Irrlicht Engine

Greetings All,

Peace. I am completing our first real commercial product and I am confused about how Irrlicht can fit into the equation. I hear that Irrlicht is great for prototyping etc…but folks would not use it for a commercial product. I need to have clarification on this please.

We completed our project with Irrlicht last year, it looked great. The problem was that many of our customers had older computers and I set up the driver for directX8, which many did not have. So I felt horrible that customers felt upset. Now, although I would love to use Irrlicht for this next commercial project I feel nervous, and want to know what I can do to ensure that they can open the project on most computers correctly—if anything.

Even on my computer, when I open the Irrlicht tutorials in OpenGL, or most of the other driver options (I believe) other than DirectX8 or 9 they do not render properly—some in black and white, and not color.

So, the bottom line is, is there something I do to ensure that our product can run on most users’ computers where it is rendered properly? Will this newer update 1.5 (I had the previous one) help in this? Thank you in advance for your help or suggestions. It is for a fundraising project.

NB As an aside...I love Irrlicht and would love to use it, I have no disprespect

Peace.

You could use one of the software drivers. This will ensure that the app will look the same on all computers.

However the software drivers doesn't support shaders for example so you have to keep that in mind during development.

Btw:
What type of computers do your customers have when there isn't even support for dx8 ? 486?

@ Sylence...Yeah the computer were from churches where they received donated older computers, and others were kids who only had access to their grandmother's older computers. What did you mean by the "software drivers" ? Did you mean "Software Renderer", and "Burning Software Renderer?" I just tried both of those and they worked great(no Black and white), but is this the drivers you meant for me to use for it to work on older computers?

Our next program is a simple 2D game where all we need is (a) just to allow the user to push buttons so that menus appear, (b) be able to have a billboard or panel on which I can animate jpg files. The jpeg animations will be created in 3Ds Max.

Please let me know which software drivers you meant. I *really* appreciate your response!

Yep i meant the software driver and the burning software renderer.
They should be enough for what you want.

They will always work since they don't rely on the graphics hardware. Everything is rendered using the CPU. And since you only want to have some menus even a gameboy should be able to render this at accapteble framerates

@ Sylence... Thank you *so* much for your reply. I'll be sure to post the final product on Irrlicht . You are my angel of the day... I have a quote for you...


Peace be to you, fear not. ~Genesis 43:23

Peace.

You should probably offer a choice between OpenGL and the two software drivers, OpenGL will be much faster on machines that support it and doesn't require any external libraries to be installed.
If you have problems with OpenGL on older machines then just report the bugs so they can be fixed or we can at least find a workaround.

@ bitplane Thank you so much for your kind response. We'll offer both drivers and send a download to you of the program just so you'll see it. God bless you all my 3D family for all of your fine work.

Peace