Irrlicht Engine

I'm a professional game programmer and the author of RakNet. I want to say publicly that I love Irrlicht. The documentation is A+. The design is clean, intuitive, and easy to use. The code is easy to read and modify. The engine is powerful enough to do everything I want to do. None of the features are superfluous or a burden to use. And the performance is fantastic. I quickly find fault with most APIs that I look at yet haven't found a single thing I don't like yet about Irrlicht.

What appeals to me most about Irrlicht is that it is not obtrusive. I don't have to design my architecture a certain way. To read and use the code in the samples I can copy a few lines of code, as opposed to a dozen files in some libraries. I don't have to write XML files to design an interface, spend 20 minutes recompiling after every change, download dependencies, or change source files just to compile the samples.

This is the same priciple that i use in RakNet. The API is supposed to save you time, not cost you time. It's nice to see I'm not the only API author that understands this.

Good job!

That's great to hear .

Yes, especially from the author of RakNet.

Hey, that was very nice to hear
I would like to say the same things about the RakNet libabry.
Great piece of soft.

Thanks for the detailed, positive feedback, nice to hear that you like it. Did you take a look at Irrlicht because of the raknet tutorial I posted on the front page?

niko wrote:Thanks for the detailed, positive feedback, nice to hear that you like it. Did you take a look at Irrlicht because of the raknet tutorial I posted on the front page?

speaking of things that should be posted on the front page. *cough*

and of things that should be posted on the wiki...

yes Irrlicht is great and we all love it and raknet rules also.

old news moving on...

The opening appeal of Irrlicht was the generous license, the fact that it is open source, and the nice tutorials. Once I downloaded the library it helped a lot that I was able to compile with a minimum of hassle and able to integrate the source without a huge hassle.

The only problem I had was converting to source from a DLL but it was a minor problem in relation to other APIs.

After the intial setup I stuck with Irrlicht because it was easy to integrate. Loose coupling + tight cohesion = small, simple, portable, tutorials. I really appreciate this not just for its own sake but because I can copy / paste into my game and see the results immediately.

As I use Irrlicht more I continue to be impressed by the feature set. I've been integrating the GUI lately and find elements that I never even thought of. Usually I wouldn't bother to use a GUI set that came with a 3D api because it would cost me more time overall to learn and debug than to write my own. In this case, I feel I am saving loads of time.

Lastly, I appreciate how easy the code is to read and modify. I needed to load resources from a memory file instead of an actual file. I was able to accomplish it in about 30 minutes, including testing.

Irrlicht is perfect for someone like me who always tries to reinvent the wheel with no success. It's allowing me to prototype ideas with little trouble, not losing any real time if the idea doesn't pan out. Irrlicht is brilliant!

I've just started using RakNet too as one of my ideas is small a multiplayer game; I must say that the same thing applies to RakNet, it's small, simple, clean and fast.

Rakkar and Nico have both done sterling jobs in developing their code AND releasing it to the public, so thank you both of you for your hard work and time. I certainly appreciate it!

I agree that Irrlicht has a shallow learning curve and it lets you get up and running quickly. The documentation is easy to follow. I'd continue using it but I need to see if there are any performance improvements in OpenGL for 0.12.

I think overall, it's a great place for someone starting to learn 3D and/or game development. It sort of doesn't get in your way, provided you don't want to do anything too complex/large.

Aww, nice post !

Raknet and Irrlicht both are amazing

Thank you to both of you guys for all your hard work,

If my game gets anywhere I'm thinking of using Raknet. We'll see though.

niko wrote:Thanks for the detailed, positive feedback, nice to hear that you like it. Did you take a look at Irrlicht because of the raknet tutorial I posted on the front page?

Hey Niko, I wrote that tutor. Awesome thanks for linking it on the FP! I was checking my logs and noticed my hits went way up and it stunned me.

I noticed it isn't in the tutorials section like your news update says, though.. is there any problem?

roninmagus wrote:I noticed it isn't in the tutorials section like your news update says, though.. is there any problem?

Hm, but it is, the last one, on the bottom of the page. Maybe your browser has a problem with its cache?

I've been watching the engine for a long time, and when Mac OSX suppport is ready, I might take the dive since there's also a Python binding.

Congrats to all involved. It's turning into an excellent piece of technology!

Venom isn't a true Python binding - it doesn't bind Irrlicht functions. Rather it binds higher level functions written as a framework.