Can Irrlicht Do Point & Click control

[ReneBart]

Hi;

Graduated as Computer Sciences for 15 years.(Yes I have 35 years, but love a lot to program and play RPG games) I program in C++ and other languages and found by chance this engine and (OGRE, PANDA3D, Crystal Space and OpenSceneGraph). I have practiced enough with the examples and tutorial. But.

3 easy questions.

1)
I'd just like to make sure that Irrlicht is capable of creating the kind of game that I'm interested. 3rd person 'Roleplaying Action/Adventure' games, in the style of NeverWinter Nights or Dungeon Siege.

To make the player move, you simply click a point on the ground and the player moves to that point. To attack a monster, talk to an NPC, pick something up from the ground, interact with game menus...ect, you simply left click on them. Also, the camera is constantly "locked" on the player, when the player moves, the camera moves with them. The player is always at the center of the camera.

When you want to rotate the camera, you simply move the mouse cursor to the edge of the screen. If you move the cursor to the left edge of the screen, the camera rotates "around" the player in an anti-clockwise direction, if you move the cursor to the right edge of the screen, the camera rotates around the player in a clock-wise direction.

I found something similar:
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... 3rd+camera
But use keyboard not mouse

2)
Is it possible in Irrlicht, to do indoor/outdoor worlds like dungeon siege.

3) Limitations in the engine.
polys=
terrain=
meches=
model=
objects=
light=
GUI=

I download: Irrlicht SDK 1.0
I know this is render engine not a game engine i need a few extra tools. (sound, physics, AI) terrain editor, level editor, etc.

I use Blender 2.42, 3D Studio MAX, Photoshop 7, and Code::Blocks

Thx for ur help.

[CuteAlien]

Hm, generally i wouldn't recommend doing an RPG with a new engine which i don't know really well anyway. Do a small project first ... but that's just a hint.

1. You will have to do object picking yourself, but there are a lot functions in Irrlicht which will help you programming something like that. But what exactly happens on clicks (walk there, pick something up) is gamelogic and has nothing to do with the engine.
As for the camera - not sure if there is one which behaves exactly like you want it to behave. But it's easy to add own cameras to the engine. You can use existing cameras as examples for how to do that.

2. I haven't played Dungeon Siege, so i don't really know. Irrlicht has some support for outdoorscenes with the TerrainSceneNode and for indoor scenes for example with the OctreeSceneNode. It really depends a lot on your gamedesign if those will be sufficient for your game. I doubt you will get around programming some own SceneNodes for a complex RPG.

3. There's no polygon limit by the engine, except that you can't use more than 65535 Polygons for one Mesh (you have to split complexer meshes). But there's certainly a limit from the graphic card. This limit depends on a lot more stuff, than just the number of polygons (for example it depends also a lot on the used materials). A very, very basic rule of thumb for me is "50000 multi-textured polygons will still run fine on older PC's". Another one is "if it runs still on my own PC it's probably fine...".
Same goes for terrain - but i think there might be some posts in the forum about streaming bigger terrains (not sure).
No limits on meshes, models, objects except memory.
No more than 8 lights can be used at the same moment. If you have more you'll need a lightmanager, which for examples always enables the 8 lights nearest to the camera.
For a complex GUI you will either need to add some work or you can just use another gui-system like CEGUI.

[Duncan Mac Leod]

1)
I'd just like to make sure that Irrlicht is capable of creating the kind of game that I'm interested. 3rd person 'Roleplaying Action/Adventure' games, in the style of NeverWinter Nights or Dungeon Siege.

To make the player move, you simply click a point on the ground and the player moves to that point. To attack a monster, talk to an NPC, pick something up from the ground, interact with game menus...ect, you simply left click on them. Also, the camera is constantly "locked" on the player, when the player moves, the camera moves with them. The player is always at the center of the camera.

When you want to rotate the camera, you simply move the mouse cursor to the edge of the screen. If you move the cursor to the left edge of the screen, the camera rotates "around" the player in an anti-clockwise direction, if you move the cursor to the right edge of the screen, the camera rotates around the player in a clock-wise direction.

A Game like NWN?

Of course - it is possible with Irrlicht - our Team has implemented a 1:1 Camera Movement like NWN features (mainly for the reason as we are coding a NWN-style Toolset and Game ) - Object Picking -or should I say 'ACCURATE' Object Picking- is possible, but you will have to code it yourself... - most RENDER-Engines only provide a 'simple' object picking using Ray SceneQueries but this is limited as they are using (axis-aligned) Bounding Boxes... - you'll have to code these features yourself or use a Physics Engine (some provide excellent collision detection)... - as for the Cam-Movement we have modified (extended) some APIs of Irrlicht as we also did for implementing OBBs (Oriented Bounding Boxes, as Irrlicht only features AABs), but we quit Irrlicht-based development some weeks ago and moved to Ogre3D - (ogreopcode for example, a ogre-addon features excellent collision detection)...

You should play around with some engines first and should look closely at their features before you decide to use one of them...

But keep in mind that most of your wanted features aren't provided by Render-Engines, you 'll have to implement them yourself!