Is Irrlicht a suitable engine for...

[Troy]

an Operation Flashpoint type of game? I mean with huge islands covering many kilometers and lots of trees and different vehicles/airplanes/weapons and of course multiplayer?

Second question: Is there a version of Irrlicht which already has a terrain in it so i could start building physics, animation and such?

Thanks for any replies!

[erSitzt]

If you have a look at the forum you will find posts of several other people who already asked the same question...

1. Yes, if you know how to do it.
2. No, there still is no terrainscenenode for real large terrains. ( I think..)

[timmy]

an Operation Flashpoint type of game? I mean with huge islands covering many kilometers and lots of trees and different vehicles/airplanes/weapons and of course multiplayer?

Second question: Is there a version of Irrlicht which already has a terrain in it so i could start building physics, animation and such?

Thanks for any replies!

the easy answer is no. I was hoping terrain support would be largely improved in irrlicht 0.7 but it wasn't. If you want a game with large terrain's than irrlicht just won't cut it unless of course you can come up with your own terrain class but many have tried and failed. Soconne who is the author of freeworld3d tried to port his geomipmapping code to irrlicht,the irrlicht engine needed some mods but it ran like crap and he gave up on it (i think?). With his own code it runs at 400fps+ ...when he ported his code to irrlicht and modified irrlicht the best he could get was 90fps.

check out ogre, it will do everything irrlicht does and heaps heaps more and heaps faster too ....watch out can be a little tricky at first but is fine once u get the hang of it although it certainly is not as easy to use as irrlicht.

I have been working on my own irrlicht geomipmapping port, but irrlicht only supports vertex buffers up to 65,000 triangles because it uses 16bit index arrays.

So I modified the engine to use 32bit index arrays, but I got about 20 fps. So then I added VBO to Irrlicht and I got 90fps, which is still far from the 400+ with regular OpenGL.

So basically I then found that for every single thing Irrlicht renders, it goes through a lot of state changes, which are very expensive performance wise.

My team and I have now switched to using DevLib for our upcoming game. Its faster and just as easy to modify and code.

that is what soconne had to say anyway,im sure he posts on here from time to time and maybe he has more too add to this.

*edit*
before anyone calls me an ogre troll i ain't. I started with irrlicht and switched to ogre simply because irrlicht couldn't do what i wanted and i don't have the knowledge at this stage to improve irrlicht myself.

[buhatkj]

well, irrlicht terrain capabilities are pretty limited right now, they ar ea very early cut at what i think it is that niko really wants to do with it. Irr has basic heightmaps, and...thats about it....no tree generation, repeating tiles...nothing really like that...so to sum up....
probably hard to make right now.
-Ted