Irrlicht Engine

Thanks for posting your results, I think I'm adding some of these modifications to Irrlicht. However, I'm of course not going to remove the file loaders, they wouln't increase rendering speed anyway.

for past tests I read been done in the past, Irrlicht is very fast already, but every good optimization is welcome. I am not a coder, but love to do art for fast engines

And I agree with Niko: loaders are live saver for artist, u make em happy, and that's key to keep them I know as I am an artist


"- removed PSD support (not of any use)"

hey, no. Is of use. Gimp saves in PSD, and someone could even add aplha channel export support, like in tga, but perhaps with exta power and less issues. Photoshop of course saves in PSD, and several other free or cheap app do.


"- removed PCX support (not of any use)"

Well, if there's BMP, yup, not of much use, but if actually is not what is lowering speed, better not to remove any format.

"- removed JPG support (i use tga instead, has alpha)"

hey, no. In pc comercial game project I was at we used jpg for textures: we were limited in amount of memory, and the transparency was solved other ways. I do prefer alpha, but trust me jpg comes handy often for certain textures and certain projects.

"- removed PNG support (i use tga, has no external lib and licence)"

PNG has a license? Anyway, I worked at java projects, and jpg transparency is easier for the artist. Has kind of zip compression , lossless.Supported by all tools.


"- removed MD2 support (format depricated, .X file is best supported)"


Yup, x is better. but for sharewaregames, you aim at low machines often. i wouldn't do a one-only character game with near camera shots with md2, but with x, but a warcraft3 view kind of game make good use of md2.

"- removed MS3D support (milkshape sucks badly)"

True only for characters. It kick ass for space ships, tanks , cars, everything rigid composed of a hierarchy of rigid parts.
Scorched3d free game uses this format.


"- removed LMTS support (no need for that)"

Well, several users do use Trancos tools...

"- removed DMF support (no need for that either)"

ehm? Deled format? Why?

"- removed My3D support (also no need for that)"

ahem... Saying kind goodbye, come back whenever to Max users which right now are leaving the room...

"- removed DirectX(8,9) support (does not work on linux, opengl is better IMHO)"

Yup, but too many users prefer only dx...
I dfon't mind as I don't code. yet though I like the fact of be able to put a game in both win and linux.

"- removed Software support (useless piece of code)"

Well, maybe for machines with no 3d cards...though in shareware world, it's considered that the main low machines users already have 3d acceleration of some sort...


"- added vertex buffer objects for static meshes (meshes which do not have animations) (modified to work with irrlicht 0.12)
http://www.irrlichtnx.mmdevel.de/phpBB2 ... .php?t=210"

This does allow more than 65,000 tris x meshes, if so, extra cool... Anyway, I guess if I use irrlicht for a game (that is, if I do a game at home) I'll probably use a format like MIM or similar...

I agree with the optimizations, no so much with formats removal. And anyway, kudos.

i did not say the fileloaders are not of any use for othe people, but for me i guess this was a misunderstanding. i think its great irrlicht support that many formats!!

If you dont have a use for it, then I would take them out and you get a smaller dll. And sometimes for games, you should watch the memory use, right Vermeer?

oh, I understood for everybody, not each one's own customization...

vermeer wrote: "- removed My3D support (also no need for that)"

ahem... Saying kind goodbye, come back whenever to Max users which right now are leaving the room...

Can you re-iterate that? I can't understand what you are saying about My3d and max (you think they are good or bad?). not that it really matters.

Anyway GFX styler was just pointing out how flexible irrlicht open source is, that not only can you get speed optimisations but size (dll) ones also.

I doubt he or anyone else would ever condone removing loaders from irrlicht (unless they became obsolete). It was just to cut down sizes on his personal build. I do the same - my dll is around 700k because I use DX8 and OGL (to give a fallback/choice) - however I took out software rendere, DX9, all guis stuff, all shader stuff, every loader but my3d and X, every gfx loader except jpg,png and tga - and all xml stuff also - why? because I won't be using ANY of this stuff for my projects that are aimed at being runnable on a wide range of systems including slower/older ones - so no use for shaders for me as It would cut down my users. The next person may want to go all out on gfx or make something more "cuttin edge" so he can chop out the old stuff he doesn't need and use just DX9 for instance. Very flexible and a great piece of coding from Niko.

