Irrlicht Engine

The problem with removing a font is that the sprite bank behand that font is not properly connected, and hence cannot be removed at that place. Don't know where the actual design flaw is, but it's not that easy task.

Would be possible to have something like IGUIEmptyElement? Something like IEmptySceneNode, but for the gui. It would help to manage gui elements, e.g. make all elements children of this empty element, so they can by removed by removing their parent - the empty element - in one call.

Some day... I think the main problem last time I looked at that was how to handle clipping correctly (should probably either be ignored completely in clipping or configurable). If you don't care about that (and for example just make it large enough then you can create one yourself rather easy. You basically need those 2 functions in your empty element:
That works for 90% of the cases (and the rest can be worked around). But well, once I catch up on bugs I'll think about features again.

In my case I work a lot with Collada so I'd like to request support for materials and animations in a near future release

I also think that some Irrlicht classes are too tightly coupled (mixed concerns) regarding file handling. It becomes a limitation when you want to load something from another source. For example IrrXMLReader reads XML data from files only and a Collada mesh can only be imported from an original Collada file. What if these documents are stored in a database, a compressed archive, encrypted file, cashed or even created dynamically - it shouldn't be necessary to create temporary files when it can be done in memory?

I understand it's a lot of work, but IMO it's a better design to separate (or at least not depend on) file reading/writing in such cases. "CColladaFileLoader" could be just "CColladaLoader" (or maybe "CColladaParser"). So, for "getMesh" I'd like to request overloads with input text or binary data, and an enum to specify which loader to use (in my case ColladaLoader).

Doesn't Irrlicht have an IFileReaderMemory or something like that though? I thought you could do that already.

I would like to ask for full collada support(animations and fixed function materials, so we could convert later for shaders using materials IDs)too and maybe native md5 model file format support. We could also setup IrrMesh format animations instead of adding more loaders.
Also LOD for animated and static meshes would be a great addition.
And also, how is going the standart material/shader format and the standart post processing module for irrlicht? Wiki seems outdated....

It certainly would be nice, to have some material flag like EMF_SELF_SHADOWING. In my game, i let user decide, whether he wants to use shaders, or not. In some transparent materials(grass for example), self shadowing is not desired. So, in shader, i can achieve this easily, but I haven't find a way to do this in irrlicht renderer. And you can imagine, that the grass looks very differently with and without self shadowing. Would it be possible?

Freetype 2 + xeffects + 3D Sound (using audiere) + Video support to textures + Better support for ".OBJ" files, and animations, would be... perfect! Not really perfect... Since it is already!
Awesome piece of art!

It may have been asked before (I didn't go through the whole topic) but here are a few simple things I:
-2 robust functions to convert from wide to narrow string and vice-versa. Maybe it already exists but I could not find them in the engine and I have seen some questions in the forum about it:
With the utf8 library, it's very simple but it relies on std
http://bluecosmos.tuxfamily.org/2010/07 ... ice-versa/
This one is not crucial since there is this workaround. It may be out of scope too.

-About IAnimatedMeshSceneNode I think it would be very helpful to change the current way of working (nothing to change in the interface) :
setFrameLoop(start,end) will swap "start" & "end" if end < start. So if you want to play an animation in reverse you have to set a negative speed or a scaler speed should be > 0. I find it unlogical and unpractical.

Hope you don't get frustrated working on bug fixing instead of features. Keep up with the good work.

I think i already asked for volume textures.
But "Santa" needs to be reminded constantly wich gift you'd like to got on xmas
PS: its not xmas, its just a metaphore.....

It is fun to see how this turned into a "feature request" thread when it originally was a "feature preview" post

hello

is there some plan, when can we download/use irrlicht 1.8 ?

when I read its content, I read that the shadow handling will be supported much better, than in previous releases...

Yes, that was the plan, but I doubt it will happen for 1.8. It's not yet finished anyway, so you can access only the developer version WIP from SVN. No release date fixed, yet.

The latest Irrlicht source code is in the SVN trunk:
https://irrlicht.svn.sourceforge.net/sv ... icht/trunk

This will eventually become Irrlicht 1.8. If you want to try it out now, just download the source code using an SVN client (TortoiseSVN is the easiest to use for Windows users) and compile it yourself.

Do you plan on adding a good working way to combine/batch meshes? Because snippets in the forum tend to use hacky ways which lead to memory leaks, broken textures etc.