Irrlicht Engine

Hello.
I'm a beginner game developer who is wandering to find the fit game engine. I checked a few both open source and commercial ones and I haven't found the right one for me. But I don't know why the heck I skipped Irrlicht so far, after all. Anyway, reading about it on Wikipedia convinced me it would be not only the best choice for me but actually continuously bringing up new and new bonus assets to add to what I was expecting!
From all these reasons I value very much the friendly community, customization, license, learning curve. Plus I've read a simple (getting started) tutorial by dudMaN which lifted a burden off my mind. He made working with Irrlicht look easy to grasp and accessible to C++/game developer newbies. So in like 10 min. I learned how to create a simple functional... game.

But I'm very curious whether Irrlicht has some features I'm particularly interested in. Even if it doesn't have them -- no problem (I've already read the official ones):

1. LOD for all possible things, besides 3D meshes: billboards, particles, terrain.

2. Dynamically replacement of 3D meshes with 2D billboards.

3. Custom palette files like 16 colors display.

4. Any way to check the bottleneck of performance: GPU / video ram / CPU / ram / code etc.

5. Multithreading.

6. Loading in background. Like when close to the level boundary, load the next one so that the player enters it seamlessly.

If they're not present, can you honestly tell me if it's feasible and recommended to implement any of them myself manually? Please.

no multithreading. oh and this is wrong forum section to post in

I've moved the post.

As for your questions - the answer is mostly no.

1. LOD is there for terrain.
2. I remember bitplane wrote an extension for that, but don't know where to find it right now. Search the forum for "impostors".
3. I don't think so.
4. I've written a small profiler which I will probably add to Irrlicht at some time, but mostly I use external tools for that.
5. no
6. Basically needs 5. to work well, so no.

Sorry for wrong posting and thank you, guys. I don't need the features at this moment. I'd be happy to see a few tanks firing on a field atm. But I hope in the future someone will consider them.

Well, you could implement them
You can use manual optimization LOD using different polycount meshes and puting them on the screen depending how far you are from them...
Multithreading is more of a "system" thing, irrlicht is a graphics engine (that can also handle input). You can always find another library and bind it with irrlicht to generate a really cool product. SFML for example is capable of multithreading, input, networking and sound. You could aslo use Boost to handle multithreading.
Anyways...good luck

You can program the most of the points by your own

Thank you.
About LOD I don't know the resources needed to replace the mesh/particle system/billboard manually. Maybe I speak rubbish but I have the (wrong?) guess that what I code myself is slower than the built-in features. I hope I'm wrong
Anyway sorry to dwell on this but has anybody tried to use 16 or 256 color textures so far? I'm far from even trying to load a texture at all atm...

i'm curious. can the LOD feature in terrain directly port to mesh scene node?

mireazma wrote:Hello.
I'm a beginner game developer... ... ...


I've read a simple (getting started) tutorial by dudMaN which lifted a burden off my mind. He made working with Irrlicht look easy to grasp and accessible to C++/game developer newbies. So in like 10 min. I learned how to create a simple functional... game.

Hey, I'm beginner too, and also trying to make a simple game... so could you please point me to the tutorial by dudMaN wich you was was talking about??? It would help me a lot if you did.

Here: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... hp?t=24898

mireazma wrote:Thank you.
About LOD I don't know the resources needed to replace the mesh/particle system/billboard manually. Maybe I speak rubbish but I have the (wrong?) guess that what I code myself is slower than the built-in features. I hope I'm wrong
Anyway sorry to dwell on this but has anybody tried to use 16 or 256 color textures so far? I'm far from even trying to load a texture at all atm...

The problem with this workarround is that it only improves the fps if the scene is very populated.
It occupies more memmory at first but it can save a lot of rendering steps when your scene is too big. And also you dont need to compute LOD for every mesh at runtime.
Another problem is that you will have to make up some sort of class structure to automate your LOD, you can just extend IAnimatedMeshSceneNode to handle more than one model topology and texture resolution and at the onRegisterSceneNode you can calculate the distance and LOD of the curent mesh.