Prophecy 3d sdk

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sat Sep 20, 2003 12:17 am

hi all,
irrlicht is surely one of the best open source 3d engine out there, fast, well designed, powerfull, easy to use and understand.
I see Niko is now spending much time adding support for more bitmap formats, 32 bit textures and so on. All stuff that you can already find implemented in other libraries. And so you have to delay development of irrlicht core features...

Niko, have you tried the Prophecy 3d SDK (http://www.twilight3d.com/) ? This is not a 3d engine, instead it is a multimedia library, which, among other things, supports many bitmap formats (bmp, dds, gif, jpg, jpeg2000, pcx, png, tga and others), and let you easily add other codecs you implement by simply register them.
Also, when you have a bitmap loaded in memory, you can easily change pixelformat (so you can convert, say, from r8g8b8a8 to r5g5b5 with just one call), and manipulate it in many ways.

It has a complete and well optimized math library.

It support archived file system (now zip format is implemented) in a transparent way so you can access a file in an archive by referencing like this: "quake3.zip/map1.bsp".
You can register your own archive codecs (same way as bitmap codecs) and even access archives inside archives (e.g. "test.zip/quake3.zip/map1.bsp" is valid).
It is endianness aware so you can easily port your code, say, from Win32 to MacOs.

There are many other features (a fast String class, keyboard, mouse, joystick support, utility classes like array and linkedlist and so on).
Many of this features are already implemented in irrlicht, but I suggest you to check it out. Maybe you can find useful stuff so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Last but not least, the library is still in development and supported, and it's completely free (you don't even have to give credits to the authors, even if they deserve them)

I'm not involved with the development of the library, I'm just an happy user of it (I use it as a base code for my multimedia apllications

)

cheers,

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sat Sep 20, 2003 12:30 am

I forgot, this is a good description made by the author:

http://www.flipcode.com/cgi-bin/msg.cgi ... neral&id=5

cheers again,

niko · Post by **niko** » Sat Sep 20, 2003 6:10 am

Sounds promising and very nice. I'll take a closer look at it, I think there are a lot of things in prophecy which would be good to be in Irrlicht. I like especially the way .zip archives are accessed. But I don't think I'll directly use it, at maximum I'll change some interfaces of Irrlicht to make it more easier to use.. as always.

That's because I don't like much dependencies from other libraries, especially if they are still in development. zLib, jpegLib, OpenGL, D3D are enough for me.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sat Sep 20, 2003 5:46 pm

You are right, you can get ideas from prophecy and adapt them to your engine. Prophecy is modular so you can extracts pieces of code you need.
Maybe for you archive manager and bitmap/pixelformats manager (even floating point pixelformats are supported) could be useful.
The library is still in development but anyway it is very stable.

If you need help for something feel free to write in this forum, and I'll be glad to help you whenever I can.