Irrlicht Engine

I'm currently planning to help someone convert a commercial windows app to a cross platform windows/mac/linux app. The application is physics related, and does a ton of calculations to produce 3d graphs of vector fields. The problem is, right now the visualizations aren't done in DX or OpenGL -- they're done in the basic win32 api. This is slow, and obviously not portable.

I know irrlicht's license is compatible -- but I don't know if it's the best tool for the job. Is irrlicht overkill for something like this? Would I be better off doing this in straight OpenGL? I don't have much experience programming 3D, and will be doing a lot of learning along the way, so I don't have a great idea of what's appropriate yet.

First of all, it depends on how much code of the original prog you got and what's your OGL programming background. If you can separate the physics code to a stand-alone library, I don't see a point why you shouldn't try using the irr. And hey, if you're talking about real time graphing it could be done real nicely with the irr.10 XML parser. Give it a try.

I would definitely recommed Irrlicht for what you are wanting to do. Sounds like an interesting project, good luck.

Joe