and Ogre3D has a weird license and loads of Bloat

[Infinity]

Currently, does Irrlicht use OpenGL 3.0+? I have no problem with using OpenGL 3.0-3.3 because you can still achieve amazing effects with OpenGL. I also agree that Ogre 3D is bloated but its license is the MIT license which lets you use it as long as you credit them. Horde 3D also felt quite limited and did not have a proper documentation for it, Irrlicht is nice since it is quite fast and simple yet powerful. Looking at the Build a World Demo that hendu pointed out, the graphics are beatiful however i do not know if the creator modified Irrlicht.

But other than that if Irrlicht can use OpenGL 3.0+ then its fine, if not i will add some more featured to it and post it on this community forum if anyone else wants to see it.