Irrlicht Engine

hi.

when i started with irrlicht (not too long ago) i was interested in using c# for a change of matter (i do too much work in java). but soon i found out, that some parts of the .net implementation is work in progress.

like some others, i found "irrlicht.net cp" (which is beautifully hard to search for in this forum) and it seems like this covers more of the engine, at the expense of being not up to date with the cutting edge.

so, now i am lost at what to use: either the work in progress or the complete, but release-dependant version?


is there any chance, the inhouse .net implementation is going to improve? would it make sense to offer help? im not speaking for any side, i just wonder: would there be any way to merge both projects somehow?


it looks like irrlicht is losing some momentum in just the forks and additional projects, which might better be contributions to a core?

This is almost always the problem with open source projects. Things tend to get out of hand and "spinoffs" are rarely missing

I would say that Irrlicht .NET CP is much more developed than Irrlicht.NET, but it is still lacking many important things. Contributing is probably a good idea, but takes a lot of time that might be needed to actually do projects based on the engine.

I think that Irrlicht.NET might improve in the future, but considering how much further Irrlicht .NET CP has come in comparison, my bet lies with that.

Well if you wanna just play arround or try things out the .NET wrapper is OK. But if you wannt to do even a little bit more than that you will sooner or later port it to the CP wrapper. I had to do this just the other day. After implementing my core engine, GUI and the scenes in no time it took me about 3-4 weeks just wasting time searching for workarrounds for various bugs and not implemented features. Finally i resigned and ported to CP.
I was supprised how easy this process was - no major issues or anything. It took me about two hours to have the port ready, but we are talking about a huge project. The CP classes are similar to the .NET interfaces but much more c# like regarding naming, usage and the look & feel as a whole.

I was even more supprised with the effect. Unchanged source produced visually amazing improvements. Dont ask me how is this possible. I couldnt believe it neither. Seems that lot of stuff is somehow lost if working with the original Irrlicht.NET wrapper.
Sure you dont get everything with CP but I'd say that you have at least 90% of all the features compared to C++ which is at least 50% more tham using the .NET wrapper.

All this is of course just my personal opinion, not that I was a CP fan- i just found about that project by accident and gave it a try the other day!


C ya