Irrlicht Engine

to implement a 3d turn based strategy game using IrrLicht?


Hello,

i've made an 2d turn based strategy game with the SDL lib. Now I want to change it (I think I reached some limits of the SDL) for 3d.

I think that IrrLicht get nearly all the features i need. Only the audio part is missing, but it's not a problem. At the moment, i think i'll use OpenAL.

Well, my problem is that I'll need to implement 2 types of GUI, and I didn't find if it's possible or not with IrrLicht.

1/ I'd like to make an "user panel", with some butons (menu, actions for units, etc.). Thus i need to split the window in two parts: one for the 3d scene, and one for the menu. In a few words, how can I do that with IrrLicht?

2/ I need to make a menu "settings", and for it, i need a few controls (buton, list, text edit...). I see this like a new window that will be displayed over the main window. Is it the good way to see it? Is it possible to do this with IrrLicht?

3/ My game is cross-platform (linux & windows), and i want the new version (with Irrlicht) to keep this feature. How to make the points 1 and 2 in order to keep it cross-platform?


Thanks for any help

Regards.

Check out IrrKlang for audio, i've just started using it myself and it's stupidly easy to use... The only issue is that it's only free for personal use, you need to pay for commercial usage.

3 - No issues here with cross platform-ness, whatever you do will be fine!

1 - You needn't actually split the screen, you can just create a IGUIWindow and place that on the right side of the screen (or wherever) and add the necessary GUI features to it

2 - Similar to above really, you can just create a IGUIWindow and add buttons to it to do the necessary things.

r0d wrote: 1/ I'd like to make an "user panel", with some butons (menu, actions for units, etc.). Thus i need to split the window in two parts: one for the 3d scene, and one for the menu. In a few words, how can I do that with IrrLicht?

IVideoDriver::setViewPort(). Call it before rendering your 3D scene to set the area that it will render into, then call it again before rendering the GUI to give the GUI a different area.

r0d wrote: 2/ I need to make a menu "settings", and for it, i need a few controls (buton, list, text edit...). I see this like a new window that will be displayed over the main window. Is it the good way to see it? Is it possible to do this with IrrLicht?

Sure, just use IGUIEnvironment::addWindow(), then add your other GUI elements to that window.

r0d wrote: 3/ My game is cross-platform (linux & windows), and i want the new version (with Irrlicht) to keep this feature. How to make the points 1 and 2 in order to keep it cross-platform?

Mission (already) Accomplished.

Great!
Thank you very much, i'll try it as soon as possible.

A last question (i guess i can find the answer in the doc, but... ):
Is it easy to customize the IGUIWindow?
(I just want to put pictures in background of the controls and a "sexy" font.)

Yes it is:
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/docu/na ... _1gui.html