2d capabilities

[julescoder]

I have seen the irrlicht 2d tut, but can it provide features which a conentional 2d engine like haaf's game engine would provide,
Mainly,
2d lighting effects,
2d camera.

Thnx in advance.

[Josie]

Irrlicht does not offer all the functionality of HGE. HGE has a much wider scope ( it does graphics, sounds, collisions, etc. ), whereas Irrlicht is (for the most part) just a rendering engine. Irrlicht can do 2d, but most of the functionality you'll have to do yourself. You'll also have to use other libraries for sound and probably collision, as I don't know how well irrlicht's 3d collision will play with 2d.

I'm also not sure what you mean by 2d lighting?

[Lonesome Ducky]

2D is often achieved by a flat quad in 3D space. This takes advantage of hardware acceleration. As for the lighting, you could easily write a shader to do it yourself. And for collision, I've implemented box2D in irrlicht before, so I can tell you it's quite possible.

[Josie]

2D is often achieved by a flat quad in 3D space. This takes advantage of hardware acceleration. As for the lighting, you could easily write a shader to do it yourself. And for collision, I've implemented box2D in irrlicht before, so I can tell you it's quite possible.

Agreed with Lonsome Ducky, but as I said, you'll be implementing your own functions to make/manipulate these quads.

Also note that drawing large numbers of individual quads can be slow without
optimization.