I've been working on developing a space sim causing Irrlicht for the past couple years, and it's finally ready to show off. It's called Extermination Shock and it's directly inspired by things like Wing Commander and Freelancer.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xydktDai1Bo
Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2510 ... ion_Shock/
Planning to release in the next few months, depending on whether or not I can get a couple of last-minute fixes and debugging done!
Irrlicht's been really easy to use for this whole thing; the graphics are using shaders written in HLSL and scene management has been pretty easy (1.9 also has some convenient extra GUI code that made handling menus a lot easier). It's been fun trying to stretch what I can out of both the defaults and the custom stuff I've been creating for it.
The collision and physics are done using Bullet3, which has been invaluable, and under the hood it uses an ECS (Entity-Component-System) setup made possible by flecs, which has been equally incredible. Audio provided by OpenAL. Mixing all of that together with Irrlicht has been interesting to say the least. I had to write my own AI code, unsurprisingly, and it uses steering behaviors combined with a state graph to produce some pretty interesting flying.
The actual gameplay itself is mission based; you pick a mission from a list in a given sector (there are seven, eight missions each), select your wingmen, and create the loadout for your ships with weaponry and physics-based attacks. You build all of this from a fabrication bay and have to be mindful of ammunition counts as well; different ships have different attributes and amounts of weaponry. Your wingmen also have differing skillsets and fly differently; you can talk to them at the mess hall as well. These conversations can unlock additional missions or modify their stats.
It's been a hell of a lot of fun to make. If you have any technical questions on how I accomplished something, don't hesitate to ask. HUGE thank you to CuteAlien and other forum posters for help during this project while fiddling with the engine; it's been a very smooth process.