Using Irrlicht for 3d graphing

dataangel · Post by **dataangel** » Sat May 28, 2005 2:06 am

I'm currently planning to help someone convert a commercial windows app to a cross platform windows/mac/linux app. The application is physics related, and does a ton of calculations to produce 3d graphs of vector fields. The problem is, right now the visualizations aren't done in DX or OpenGL -- they're done in the basic win32 api. This is slow, and obviously not portable.

I know irrlicht's license is compatible -- but I don't know if it's the best tool for the job. Is irrlicht overkill for something like this? Would I be better off doing this in straight OpenGL? I don't have much experience programming 3D, and will be doing a lot of learning along the way, so I don't have a great idea of what's appropriate yet.

Brinsky · Post by **Brinsky** » Sun May 29, 2005 3:34 pm

First of all, it depends on how much code of the original prog you got and what's your OGL programming background. If you can separate the physics code to a stand-alone library, I don't see a point why you shouldn't try using the irr. And hey, if you're talking about real time graphing it could be done real nicely with the irr.10 XML parser. Give it a try.

JoeWright · Post by **JoeWright** » Mon May 30, 2005 10:16 pm

I would definitely recommed Irrlicht for what you are wanting to do. Sounds like an interesting project, good luck.

Joe