Irrlicht Engine

I believe this belongs in off-topic. So i have irrlicht and all and as ive read, i keep hearing about how its so flexible. well i was wondering if i have to learn open gl, or something like that to make it to my needs. as i Have strong knowledge in c++ and plan on using irrlicht for a long time, while hopefully contributing. i just need a little bit of help getting on the right track.

Ever heard of text formatting? Anyway, that doesn't really matter (I almost didn't read it due to the lack of formatting, that's all)

I believe this belongs in off-topic. So i have irrlicht and all and as ive read, i keep hearing about how its so flexible.

*I've
Anyway, what have you read? You kind of cut half of the sentence out.

well i was wondering if i have to learn open gl, or something like that to make it to my needs.

What are your needs? Do you expect me to be able to read your mind in order to figure out your needs and then magically determine if you will need OpenGL or not?

as i Have strong knowledge in c++ and plan on using irrlicht for a long time, while hopefully contributing.

Good for you.

i just need a little bit of help getting on the right track.

I will help you, if you tell me what you need help with.


Oh, don't really care for what I write, I am probably the rudest or at least on the top 5 rudest users list.
But to put it simply, your post contains (nothing) of value as it doesn't ask a question that can be answered nor does it do anything but glorify your skills within C++ as that is literally all you said.

well i was mostly asking if i was going to need to learn open gl or not to do things like, write my own shaders. as i am planning on making my own video game with the engine.

You should know the basics of OpenGL and you will have to learn GLSL if you want to write shaders.

I think you can start to work with default engine's features right now. Builtin features mostly do not require from you to know complicated internals of the DirectX or OpenGl.
And when you will become comfortable with it and standard materials will not satisfy your needs, you can learn how to use GLSL/HLSL/CG in irrlicht, how to directly manipulate meshbuffers and other interesting stuff.

Welcome to the forum Oppositescopez,

Imagine Irrlicht as a car and OpenGL as the car's engine. To drive car you practically don't need to know anything about enignes. If one day you will learn to drive cars very well, you may want to do some tuning of your car to get even better results. To tune your car, you will need to know your car's engine work.

The same is with Irrlicht. At first learn how to use it. Learn it well, and if one day you Irrlicht will be not enough for your needs, learn OpenGL and tune it.

So, the best would be if you will start with the tutorials: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/tutorials/ . Play with all of them, modify them, later try expanding them with own code, finally try to write purely own code. Use the documentation to get deeper into the things. Later, when you will know Irrlicht very well, you can start playing with custom shaders and other things that require knowledge of OpenGL.

Have fun!