Irrlicht Engine

Is there no other way of getting great graphics without shaders?
I mean does cool looking models and weather effects and everything that makes the newest games looks so good isn't possible without shaders?

Is there no other way

The latest and greatest tricks will always require shaders, but there are plenty of cool tricks you can do without them. I just made this which doesn't use any shaders-

That looks pretty awesome hehe, and of course I'm asking for the code

how can you do that without shader?

Well, it was supposed to be reflection and isn't finished yet, but it ended up as a pretty cool diffraction. The area is rendered to 6 64x64 render targets then rendered to a larger texture (free bilinear blur) on the faces of a hexahedral sphere. I was too lazy to do the front face like in this example-

http://www.opengl.org/resources/code/sa ... de180.html

It uses the spheremap renderer to draw the result, light bend is done by the scale of the vertex normals so you'd have to build the meshes at the correct scale. Of course you can't really update all 7 textures each frame (only the output) so it will only work with scenery.

I'll release the code when it works with standard reflections and I've tidied it up a bit, or I get sick of it and give up (whichever comes first)

Wow that is nice. I would just like to say that the picture was labeled as porn on my school computer, haha. I thought that was pretty funny.