Irrlicht Engine - A free open source 3D engine

Welcome to the Irrlicht Engine

The Irrlicht Engine is an open source realtime 3D engine written in C++. It is cross-platform, using D3D, OpenGL and its own software renderers. OpenGL-ES2 and WebGL renderers are also in development. It is a stable library which has been worked on for nearly 2 decades. We've got a huge community and Irrlicht is used by hobbyists and professional companies alike. You can find enhancements for it all over the web, like alternative terrain renderers, portal renderers, exporters, world layers, tutorials, editors, language bindings and so on. And best of all: It's completely free.

Irrlicht 1.0 for MacOS released

Etienne Petitjean just finished Irrlicht 1.0 for MacOS, and this time there are again some new features in it:

  • Includes universal Binaries (runs on MacIntel and MacPPC machines)
  • The keyboard handling code has been completely rewritten
  • Added support for native copy, cut, paste for the 2D GUI

Happy downloading. Thanks to Etienne for all the work.

Games using Irrlicht

I added screenshots of two games using Irrlicht to the screenshots section:

  • Bolzplatz2006 (german), SlamSoccer2006 (english) or CoupDeFoot2006 (frensh) has been released recently by Xenoage Software and is a free comic-style 3D-football-game created using Irrlicht/Jirr. It has a lot of nice features and is fun to play.
  • SilentFuture is working on an impressive looking game named High On Racing which is using the Mupolis Engine, which again is based on Irrlicht. Added some pictures of it.

Documentation uploaded, additional tutorials

I finally uploaded the Irrlicht 1.0 API documentation to this website. Further news:

Irrlicht 1.0 released

I just released Irrlicht version 1.0. It includes some few new features and bugfixes since the last release and has been carefully tested. Some of the new features are:

  • Enhanced software rasterizer: 32 bit rendering, dynamic lights, more materials (Thx to Thomas Alten!).
  • Support for the Code::Blocks IDE
  • Microsoft .dll hell awareness (no more abort and ‘d3dx9_xx.dll not found’ messages), Irrlicht will also operate if some of these dlls can not be loaded.
  • Better support for orthogonal rendering and drawing to foreign windows, useful for creating 2D games, editors and 3D tools using Irrlicht.
  • Improved Irrlicht.NET (root scene node, view frustrums, bounding boxes, …)
  • More precise picking
  • gcc 4 support
  • Bugfixes, other small implemented feature requests

For a complete list, please take a look at the changes.txt file. Happy downloading. I’m quite happy to get this release out, and also wrote down a small summary of the development of Irrlicht until now, why Irrlicht 1.0 has been released now, and what will be done in the future, on my blog.

Other news:

PhysX & Irrlicht and more

Forum changes

Bitplane and SkaterX29527 now are official Irrlicht Forum moderators, and try to help out to make the forum a better place. Welcome on board!

Some other, related news: If you are a registered Irrlicht Forum user but haven’t posted anything until now, your account might have been deleted recently by mistake because we are trying to fight spammers.

Irrlicht for Mac OS X released

Etienne Petitjean invested lots of hours of his spare time and created a complete Mac port of the Irrlicht Engine. The result can now be downloaded as separete irrlicht-0.14.0-macOs SDK. It includes the full source and precompiled binaries of the engine and the examples. The port is not checked into the CVS yet, so the download will be the only source of the MacOS version of Irrlicht for now. Happy downloading, and a lot thanks to Etienne!

Other news: Jirr, an java binding for Irrlicht has been released in version 0.6, providing interfaces to the full irrlicht-0.14.0.

irrLua 0.6 released

Josh Turpen just released IrrLua 0.6 for Irrlicht-0.14. IrrLua is an attempt to provide a nice Lua front end to the Irrlicht Engine and now supports all the examples and the demo included in the SDK. IrrLua is one of the the furthest along of all the language bindings of Irrlicht and it also now supports dynamically extending Irrlicht at runtime.

Some other news: Bloodgiver, a game created using Irrlicht won the Polish red cross competition.

Irrlicht Engine development more open now

I’m glad to announce that there are several changes in the software development process of Irrlicht:

  • Irrlicht now is accessable via CVS. You can grab the latest development version of the engine directly as described in this FAQ entry and it is also possible to browse it via html.
  • We’ve now got an Irrlicht Engine team, I’ve updated the author page. If you would like to join the team, please take a look at the FAQ entry. Currently, we would be glad to find someone to create and maintain a Mac port, for example (also mentioned in the FAQ entry).
  • I’ve written some basic Irrlicht coding rules you may want to look at, if you want your additions to be merged with the development code.

And last, I’ve finally managed to upload the version 0.14.0 API documentation.

New Irrlicht related project & development video

I’ve added a new project using Irrlicht to the screenshots section. It is named Bloodgiver and is a Gothic style RPG with lots of NPCs and (polish) dialogs, developed by Delan. The game is finished and can be downloaded and played freely.

Some other news: Ing. Apfelbaum created a short video showing a WIP version of Irrlicht with an interesting new feature.