Irrlicht Engine

Where do you think that Irrlich will go in the future?

Most of the users play with the curent futures and theirs limitation. Most of the good/stable/useful futures are broth by niko. (like the irrEditor).

I think that this must change in the future. My idea for Irrlicht is that small groups begin to developer and bring the futures to Irrlicht.

For such a community take a look at Blender.
link: http://www.blender.org
last release log: http://www.blender.org/cms/Blender_2_42.727.0.html

So how do we shift creating part from niko to a team of developer to make easy the process of developing this software to new limits?

waiting for your ideas ...

Is this not the point of the SVN?

Yup!

But for now I don't see any plan/futures list/requests or teams!

So maybe this must be a bit reorganize a bit?

you don't check the news on the frontpage, do you?
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/

Hybrid and Bitplane (you should know both already if you) received SVN accounts and are now actively improving Irrlicht; they are now a part of the team, thanks for helping out! An update of the author page will follow soon.

and I must also add the SVN version is burning hot! Hybrid is pretty active checking the forums to add the latest and greatest and so is Bitplane. As of new features, there's always a "change" files with each new release, and also some are mentioned on the frontpage. It might not be as complete as blender's since it's yet too new and the team is only putting things in their proper places

The core team is precisely defined, though sometimes growing
The current plan says that each developer is doing some enhancements for Irrlicht and commits from time to time. Besides that the currently existing patches are adapted for Irrlicht SVN and then integrated.
If you want to put some features into Irrlicht you should start a new project thread, describe your plans and finally develop a patch against Irrlicht SVN. you should also provide an example application to show the results of your work - this makes it easier for us to asset the code. Patch generation is really simple with SVN!
A wishlist is being discussed in the Irrlicht 2.0 thread somewhat below. Might need some cleanup to really make it useable. Making some larger tasks SourceForge project tasks might be possible.

Can't stress this too much: It was a really good idea to add a few more people to the core team. My major concern was that Irrlicht would remain a "one-man show" - and finally be discontinued, once Niko wins the austrian lottery.

I feel the contributed content is being transfered into Irrlicht more frequently now.
That is really great. And it is better this way (via the boards), than open the SVN to a wider range of people, IMHO.

you are right! but I think that this go to slow and I think Irrlich must go thirds distribute team and community must help
more in improving this engine.

3 developers (2 of them only make updates) are not a active developing team (community).

no plan for future developing (so can user begin talk and joining them)

It's 6 developers if you check the authors page, and lots of contributors as well. But of course we need the input from the community as we cannot keep up the pace without. And bitplane and I are also developing new things (check bitplane's homepage for several interesting new scene nodes, I've contributed several mesh file loaders). However, Irrlicht also needs proper bug fixing and feature fixing (things that work with DX don't work under OpenGL etc.). So we're currently concentrating on this. New features do require more time so we'll fix the main bugs first and then proceed with new features. And you never know what Niko comes up with for the next release
For the features TODO list: Read a book on real-time rendering or the feature list of some other 3d engine and choose one of the items currently missing in Irrlicht's feature list

ok!

now just like to ask for some advice.

what is the correct way to submit something to irrlicht:
- i have the latest SVN
- i have add / modify some of the classes
- code only for opengl

idea 1:
- new shader callback (multipass algorithms)
- new type of light (point / spot) implement with OGSL (per pixel lighting)
- project texture for light type
- future: soft shadow
- future: bump map / normal map

idea 2:
- new Color Picker


more info on my blog ...

The second one would require a simple patch against the latest SVN revision. If you have SVN on the command line use 'svn diff >colorpicker.patch'
For tools such as TortoiseSVN you have to readh the docs how to save the diff into a file.
The first one will require some more work, maybe also separation into separate tasks. It should also get DirectX support beore it's added to SVN. So create a new thread in project or bug forum and present your ideas. Code is best presented as patch, too. Small fragments to describe your ideas can be shown in the thread, but hosting a patch file is easier than copying from the webpage.

three thoughts on these...

-bump and normal mapping is already possible isn't it?
-the color picker is sort of neat i guess for making in-gui tools for irrlicht, but i'd personally rather use .net forms for that
-if we implemented multipass post shaders, then doing soft shadows could just be a post shader that applies a blur to the shadow volumes couldn't it?

chromdragon wrote: 3 developers (2 of them only make updates) are not a active developing team (community).

I just want to add something to this statement, although it has been answered already (people doing patches, we are integrating them, => developer community). The problem with a larger development team is coordination. Once there are a lot more developers, the management overhead becomes too big for a hobby team, especially if I also want some time to write code. Currently this time is very low already, and doing backups, managing the server, website, answering support mails, and also trying to visit the forum from time to time is a lot to do. No time to manage the overhead of managing a bigger developer team too Currently, it really works well, and I think we should try to go on like this at least a little bit.

But I think some sort of todo-list (more than "just look at other engines") and a webpage with general advices on code-style and creating patches would help people starting contributing to irrlicht.

ebo, as for the coding styles, check here: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/faq.html#rules

Ah, and:

Currently, it really works well, and I think we should try to go on like this at least a little bit.

YES.

ok!

I will research TortoiseSVN diff

and make some plan/exemple for the new ShaderCallBack
and what nice things we can make with it!

maybe some DirectX men can help me to port it to DirectX