Pitfalls Irrlicht.NET

laloivol · Post by **laloivol** » Tue Jan 24, 2006 6:24 pm

I'm totally new to Irrlicht, i've worked with DirectX and OpenGL before and now I want to get an engine for future developments. I code in C#
I've downloaded the Irrlicht SDK, but I noticed there's not enough documentation about the .net wrapper, and I can't still get it to work.
As I can see in other posts from this forum, this wrapper has lots of disadvantages, but I'd like to read oppinions from people who had already used it. Have you encountered any problems when working with Irrlicht .NET?

Braneloc · Post by **Braneloc** » Tue Jan 24, 2006 9:37 pm

http://www.irrforge.org/index.php/Irrli ... it_working
http://www.irrforge.org/index.php/.net

Pitfalls, hmm.

One bug I noticed straight away.. non-animated X-file meshes can corrupt quite badly (workaround, use .3ds instead)

Custom scene nodes are not available.. so no making your own object formats to compensate for any problems with the existing ones..

Animation only seems to like the animation to be stored in the same file as the mesh/skeleton = many huge files and duplication of work (no copying an anim from one file to another - please correct me if I'm wrong here!)

LOD/Roam style terrain system is quite limited right now (though buggy, it works for the most part)

You already noticed the lack of documentation - hopefully people will start contributing to community docs on the wiki and the XML documentation to help that one out.

.Net graphics/game engines are pretty thin on the ground, especially at the high end. This is one of the better ones. Ogre.Net posted prebuilt binaries on the forum last night... ( http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2addons/viewtopic.php?t=326 ) though the documentation for the .Net wrapper there is even worse than that of Irrlicht. Maybe I should go through the wiki on there too. Hmm.

Irrlicht.Net is certainly usable for smaller projects, and the C++ boys are doing quite well on getting larger projects underway, the real problem is most people using Irrlicht are using C++ and the examples/demos are based around that, not exactly helpful for .Net developers.

With any luck, the next version will solve some of the restrictions

the_bob · Post by **the_bob** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 2:18 am

Braneloc is right. As far as .net development, Irrlicht is about the most mature engine I've seen. It includes rendering in DX8, DX9, OpenGL, and even software.

The API documentation is available right from the Irrlicht homepage. The wiki information will also grow as more people start using Irrlicht.net

buhatkj · Post by **buhatkj** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 3:31 am

yes, irrlicht .net is probably the most complete .net engine availableso far, but regardless it still needs lots of work to catch up to the amazing stuff possible in c++. I'd prefer to develop in .net bewcause its faster, easier, has simple project setup, and runs fast on windows. I think in the next 2 versions or so, Irrlicht will really start to shine at this, and the .net version will be mostly caught up. Every version of Irrlicht has been significantly better than the last, and niko has been proceeding at this rate for some time. I think in the next 6 months Irrlicht will be pretty far and away the best .Net engine available open sourced.

laloivol · Post by **laloivol** » Wed Jan 25, 2006 4:50 pm

Thanks to all of you for your comments, this should help me to make a desition. I'd like to read more opinios though.

And also thanks to Barneloc, thanks to your links I could get Irrlicht.net to work... still with some problems, but I'll try to fix them reading the tutorials.

Silbermünze · Post by **Silbermünze** » Fri Jan 27, 2006 8:10 am

As far as I digged into the Irrlicht.NET engine, the major drawback for me seems to be, the lack of being able to create custom meshes dynamically during runtime. The SMesh and MeshBuffer objects seem not to be wrapped yet.

For generating own easy geometry, which I don't want to load from a file, this is quite an obstacle.