Irrlicht Engine

https://imgur.com/a/ylwYp was wondering if this was a nouveau driver issue for linux or if the software renderer / camera needs work still ?. player models seem to let you get closer to them without the culling issues.

Use Burnings renderer for a software renderer with correct clipping. The other software renderer hasn't implemented that. It's mainly there for quick gui-dialogs (so you can have for example a gui-dialog to chose which hardware renderer to use which will run on all platforms like in the Demo). It implemented some 3D so it also allows for example displaying 3d models in the gui, but it's not there for real 3D scenes.

burnngs is really slow , the mesa libGL should work too but irrlicht seems to require GLX aswell ? playing games like quake3/vlc movies under nouveau still works really nice.

update: turns out i had residual nvidia drivers in /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/ causing my mesa not to load properly. everything working great again with opengl mode.