Irrlicht Engine

Hi all, I'm new here (but not new in programming). Got the link from somewhere in the allegro.cc-forum, and was happy to see that 1st there's an active community and 2nd there is a tutorial about 2D-usage of Irrlicht.

So now I'll start to dig in the postings, but my main question is: Does anybody here use the engine for 2D-games? Maybe isometric tile based games? I want to do something of that type, maybe with some 3D-effects later, and maybe real 3D even later.

I would be really happy if you could point me to some examples, best with working code...

Thanks!

The tutorials section of the website has a few tutorials on 2d graphics and isometrics.

Well, this is what I have seen - but not thoroughly looked into - but what I really wanted to know is: Is there someone doing essentially 2D with Irrlicht? What are the experiences?

the community is about 50% 2d games look around the forums a bit.

I've done some 2D work with Irrlicht. It's a great place to start, but if you are doing a purely 2D game, it might be worth finding an engine written specifically for the purpose (there are plenty). However, if you plan to extend into 3D rendering, then stick with Irrlicht, it won't let you down.

I am nearing completion on a tetris type game to try and get something finished as an example for Bindenlicht. It has been a joy to work with Irrlicht as everything has just seemed to 'work'. For audio, I added sound support to bindenlicht, but for everything else in the game it was straight Irrlicht. That said, the graphics requirements weren't very high.

Something else 2D I have started is a spacewar type game, where the view is 2D, but rendered using 3D scene nodes. This was great to work on as it is very fast, very easy to add special effects to, and things like rotations and zooming can be done so easily because it's all done in 3D behind the scenes. To the user it looks 2D, but in developing it I have all the advantages of 3D hardware.

As a final example, I once tried to make a 3D tile-based dungeon game. It uses orthographic projection, so the view is 2D (no projection), but the models are 3D, with dynamic lights, and a 3D camera that can rotate/zoom. It's has a kind of dungeon-keeper/diablo graphical style. Thanks to the flexibility of a 3D engine, and the ease development with the Irrlicht API it took very little time to get where it is and was very straight forward code-wise. I still have all the code to go back to at a later date.

I would be happy to dust them off and send them to you as examples, just write me an email if you are interested. Just so you know though, it's all written in Java, but it should be very simple to port the relevent code to C++, as the Irrlicht calls are all the same.

Thanks for the offer, William! Have sent a PM already...

I have looked around the forum yesterday, and it seems indeed that quite a few people are actually using 2D only or mixed with 3D. I've looked into the CrystalSpace3D also, and there it seems to be different...

So may I ask for advice? I want to do an isometric tile based game, where I have one or exactly four camera positions, but I want to be able to zoom in and out (to some degree at least). How would I model this? Should the tiles be meshes, so everything is really 3D? Or should I draw the tiles in 2D? What about the zooming then?

In asking these questions I want to get some feeling if it is worth to get into this engine, which looks really good. Of course I could find out all these things myself, but time is a critical resource for me, I don't have too much, so I want to make sure it is well spent. Thank you very much for any advice!

Even if your camera will be fixed and game will be isometric I recommend u to use 3d. Its no reason to do it 2d nowadays. Good luck.

Yeah thats right, I'm currently making a 2d game in which you fly with a zeppelin. But i need Irrlicht to display zeppein model ( which is the only 3d aspect of the game ). And it looks kinda good when combined with 2d map.
The game will be released soon.

Thanks for all the info, and William, thanks for the source code sample! I'll have a closer look into that tomorrow, because I don't have a wirking java installed at home.

Anyway, the examples coming with Irrlicht are quite instructive, so I think I can find a good start there: The 2DGraphics example and the TerrainRender will do.

Hmm, I have also downloaded some other engines, just to have a look also. That's OGRE, Genesis3D and CrystalSpace3D. Well, I assume that most of you would prefer Irrlicht over any of these, but I have also read good things about OGRE here, so which of these would be easier to use for my purpose? Any advice?

For my intended project I'm not sure any longer that purely isometric will do. Somehow it seems that simple polygon models which are textured using graphics which can be easily found in the internet is not that much more difficult than drawing isometric images myself, so it might be that I'll go 3D completely - but that's not decided yet (and I don't have to decide this within a short time). Again thanks for your efforts in reading and advising me here!