Introduction and Irrlicht's future

[napard]

Hi all!

First of all I want to tell you I'm working on a relative medium size project, an experimental mix between a 4x lite game and some exploration stuff like in Elite 1984/II, I’ve not played that games to the very limit and detail, but when I met Elite II I fell completely in love with the vast universe it delivers with such limited resources, the MS-DOS era aesthetics is also something I’m very found of.

So far I’ve found Irrlicht to be the most intuitive API from several engines I tested (Urho3D, Godot), Godot/Unity like engines is something I’m not very much interested in, I’m more like a hardcore coding guy (C/C++). When I tried Urho3D last time, it was too complex for what I needed (lots of SIMD custom optimizations everywhere, very huge API and code base size, lots and lots of contributors, stuff like that). Irrlicht code base is relative small, stright to the point, the API is almost perfectly documented and simple to grasp at concept level. I think its KISS philosophy in some aspects is what makes it attractive for a small to medium size project with limited time and human resources.

So the question is, what’s the planned future for the engine? If there is any plan. There was very little activity IMHO regarding news and releases (don’t know the release cycle nor the philosphy behind adding new features or maintaining existing code). I would be really sad if the project gets completely stalled :'( I hope that’s not te case… I've get pretty far with some things and it would be a pitty a lack of support from the comunity.

I should mention I’m not by any means interested in high end technology like Vulcan or such things, just a good, concise abstraction over the long time de facto standars like OpenGL, some sound API and thats all, even physics is something I would look for somewhere else.

[CuteAlien]

Hello and welcome!

Irrlicht is mainly in maintenance mode currently. So right now there's Thomas sometimes working on the Burnings renderer and the rest is pretty much on me for a few years now. And while I work _with_ Irrlicht nearly daily, I rarely work on features anymore. I do try to work on every bug which gets reported and unless it's too much work I'll also apply patches. Thought patches can sometimes be a bit tricky, so many end up on my todo-list. If I manage to find time and energy I'll continue to work on the 1.9 release. Currently around a dozen todo's open for that, but that number varies as I regularly get reports of things to check-out or find new troubles myself.

There is no plan from my side currently for Vulcan or pure core OpenGL support (mentioned the latter as it's a bit more likely I'll work on that first).

The main feature I'd like to have for 1.10 is SDL2 support (really belongs in 1.9 and as it's not much work compared with the other open TODO's I might even add it there).

And well, I work sometimes on stuff I simply need myself (like improved 32-bit mesh support a few months ago).

Reason 1.9 release is stalled for so long is that after 1.8 a lot of construction sites had been opened and then a few maintainers moved on with their life. So I suddenly ended up as last maintainer with a ton of open things. Which I've been working on over the years and most are closed by now, but not all. And yeah, I'm a bit lazy and not the most motivated guy, sorry 'bout that. Basically my target for 1.9 is having all things which got broken after 1.8 fixed again before the release.

[napard]

I completely understand, I'd probably like to make some contribution in the future but I'm afraid I don't have the necessary skills for the task, or I don't have enough understanding of the engine architecture. In the meantime, I'm glad to hear the maintenance and patching is not stalled or the project completely abandoned, I don't think I could fork it because of very limited resources I have, I'm working alone in the project mentioned and definitely is something I won't be able to finish in a very near future, that's why my concerns. I'd like to know also what's the plan about support for other display servers apart from X11. And what do you mean with SDL2 support?

Thank you for clearing this out

[CuteAlien]

I plan to hang around a while longer. And hopefully a bit more active again soon.

With other display servers you mean Wayland? Basically only chance right now if someone writes it as I've not got it running myself yet (support for NVidia cards on Wayland only got added rather recently and as of last year still had a few problems). If that's not what you had in mind - which one did you mean?

Irrlicht already supports SDL1 (for creating Windows and an OpenGL context and receiving input). SDL2 is very similar, so adding it can probably done in some weekend (thought testing it on several platforms always tends to take a while).