Irrlicht Engine

I started out with 3d programming using Genesis3D (not knowing that it was horribly outdated). After having discovered its limitations, I moved to CrystalSpace, which was way too difficult for me. Then I decided for myself that I should give up, and when I came back from my last holiday I found Irrlicht. I read the first tutorial, and decided that Irrlicht was extremely easy to use. Now i'm working on a project that's alot further in development than my Genesis and CS projects, having worked the same amount of time. The message: Irrlicht rules!

I'll take the liberty to abuse the settings that permit guest users to post on this forum. Not for the sake of pure malice, not this time, at least, but to show how the situation looks like from standpoint of someone who never received professional training in c++ programming but still could not abandon desire to write his own realtime 3d application. The person in question even considered writing his own engine with OpenGL, but then he learnt of the existence of free, open-source libraries available out there in the net, tried Truevision and Reality Factory in succession, then stumbled upon OGRE and became frightened at the sight of extensive API that took a real pro to get a grasp on, then he downloaded and installed Irrlicht, and after a short time of fiddling with tutorials and code he successfully set up his first realtime 3d app.

Now, I think that comparing OGRE and Irrlicht has little sense. The major difference between the two is that OGRE has more features, while Irrlicht is geared at programming newbies. Of the two the latter has greater potential as a learning tool, which is and which always will be the major asset of Irrlicht. I treat using Irrlicht mostly as a learning experience that will allow me to familiarise myself with how 3d programming in c++ looks like. Once I'm done either I'll switch to OGRE, or Irrlicht will develop to the point it will be able to succesfully compete with the best not only on the basis of its simplicity and ease of use.

The most funny thing in all this is that, when I first run demo of Irrlicht - which was about year ago, or so, I thought that I'd never be able to learn it. Life has a sense of humour.

irrlicht has it all.... it is just not pushed under your nose so well like in ogre, you can do shaders easily, have cool lights and material settings, with cool performance and speed.... and it all in one cool well written project that to work with is satisfaction

You know what, the difference between Irrlicht and OGRE is like the difference between Pascal and C/C++ , and I have many reasons to say that because I know both actualy forth .

Pascal is a bit too harsh. Pascal is verbose and unproductive, Irrlicht isn't.

Pascal is only as unproductive as the programmer who is using it

Anyways use what comes easy to you be it Irrlicht or OGRE or someother 3D API out there.

Would just like to point out - as easy to use as irrlicht is - it is not just "newbs" who use it. Who else? Those who require very small footprint and very customisable (ie chopping out all the stuff they don't need) for shareware etc. a single 700k dll that only provides FFP and basic 3D for low requirement 3D shareware games makes Irrlicht ideal. Ogre is great too but not as suited to small scale development. Ankh shows what can be done with ogre but that is more if you are competing with retail. Also their DX7 renderer is obsolete and they don't do dx8 (dx9 being too high for casual/semicore shareware market types who never d/l updates for their computers).

just something to chew on.

Oh and imo people who bandy the word "newbie" around as if it's some pissing contest invariably are newbs themselves more concerned with perception of what's cool or seen as "advanced" instead of what just works and get's the job done. Funny thing is, all that stuff ogre does, 90% of these people will never finish a project that includes it fully.

I have to pipe up and agree here. One of the two projects I have been using Irrlicht in recently is not a game. Irrlicht provides a relatively small footprint for me to use, a basic GUI for me to extend, cross-platofrm capability, and the ability to import a variety of file & texture formats.

Now that therre is a 32bit software renderer - it is perfect for my needs without having to worry about viral licensing, DLL incompatibilities (I can compile Irrlicht into the EXE, not just as a DLL), etc.

Irrlicht is perfect for my needs as OGRE is tuned for an arena of gaming I am simply not interested in developing for.

--EK

EK > how do you convert irrlicht to a static lib for win32? and apart from a larger exe size are there any other performance downsides?

Mostly via project compilation changes actually, though there were one or two places I might have changed some things (such as the IRRLICHT_API and associated defines). I've been considering making a patch out of it actually - it's not like it's "super secret NDA material"

As far as performance is concerned - there isn't any change really.

--EK

I am using VS2005. I know a while back when I was using VC++6 it was a lot harder to try and convert it, a post somewhere said "switch this option in compiler settings" etc but only for vs2003+. Can't find the post as the search function in this forum always seems to return 2000 results for a given phrase!

the exports and calling convention in one of the irrlicht files is probably something that needs editing but in general what compiler settings/flags do you use (banish USR_DLL etc)?

Maybe another thread would be good before it goes completely OT sorry

last post on this then back on topic (sorry)

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... rary#47370
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... rary#50435

May be of use for static lib seekers.

[Deleted]

Care to elaborate? In what way is Ogre's scene management "messy"?

[Deleted]