Irrlicht Engine Thoughts

aztech · Post by **aztech** » Tue May 22, 2007 1:33 am

Hello everyone. I'm new to this forum. We are thinking about starting our next game project with the irrlicht engine. Can you guys give me your honest opinion about the engine? Is it a great engine to use? The last game we made we used an engine that seemed great. But when we got deep into the project it turned out to be a very buggy engine with quite a few problems. We worked through it, but I'm hoping maybe Irrlicht is much better.

Thanks

Dances · Post by **Dances** » Tue May 22, 2007 5:01 am

Irrlicht is absolutely wonderful. It is certainly not buggy, and very easy to use.

On this site: http://www.devmaster.net/engines/ Irrlicht is listed as the second best free 3D engine period.

There are LOTS of nice reviews for it here: http://www.devmaster.net/engines/engine ... s.php?id=4

OGRE, though its rated #1, people seem to say is a lot harder to use than Irrlicht.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Tue May 22, 2007 7:36 am

Hmm, maybe the support forum of an engine is not a very good place to ask such a question

But the answer will also depend on your requirements. What target platforms do you have, which features do you plan?

CuteAlien · Post by **CuteAlien** » Tue May 22, 2007 9:54 am

Like Hybrid already mentioned it depends a lot on what you need in your project.

But i can tell about my experience, working with the engine somewhat more than a year. I had no problems with Irrlicht crashing so far. It's been very stable (only exception i can think of right now was burning video on 1.3 which does not run here at all, but it was fixed already a few days afterwards in svn). Sometimes there have been problems with feature which did not work exactly as they should have done. But all in all i was rather happy and i will continue using the engine.

I worked with way more expensive engines before and those also have not been bug free. A bonus in more expensive engines is usually a support which will work full time to fix bugs. In a free engine you will have to fix some bugs yourself. And Irrlicht was very good for that, as the sources are easy to read and extend - this is maybe the feature i liked most in this engine :-).

aztech · Post by **aztech** » Tue May 22, 2007 4:13 pm

Hey thanks for the replies. Any thoughts on collision detection? Does it work well in this engine?

Dances · Post by **Dances** » Tue May 22, 2007 4:44 pm

The collision in Irrlicht is pretty basic... it gets the job done but it can feel... too simple at times. Thats what physics engines are for.

kburkhart84 · Post by **kburkhart84** » Tue May 22, 2007 5:09 pm

Yeah, I think Irrlicht is great. I'd recommend you give us an idea of what you are doing so we can tell you what we know about Irrlicht specifically having to do with what you want. Irrlicht has a couple of quirks that depending on what you are doing may have to workaround. Supposedly, Ogre doesn't have most things like Irrlicht as far as quirks, but then as said before, Ogre is more difficult to get started with. It is a little more technically advanced than Irrlicht, but that doesn't mean it is better for what YOU want to do. Also, to let you know if you missed it, Irrlicht is getting a new animation system that will allow blended skeletal animations, which right now can't be done. As of right now, skeletal animation might as well be done keyframed because the result isn't much different(except for memory and file sizes) because you can't do more than one animation at a time. Also, I'd recommend you try a physics engine if you are doing anything very complex because the collision detection in Irrlicht is really basic as stated above. It can be used not fall through terrain and not go through walls, but not a lot more. Picking with rays(including rays from a screen point, like with a mouse) is available though.

JPulham · Post by **JPulham** » Wed May 23, 2007 4:01 pm

The community is one of the best things about irrlicht. If you need collision, there's several Newton wrappers on the Project announcements forum and a bullet demo. If you need networking there's IrrNet and the Code snippets is full of shader demos and input upgrades.
On top of that there's the simple coding interface and easy to use Object oriented scene node/Animator/Loader system that allows you to write anything you need that isn't already in the engine.

These are the main points that swayed me to Irrlicht, but as has been mentioned, it depends on what your doing.

GameDude · Post by **GameDude** » Mon May 28, 2007 5:04 pm

Also the Irrlicht is pretty fast compared to most other engines.

Zeuss · Post by **Zeuss** » Tue May 29, 2007 3:57 am

Irrlicht is a great engine, easy to use, well laid out, good documentation, great helpful and friendly community.

The only downside is that its current animation support is still very basic and old.

Luke is working a nice new skinned animation system, which when done will make Irrlicht in my opinion totally complete.

IPv6 · Post by **IPv6** » Tue May 29, 2007 10:02 am

GameDude wrote:Also the Irrlicht is pretty fast compared to most other engines.

Higly depends on how to measure. Irrlicht didn`t use hardware vertex/index buffers, so it can not stand really big number of poligons (since it is trying to push them all to GPU EVERY frame).

GameDude · Post by **GameDude** » Tue May 29, 2007 10:14 pm

Well the Irrlicht is still in development and people have made libraries to improve. Who knows these libraries could get included into the main Irrlicht engine to make it even better

playerdark · Post by **playerdark** » Sat Jul 14, 2007 4:43 am

Irrlicht is certainly great and considered that it is free it very great

On the downside, you got to be ready to either rewrite parts of your application every time a new version comes out, because it breaks the code, or stick with an older version.

If you're serious about using Irrlicht for a project and you have it intertwined with your code, every new version is a nightmare

Saturn · Post by **Saturn** » Sat Jul 14, 2007 8:32 am

You can't have improvements without breaking client code sometimes. But I hadn't had the feeling in any update in the past, that it was too much, actually the Irrlicht team is pretty conservative in that regard.
And breaking changes are documented in the changelog. Even when not all changes are explicitly listed as breaking, it can be easily deducted from compiler errors and changelog entries.

zenaku · Post by **zenaku** » Sat Jul 14, 2007 9:34 pm

After examining the source of all the game engines I could find I stuck with Irrlicht because I thought the source code was the cleanest and closest to my own C++ style. I highly recommend looking through some of the header files of the other game engines and compare them to Irrlicht.