Hi everyone,
I've been assigned in my job at the university to find out what graphic/game engine suits better for our real time graphics research. I've started with Irrlicht because it seems easy to use, and it's open source, so we can surf the code and adapt it to our needs. So, my question is, are there any modules which take control of the real time deadlines and where should I look for in the code to find them? I guess real time constrains in the engine are soft ones, but that's what we are looking for.
Thank you for your help.
Real time modules
Realtime in games means typically something like - displaying 60 frames per second. But it is not so much up to the engine to guarantee that, but to you as the user. The main loop is completely under your control and so it is up to you to make sure the stuff in there does not take more than 1/60'th of a second.
The part where an engine like Irrlicht helps you is by displaying graphics as fast as possible. Which is done by using hardware acceleration and by clipping models which do not need to be drawn. It also helps by supporting the loading of graphic formats which are typically used in realtime 3D graphics.
And Irrlicht also offers support for other features which you typically need in a 3D application. For example it has a build-in gui system which low-level graphic libraries like opengl and directx are missing. And it's platform independence means you can run the same code on several systems like Windows, Linux, MacOSX.
The time constrains you have in 3D rendering are dependent on your hardware and on the amount of graphics which you try to draw each frame.
The part where an engine like Irrlicht helps you is by displaying graphics as fast as possible. Which is done by using hardware acceleration and by clipping models which do not need to be drawn. It also helps by supporting the loading of graphic formats which are typically used in realtime 3D graphics.
And Irrlicht also offers support for other features which you typically need in a 3D application. For example it has a build-in gui system which low-level graphic libraries like opengl and directx are missing. And it's platform independence means you can run the same code on several systems like Windows, Linux, MacOSX.
The time constrains you have in 3D rendering are dependent on your hardware and on the amount of graphics which you try to draw each frame.
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Code snippet repository: https://github.com/mzeilfelder/irr-playground-micha
Free racer made with Irrlicht: http://www.irrgheist.com/hcraftsource.htm
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Irrlicht - as most other libraries and apps - does not have anything to do with timing constraints. Neither hard nor soft ones. Irrlicht uses a simply render loop which executes the same tasks each cycle. But it does not restrict their run-time. So if you have a scene which takes few minutes to render you'd get only one frame each some minutes. I even cannot think of a reason where soft (even less hard) deadlines would make sense. After all, the idea is to see the whole scene, not to get 60 FPS with only partial renders.