DX11 support showing on Wikipedia

[robmar]

Is this correct on Wikipedia, about DX11?

"Irrlicht supports 3D rendering via OpenGL, DirectX 8, 9, and 11 (with DirectX 11 extension) "

[CuteAlien]

Not really. There is a shader branch in SVN which is about DX11 support. But it doesn't have any active maintainers left currently.

[robmar]

Is that the one Grantye was doing? I have that one working after modes to the _m128 vector code, but it needs the standard shaders to be added.

There are tech reports that the _m128 ops do not actually speed vector calculations, so it may need removing.

[CuteAlien]

Sorry, don't know, I never was involved in that.

[masm32]

I think lack of more modern rendering pipelines is the death to Irrlicht. There are other engines that support d3d11, d3d12 and vulkan.
I'll think, the missing adaption to newer rendering pipelines is the reason for the big community losses.

[CuteAlien]

@masm32: Sure, it's a problem, it's not like we don't know that. Nadro is working on it. We also just got WebGL/emscripten support (in ogl-es branch) which is also still a rather new pipeline. I get it that you maybe want us to work faster, well - I'd also like to figure out the secret of being able to do that...

[hendu]

Eh, with the Big Ones having opened their sources and made licensing costs low, there's little reason for a newbie to go for a smaller engine, that doesn't even come with a perfect editor or an asset store.

[CuteAlien]

Irrlicht still is the easiest code out there to modify yourself. I think it's a good engine if you are getting into 3D and really want to learn it. Also big ones still have other licenses - which you might like or not - right now only competitors for my own projects would be OGRE (but I worked with that already in one project and I still prefer Irrlicht) and Godot (which sounds really nice in theory, but haven't worked with it yet). Editors which are working for all cases... well - maybe works for you. In my life I've only worked a single time with an engine-editor, for all other projects me (or often we) always wrote a game-specific editor instead.

I get it that Irrlicht is not doing some stuff people want. But I work with it now for a decade nearly on a daily basis and 90% of the time it simply works for me. And when it doesn't I then change the stuff I need. Which is still on option I offer to other people regularly - but for some reason most people decline svn access even if it comes with no pressure at all to do anything with it (BlindSide for example did a single commit - changing a comment to say hi - and he still retains his svn access in case he wants to do more stuff one day simply because we know he knows his stuff). Or last week I offered someone to take over maintenance of shader-branch - still hoping I get an answer back (don't get your hopes up - it's usually NO - people are so funking afraid of svn access...). And I can't help it that I don't run into situations where I need DX 11/12 myself and therefore spend my time on other stuff which I consider important.

And once I get to working on shader-pipelines myself (which I plan for after 1.9 got released) I'll approach it my way. Which isn't - "we need current DX or OGL version". But - "how do we get a PBR pipeline supported which works well with current other tools like Blender". And "how can we offer a shader-pipeline while still allowing newbies to code games which are not able to write their own shaders" (you know - like the comfort fixed-function pipelines offered where even a complete beginner like I was 10 years ago could get cool light effects working in Irrlicht). And "how can we avoid breaking all the projects which are using Irrlicht right now" - and yes - there still people dending on it (aka - there are non-coder people making their living with software written with Irrlicht).

[hendu]

I'm reasonably happy with irr, don't get me wrong, but I'm far from the typical user. I write my own shaders and have no issue editing the source, and the license is an advantage to me. Not so with newbies looking to buy a FPS kit, combine it with prebuilt models and sell in app stores.

[Xaron]

Howdy! I must had been away for ages, used different engines including Unity, Unreal, Monkey 1+2, AGK. Oh well and guess what? I still love Irrlicht. It's somehow strange. CuteAlien is right, it's one of the easiest to use when you go for coding with C++ and not visual editors.

So hi back from an oldie!

[The_Glitch]

I like Irrlicht I remember in the past I tried ogre3d and I turned away because like CuteAlien said above Irrlicht is a lot easier to use, another reason was because it took an act of congress to load a .x character file I had I don't know if this has changed but in ogre3d you had to convert the file into the other file types it was just to much and it never worked. I do wish irrlicht had the more simple things like cubemaps and higher shader model support. I know one of the branches support it but I've made my application with shader-pipeline which does not support those things .

[AReichl]

I also like to compare engines ( why no one mentiones "Open Scene Graph" or "Delta3D" ? ), but in the end my focus always switches back to Irrlicht. My experience in life is that it is better to concentrate on few things ( e.g. a programming tool or a library ), learn it and stay with it. Better than to switch just because of some "feature" ( there a exceptions of course but they are rare ). Wrap your brain around Irrlicht and you can solve most things. The rest comes with time. Irrlicht will be developed further and refined over time.
An example:
I tried to add another coordinate system to Unity, but i had to fight "against" the engine. In Urho3D i didn't understand where to begin, in Delta3D it was doable, but a "pain in the ass". With Irrlicht it was relatively easy.

[masm32]

Hello

I want to share my work from the last days. I have implemneted the shader-pipeline based on nadro in the current sources of Irrlicht.
Default in IrrCompileConfig.h is #define NO_IRR_COMPILE_WITH_DIRECT3D_11_. I've also started with Vulkan, but I have currently no access to an video adapter with Vulkan support.
Hopefully you all have fun with the DirectX11 driver and share youre improvments.

Patch created with TortoiseSVN
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_Qjr ... XJ2Zk9wbk0

[AReichl]

Seems to work!
I had to make some changes ( e.g. add case video::EDT_DIRECT3D11: in IrrlichtDevice.h and change enum order in EDriverTypes.h !!! ) and "tweak" the solution and project files a little.
If you are interested, i could post/send MY changes.
This looks so easy, that CuteAlien really should think about just adding it to trunk ( D3D11 first, Vulkan later ).

[AReichl]

Ahem - i was too fast. Some demo programs don't start and others look different. So probably some more work to do.