Irrlicht Engine

Hi all !
I've made a minimum port of the engine for Wii using CodeWarrior and I wanted to share some of the problems I could have encountered...
The port was minimum because I didn't have to care about the inputs handled by my main application, so all I had to do was to compile the Irrlicht library with a Wii device and a Wii video driver (and textures).

Here's my developpement notes on Irrlicht...

CW:
Basically the transition to CodeWarrior was easy, every time a "#if defined _MSC_VER" was declared I just added the metrowerks equivalent...

Wii:
- irrAllocator.h : I realized that the line "#include <memory.h>" is useless.
- dmfsupport.h : the whole code should be encapsulated by Irrlicht namespaces
- irrMap.h : throw is used several times in this file, I suggest the replacement by a "os::Printer::log(msg, ELL_ERROR);"
- Samples : I suggest the samples shouldn't use the "using namespace irr" as some paltforms also redefine basic types as u32, s32 etc. and it's a real pain in the ass to change that in each main.cpp of the samples.
- General : when linking statically an application with Irrlicht, on the runtime many allocations occured in Irr before entering the "main()" function, wouldn't it be really interesting to get rid of these. For example on Wii, the memory management is kind of complicated and that could cause some problems...

I hope this will interest someone, and if you have any remarks about my suggestions I'll be glad to read it !

Warning : the CodeWarrior version for Wii might differ for the PC/MAC one, I'm not sure about this...
Warning : As you can understand, I won't be able to provide Wii related sources as I work under NDA...

Very cool to share!

>Warning : the CodeWarrior version for Wii might differ for the PC/MAC one, I'm not sure about this...

I have been working on CW DS and CW Wii and they are not the same, anyhow so probably PC/MAC wont be the same either.
CW sucks BTW (not like you have the choice with the big N ...) except you can compile your code very fast on a quad core ^^

Which company ?

Very Cool! I thought I might be considered crazy for thinking that I might port my commercial irrlicht game to the Wii some day. How well does it run? Does paralax mapping work?

Also, is there some fancy insider forum that the Wii devs can communicate? Do you know if you'll be releasing your port there?

Of course, I understand your binding to the NDA, so if you can't answer thoose, no problem

Oh one last question: Are we going to be seeing your game on WiiWare or in stores sometime in the nearish future?

~DtD

Valmond wrote:CW sucks BTW (not like you have the choice with the big N ...) except you can compile your code very fast on a quad core ^^
Which company ?

Sure Cw is buggy... But I had more difficulties with the platform than with the compiler
I work for Omegame (see signature) and we use Irrlicht to develop our in-house samples of what can be done with our middleware...

DtD wrote:How well does it run? Does paralax mapping work?
Also, is there some fancy insider forum that the Wii devs can communicate? Do you know if you'll be releasing your port there?
Are we going to be seeing your game on WiiWare or in stores sometime in the nearish future?

As I previously said I did a minimum port and this doesn't include any special effect from the original engine. Paralax mapping would be difficult to implement, I guess, as you don't have a real programmable GPU on the N consoles...
Don't know about an insider forum, official devs have access to a mailing list though.
As you mentionned, I can't release the port for obvious reasons and as I don't develop any game, just samples, it won't be available anywhere, sorry. Believe me, I'm the one who's the most frustrated by this kind of situation

The original post was also to remind Irrlicht users and creators that they have a very good product in their hands. I was glad to see how easy it was for me to port the engine on different platforms (X360 & Wii). Next step will be the Iphone (already in an advanced stage as I've been able to see on SVN).

Never underestimate the complexity of a menu (true!)

et bonne chance !