Irrlicht Engine

What's happening to Irrlicht development right now? I love Irrlicht and everything, but it's so limited. I've made far too many modifications to Irrlicht, so I know for sure it's missing a lot of things and some of it needs to be rebuilt to support features like VBOs and normal mapping.
And yes, I know it's 0.7, so all these things will get done by 1.0, but when is 1.0? What's happening now? Are things moving along? Are they lacking developers?

niko has not much time at the moment, and he dont want other developers on the engine because he want to make everything on his own till 1.0, no clue why.

but i would like to see some updates too. mostly CG shaders, thats the most important. then better file support, because at the moment its terrible. i want at least ONE file support that works 100%!!!! and lightmapping should finally find a native way to irrlicht too (a commercial usable solution!!!). and also better opengl support, since directx is atleast 3 times faster! and vertex buffers! there is so much that has been to do!

You could check out IrrlichtNX++ for all those things. It's still far from perfect but at least a lot better than the normal Irrlicht.

As far as the better OpenGL. OGL2 is comming soon. Once it does all niko has to do is give Irrlicht a quick tweak here and there and it should render 10x better.

any news on the whole DirectX and DevC problems, i know there are some workarounds (none which have worked for me), but it is senseless to send DirectX files along with a program if someone already has DirectX. that and DX cannot be run in windowed mode (saw that somewhere here on the forums).

but all in all this engine seems really fast, and for the most part a little easier than most out there (that ive seen).

are the little problems like these being fixed in the IrrlichtNX++ program, or are they just on standby?

AFAIK , NX[++] is the borg.

be carefull or ... You will be assimilated...

No, really... there is evidence all around!

well i cant get DevC to work correctly with the NX CVS... so it wont assimilate me... yet

You could check out IrrlichtNX++ for all those things. It's still far from perfect but at least a lot better than the normal Irrlicht.

Well personally i prefer to stick with the original Irrlicht, because it's not that bloated , i like niko's coding style and i trust him more than it's former apprentices.
I saw some "interesting" functions in IrrlichtNX that made me run away from it.

Fundamentalist wrote: I saw some "interesting" functions in IrrlichtNX that made me run away from it.

could you elaborate on that please ? id really like to know.
thx.

mm765 wrote:

Fundamentalist wrote: I saw some "interesting" functions in IrrlichtNX that made me run away from it.

could you elaborate on that please ? id really like to know.
thx.

Yes, I'm also curious what it is in NX++ that is bloated?

Anyone ever thought of working in multithreading so the load could be spread across multiple CPU's?

AFAIK very few of us have multiple CPU's (kinda expensive if they're good ones) so I don't think anyone's given it much thought

It wouldn't be a good deal either in case you want to develop an app or a game since everything would be running perfect in your system but performance would be dramatically different on average pcs.

one of the facts I like about Irrlicht is how fast it runs even in lower-end spec boxes.

SkaterX29527 wrote:As far as the better OpenGL. OGL2 is comming soon. Once it does all niko has to do is give Irrlicht a quick tweak here and there and it should render 10x better.

sorry, it doesn't work like that though, i wish it did.

Robomaniac wrote:

SkaterX29527 wrote:As far as the better OpenGL. OGL2 is comming soon. Once it does all niko has to do is give Irrlicht a quick tweak here and there and it should render 10x better.

sorry, it doesn't work like that though, i wish it did.

Yeah I think that was an under statment. sorry, but If the GLSL gets into Irrlicht then its almost there.