Is Irrlicht Dead?

[reifsnyderb]

Hello,

I was recently looking for a new release, of Irrlicht, and the last release was from 2013. Has there been any more Irrlicht development? Is there a plan for future development?

This is very important as some developers may not be too interested in using such an engine if it is not longer going to be improved.

Best Regards,

Brian

[CuteAlien]

No, Irrlicht is not dead. 2014 development was even a little up from the year before. But the main programmer hasn't shown up for a while (busy with job) and so currrently it's mainly Nadro and me developing. I try to keep up with testing and applying patches and fixing bugs reported by the community. But we both do that in our spare-time and there's not always that much of that. So activity varies a lot.

Still if you want to check newest progress get the svn versions (trunk, ogl-es and shader branch are all development versions). You can also follow progress on the sourceforge activity page: https://sourceforge.net/p/irrlicht/acti ... 0b6357b35f

I hope I finish a game release next week which kept me busy last months. Thought not sure yet if it means I'll have more time afterwards (obviously have to work on another project then).

Can't tell when next release will be ready. The plan was originally to merge ogl-es into trunk and release after that. But I don't really like doing that shortly before a release, so by now I wonder if we should maybe just fix last open problems (there's a few minor things) and release 1.9. And then switch to git, merge ogl-es, kick out dx8, maybe (not yet discussed, just thinking out loud) kick out one software driver and then release a 1.10 version.

[reifsnyderb]

Thanks for the update!

[chronologicaldot]

@CuteAlien - I like the last commit you added (rect constructor).

[Squareys]

And then switch to git, merge ogl-es, kick out dx8

Did I really read switch to git? Awesome! Very excited!

[ent1ty]

And then switch to git, merge ogl-es, kick out dx8

Did I really read switch to git? Awesome! Very excited!

Just throwing this out here, in case someone hasn't noticed and would like to use it: https://github.com/osense/irrlicht-git

[Wodzu]

No, Irrlicht is not dead. 2014 development was even a little up from the year before. But the main programmer hasn't shown up for a while (busy with job) and so currrently it's mainly Nadro and me developing. I try to keep up with testing and applying patches and fixing bugs reported by the community. But we both do that in our spare-time and there's not always that much of that. So activity varies a lot.

I think it is extremely important for newcomers to know that Irrlicht is still developed. I, for example decided to use Irrlicht because I saw some movement on the forum:) If bugs are fixed that is great. Perhaps you could guys make a build once a week or once a month with all fixes and put it on the web? That would show the new users that Irrlicht is not dead and we all could benefit from it. I do not know how much effort that requires, so I am just tossing an idea here.

I could even donate some cash to make that happen. If each of us would give lets say 10€ ?

[AReichl]

just curious - what about Hybrid?

[CuteAlien]

@AReichl: I don't really know more than you guys. I suppose having a company (www.cosynth.com) just doesn't leave him with enough spare-time for Irrlicht development.

@Wodzu: For a while we had nightly-builds, but last time I checked it was no longer active. The problem with real releases is that they take some time: https://sourceforge.net/p/irrlicht/code ... cklist.txt
We should probably automize it some more (but with doing that just once per year or so no one cares...).

[Wodzu]

@Wodzu: For a while we had nightly-builds, but last time I checked it was no longer active. The problem with real releases is that they take some time: https://sourceforge.net/p/irrlicht/code ... cklist.txt
We should probably automize it some more (but with doing that just once per year or so no one cares...).

I would say continous integration is a must for such big project but I know that setting it up will be a lot of work. That is why I've suggested to raise some funds to give you (or whoever is responsible) incentive for a new release.

[thanhle]

I guess after v1.9, some of the experts or veterans Irrlicht user need to form team with the current team to push development process.
An open source project need all the help from the community to speed development rate.
Feature wise we need to expand to catch up with other engine.
At the moment looks like its too much responsibility for only a few people, which doesn't seem to be right.

Cheers
thanh

[AReichl]

OR the few people concentrate on something "special".
I would not know WHAT that could be, but there should be a (technical) reason to use Irrlicht (except ease of use).

Lastly i took a look at Urho3D (a "full" free game engine) and i thought WOW - EVERYTHING you need in one package and it compiles and runs out of the box. The downside is that they probably don't go beyond DirectX 9 / OpenGL 2, so it's future use is somehow limited.

If Irrlicht is mainly grafics (with a little bit of Input, GUI and Collision) then it should be specially good at that. Again i don't know what "specially good" could mean, but we probably could make a list of (special) features that could be integrated step by step.

[mongoose7]

Support for specular lighting and transparency (with bump/normal mapping). Maybe reflection mapping as well.

[CuteAlien]

@thanhle: It's simply not easy to find people willing to invest their spare-time for free. Last 3 guys I asked to join the core-team all declined. I still appreciate their help in the forums etc - but I guess they are simply clever enough to realize that working on the core-team usually means working on a lot of rather boring stuff. Writing new features is fun. But you usually don't have to join Irrlicht core-team for that. Doing stuff like cleaning up meshloaders to unify code is... I think scary is the best word. Or on-one ever said writing tests is fun, I think we never ever got a patch by anyone who wrote tests for the engine. Rather the opposite, many people don't even write tests for their own patches!