Irrlicht Engine

The Anaconda wrote:check the blog niko just added ogre mesh format

Sure, I'm aware of this and it's my loader. I was just talking about an export module from blender to .mesh files. The ogre file format exporters seem to have a good quality for many modellers so this could give opportunities to get an enhanced modelling pipeline.

I'm new to Irrlicht so some of these things may already be in the engine. I did search the forus though, and didn't find anything.

1. Lightning/Electrical Effects: The ability to create point-to-point 3D lightning, and change the parameters (like color, branching, bolt width).

2. Shadows on Terrain (Apparently this is really hard).

3. Fuzzy-Shadows. (Real shadows have blurred edges when the light source isn't close).

4. Mirrors. An easy-to-instantiate flat-mirror object. You can vary the reflectiveness, size.

Shadows on terrain? I could swear I have seen something like that in my first terraintest...

I think shadows on a terrain arent much harder than on objects... and irrlicht hasstencil shadows on objekts...

Better water like the bottom of this page. Fresnel etc.
http://www.moon-labs.com/ml_resources.htm
The water looks ok now but proper reflection refraction effects would be cool(Fresnel effect).

Also, hardware independant post production. applying filters to the image BEFORE they are presented (blur, bloom, invert ect...) A class could be used for this like 'IPostEffect' and SceneManager has 'AddPostEffect()'

more customisable GUI (image maps/shaped buttons etc).

Finally. A unified pesudeo script language that has the basic features of all shders (glsl, hlsl) and the driver converts them at load time to the appropreate type... hardware independant shaders (very simple at best)

That last one was unlikely and difficult

making the loading of meshes/textures thread safe. Or even an additional non blocking method of loading.

Implementing of Tangets for Animated meshes will be nice

Better water like the bottom of this page. Fresnel etc.
http://www.moon-labs.com/ml_resources.htm
The water looks ok now but proper reflection refraction effects would be cool(Fresnel effect).

Ya, I agree... Would be cool...

- Better looking GUI - easier theming perhaps?
- Improved performance, the OpenGL driver is shamefully slow

definatly better GUI. Not to put irrlicht down, but look at Ogre. THAT is a game GUI. However, image maps and cutome images for buttons (or even OnPaint() methods) give the programmer some freedom.

Ogre just uses cegui (and its own overlays in parts), which runs fine with Irrlicht too. Next cegui version 0.5 will be released soon and under MIT license instead of LGPL. Yet another reason gone not to use it.

Check it out.

Irrlicht should adopt the XNA framework when it comes out. It runs on PC AND Xbox360. I don't know how good it will be but a simple implementation (with joystick based "tab" controles for GUI etc) to add to Irrlicht and Irrlicht .NET.
i.e. irrlicht.XNA!!!
just an idea

I recommend to stick with the OGRE formats, not just .mesh, also the .material, .program, etc. Perhaps work together with the OGRE devs, improve the format and establish it as _THE_ STANDARD OPEN-3D-FORMAT.
That would be great for the engines and the community!

.material is already supported right now (to some extent...), others might follow in the future. But I doubt that .mesh will become the standard format. There are too many requirements that all the different 3D applications have. I guess that U3D will become a common mesh exchange format very soon so .mesh would have a chance only for realtime rendering (it's definitely not useful for mesh exchange), and even here I have some doubts if this is useful (see the comments on the first two pages on this). It's simply too much engine dependent to have the best file format for fast loading in realtime rendering.

As you said, I thought as a realtime rendering format, not for exchange, for that purpose there are enough good formats available, already.

hybrid wrote:.material is already supported right now (to some extent...)[...]

How to use? I can't find it.
EDIT: Cleared, I found it in this forum.