Now.. about loading my3d from archives (and anisotropic, and OGL light bug/alt tab bug + speed up improvements).. please say they are FIXED Niko.. I will worship the ground you work on if they are (fingers crossed).

Also, something to note is that OpenGL runs on Windows too.

I too have removed DX from my version of Irrlicht. Not because I believe one is better than the other, but simply for efficiency of development. Withough DX - if I implement a new shader / rendering technique - I need only code it once (for the OGL video driver). However, with DX included - I have to do it twice and only for the benefit of one platform.

Kudos for Niko implementing and maintaining both though. Not everyone wants a cross-platform engine. Irrlicht is good enough to use Windows only if so desired

--EK

"guest" ...I had already clarified that I had understood other thing, and gfxStyler also guessed I had took it wrong.

So, no point on that.


I don't actually care if each one does whatever with his irrlicht. I am not a coder, but one of the few artists here. I only was pointing that would not be good to remove those graphic formats out of Niko's Irrlicht.(that is, stop maintaining them)

Can you re-iterate that? I can't understand what you are saying about My3d and max (you think they are good or bad?).

My3d is good, of course. That I meant. And like MIM, is important to have with Irrlicht.

not that it really matters.

doesn't it?

Vermeer - no offence but I think you are not a native english speaker? You may have read my post the wrong way, there was no hostility meant in it. Also I didn't even see the 2 posts before my post when I started to make my post (including your first reply)

The post was more to clean up the meaning for anyone else reading it and not specifically for you anyway, you had misunderstood and maybe others would have too that's all.

As for the "doesn't matter" thing, I meant it doesn't matter if you think my3d was good/bad but I wasn interested if you had found specific reasons to cut it out or problems with it (as I use it and would like the info if that had been the case).

rgds

yup, not an english speaker and seems I understood badly two posts in the same thread. Quite an amount, as I don't use to...

big Sorry then .

Mainly was afraid of loosing formats in Irrlicht, as indeed, was what attracted me as an artist in a very first time, way long ago: the formats make artists life easier. That is all.

Vermeer is right. One of the main things that attracted me to this engine (also as an artist) was the whole bunch of formats it supports; I also understand that Gfx's "optimized" version is purely adjusted to his own personal needs. it doesn't mean his hacks will become the mainstream for next release. I don't think Niko has got leaving a lot of people without possibilities among his plans.

so thumbs up for optimizations, all of them as long as they benefit the engine: and thumbs down for removing 2d/3d formats from the engine. Each of us finds his own workflow with this tool

Why not split up Irrlicht in parts? With making DLLs, like one for Zlib one for DirectX (but maybe only OpenGL is needed?) , one for each part!?

because ...

1. the idea sucks
2. one single file is better
3. it would be more work to do
4. it looks ugly

GFXstyLER wrote:because ...

1. the idea sucks
2. one single file is better
3. it would be more work to do
4. it looks ugly

No way! It's because Niko does not want it that way.
1. Idea is brilliant since I want it, too Really, do you know the benefits of dynamic libraries? They do exactly what you did (reduce amount of space wasted) but you can put in these parts later on without changing sources and recompiling. Unfortunately, this brings 3. in front since space is only saved if you use manually loaded libraries. And this is definitely much work to have it correctly implemented and portable.
2. No, why should it. You'll probably know Java packages. This concept is very similar.
3. Ok, that's true. I still doubt that extracting all DirectX and OpenGL parts into libraries is that simple, so I totally agree.
4. These are the arguments we need for discussions There are already some libraries included in Irrlicht. Of course, these are currently included into one large file, but, e.g., using these CodeBlocks Template it would be easy to use several libraries without any hassle. I'd say that package structure that reflect code structure is a sign of good design.

Niko would have to write a source fo each of those customized dll's you're looking for (or do it yourselves like GfxStyler did) and that would be a lot of time. It's easier for him to put all the stuff in and it's also easier for us non-programmers to use it this way. It might be a bit heavier dll but it still does the job.

If you require such exquisite mods and hacks of the engine I definitely think it's a job one must do on its own.