Irrlicht Engine

While I completely agree with your sentiment about coding instead of writing documentation all day, I have to echo Ulf's feelings. I feel that the devs are doing a wonderful job, but that they are reluctant to integrate new code. When people post awesome new stuff, there always seems to be a reason why it can't be added.

1. "It won't fit in the engine well/it exposes the engine's internals." - I'm sure most community members who submit work would be more than happy to change it around so that it fits whatever standards the devs would like. Instead of just saying this, explain what the issue with it is and how the creator can fix it.
2. "It abandons one of our core goals: keeping Irrlicht compatible with old hardware." - Adding stuff that won't run on old hardware doesn't mean that the engine is suddenly incompatible with old hardware. The programmer using Irrlicht can chose between using the older code, or, if they're trying to make a shiny new game for all the gamers out there, using newer parts.
3. "If we added all the submitted content, the engine would become too bloated and we couldn't support it." - I've never understood this argument. It's a tautology that adding code to the engine would make it bigger, but that seems to be a silly reason to not expand the engine's abilities. If the code is well written in the first place, it shouldn't need much further support. Just make sure it meets the Irrlicht code standard (see point 1) and once it has passed that gauntlet, include it in the engine.

slavik262 wrote:While I completely agree with your sentiment about coding instead of writing documentation all day, I have to echo Ulf's feelings. I feel that the devs are doing a wonderful job, but that they are reluctant to integrate new code. When people post awesome new stuff, there always seems to be a reason why it can't be added.

1. "It won't fit in the engine well/it exposes the engine's internals." - I'm sure most community members who submit work would be more than happy to change it around so that it fits whatever standards the devs would like. Instead of just saying this, explain what the issue with it is and how the creator can fix it.
2. "It abandons one of our core goals: keeping Irrlicht compatible with old hardware." - Adding stuff that won't run on old hardware doesn't mean that the engine is suddenly incompatible with old hardware. The programmer using Irrlicht can chose between using the older code, or, if they're trying to make a shiny new game for all the gamers out there, using newer parts.
3. "If we added all the submitted content, the engine would become too bloated and we couldn't support it." - I've never understood this argument. It's a tautology that adding code to the engine would make it bigger, but that seems to be a silly reason to not expand the engine's abilities. If the code is well written in the first place, it shouldn't need much further support. Just make sure it meets the Irrlicht code standard (see point 1) and once it has passed that gauntlet, include it in the engine.

I completely agree with Slavik there, he took the words right out of my mouth.

slavik262 wrote:

• "It abandons one of our core goals: keeping Irrlicht compatible with old hardware." - Adding stuff that won't run on old hardware doesn't mean that the engine is suddenly incompatible with old hardware. The programmer using Irrlicht can chose between using the older code, or, if they're trying to make a shiny new game for all the gamers out there, using newer parts.

I just want to know WHY old pc compatbility is so important....even mobile and other devices are getting OGLES 2.0 and complicated suff...
You see genesis3d... it had the same "old stuff" idea...and now its dead...

Exactly. We don't want Irrlicht to slowly die by the wayside because it didn't advance with other modern engines. Please don't mistake our requests as animosity; we're trying to help Irrlicht be all it can be. Besides like I mentioned before, there's nothing preventing the programmer from choosing not to use new parts that old hardware won't support.

On top of that, all previous versions are always available for download...

slavik262 wrote:

1. "It won't fit in the engine well/it exposes the engine's internals." - I'm sure most community members who submit work would be more than happy to change it around so that it fits whatever standards the devs would like. Instead of just saying this, explain what the issue with it is and how the creator can fix it.
2. "It abandons one of our core goals: keeping Irrlicht compatible with old hardware." - Adding stuff that won't run on old hardware doesn't mean that the engine is suddenly incompatible with old hardware. The programmer using Irrlicht can chose between using the older code, or, if they're trying to make a shiny new game for all the gamers out there, using newer parts.
3. "If we added all the submitted content, the engine would become too bloated and we couldn't support it." - I've never understood this argument. It's a tautology that adding code to the engine would make it bigger, but that seems to be a silly reason to not expand the engine's abilities. If the code is well written in the first place, it shouldn't need much further support. Just make sure it meets the Irrlicht code standard (see point 1) and once it has passed that gauntlet, include it in the engine.

I think only 1) is a valid point. We are trying to explain this issue as good as we can, but this usually boils down to pointing at places which don't fit. It's hard to give a better explanation, as this would require to have something like a working solution already, but we should improve this.

2) is not valid, as we don't require things to work on all hardware. Maybe you noticed geometry shaders being implemented only for OpenGL. We also had external window handling only for DX up to Irrlicht 1.6 or so. The problem is that many changes simply discard certain things which are necessary for older systems. And that's a no-go.

3) is also not correctly stated. It's not about the additional functionality, but the API that is used to access the new features. Often, things are simply not properly added into an easy and comprehesive API. Instead, people simply invent a completely different system to access or do things. If we do this two or three times, we basically have three engines in one dll. That's when things get bloated. The shear code or engine size is not really a point.

BTW: This is the website update thread, the engine discussions usually happen in other threads.

soooooo when is the irrlicht website getting an update ?

I'll help in any way i can, i am an experianced PHP/mySql developer. But, i suck with making websites *look* good. Think it needs a really cool new design

Dan911 wrote:I'll help in any way i can, i am an experianced PHP/mySql developer. But, i suck with making websites *look* good. Think it needs a really cool new design

We've got both a professional designer ( fuzzy ) and a professional web developer ( myself ) who have volunteered to do it. Its just nothing has been done from the other side.

Don't know which side you're talking about. But AFAIK, you asked for updating the website, you got the ok to do so, and also the whole website code. Probably about 6 weeks ago. Is there a third side involved which I am not aware of?

Hm, as much as I remember 1-2 days after we had that original discussion about updating the website Bitplane also started working on something (that wordpress template). I already heard from Josie he's not working on that and we talked about that a little on chat. I don't know about Bitplane right now, as I didn't catch him lately (I'm not much in chat right now due to job and same is unfortunately true for Bitplane).

I'm still OK with anyone updating it (as long as I still find my most-used links afterwards), although it's nothing I can really help with (just take a look at my own website if you don't belief that). But I also understand when Josie wasn't too happy working on the php of a website when he can't test it on the live system. And I don't know what happened to Bitplane's wordpress template, if that got worked on or not.