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.

Spanish Irrlicht tutorials & Jirr update

Irrlicht Engine 0.11.0 released!

I just released Irrlicht 0.11.0. This release contains lots of bug fixes and improvements, and not that much new features. The highlights of version 0.11.0 are:

  • Improved Linux support: Mip mapping, Shared Object make target, speed improvements, bug fixes.
  • Enhanced Irrlicht.NET: Besides other small additions, the SceneCollisionManager is now available as well as the first big parts of the GUI System.
  • Antialiasing is now possible when using the D3D8 or D3D9 renderer.
  • Skinnable GUI environment: It is now possible to change the appearance of the graphical user interface easily. Besides the old skin, Irrlicht also includes now a new, metal shaded GUI skin.
  • COLLADA file loading simplified.
  • Lots of other bug fixes and improvements, see changes.txt for a detailed list.

You can download Irrlicht 0.11.0 from the download page. I also uploaded the new API documentation and API.NET documentation, and updated the development page.

EPFL using Irrlicht in robot simulation

Two short updates:

New irrXML release

I just released irrXML 1.1, the xml parser used by Irrlicht. This release adds some small bug fixes and improvements.
Other news:

New irrXML release

There are some new projects using Irrlicht:

Community updates

Time for some community news:

  • jirr, a a Java(tm) binding for Irrlicht has beend released in version 0.4, which supports Irrlicht 0.10.0 and includes source and documentation and all 12 translated examples. Thanks to Stefan Dingfelder for his work.
  • The first 10 Irrlicht tutorials have been translated into italian by Hangman.
  • The german Irrlicht Engine forum is now located at irrlicht3d.de.
  • Peter Müller released his art project LeoPig which uses Irrlicht. Source included.

Irrlicht 0.10.0 released!

I just uploaded Irrlicht 0.10.0 to the sourceforge servers. This release of Irrlicht is maybe the one with the most new useful features in it. I implemented lots of user requests, hope you like it. The highlights are:

  • Five new built-in materials. The most interesting new material type is parallax mapping (screenshot) known from the Unreal3 demos. Implemented for the D3D8, D3D9 and OpenGL drivers. A demo in the SDK demonstrates this feature.
  • RTT (Render To Texture) support.
  • Built in DeleD (.dmf) and COLLADA (.xml, dae) mesh importers. The latter one is even able to load not only meshes but complete scenes with light and camera setup. This means that Irrlicht now is able to load 12 different 3D mesh formats directly.
  • .PNG texture loading support.
  • Specular highlights.
  • The possibility to run Irrlicht inside an existing Win32 window/widget.
  • Highly extended Irrlicht.NET support: Added animators, font drawing, collision response, and triangle selectors.
  • Two new tutorials. This means there are now 17 tutorials/examples in total in the SDK.
  • Software renderer with support for transparencies.
  • Enhanced XML parser (irrXML).
  • Lots of speed improvements and bug fixes.

For a complete list, please see the changes.txt file. You can download Irrlicht 0.10.0 from the download page. Updated also the features page, the author page, the tutorials, and the development page. And I also uploaded the new API documentation for Irrlicht and Irrlicht.NET.

irrXML 1.0 & irrLua 0.1 released

After lots of user requests, I’ve created a separate project for the Irrlicht Engine xml parser. I extended it with lots of new features and bugfixes. I named it irrXML and created an own homepage for it. It is now completely independent of the Irrlicht Engine but still has all the nice features which made it popular. If you are searching for a descent, small, fast and simple xml parser, take a look at it.
And of course, all the features in irrXML will be in the next Irrlicht Engine releases. In fact, the whole irrXML SDK is being automaticly created from my Irrlicht development version with a click on single batch file which just copies files, runs doxygen, etc.

Another note: irrLua 0.1 has been released. It is an attempt to provide a nice lua front end to the Irrlicht engine. The current version is only set up to build under linux, at the moment. Linked this from the link page

Updated Irrlicht related project page

I updated the Irrlicht related projects page with some screenshots and links people sent me during the last days and I found in recent threads in the forum.
If you want your project added there too, just drop me a mail: email anti-spam image.
Additional updates:

Website change and call for shots

I’ve worked a little bit on the layout of this website and I think I improved it. Besides the obvious design changes it is now a lot more clearly arranged. Other big changes are:

  • Rearragend the tutorials and moved some externals to irrlicht.sf.net
  • Added ‘OSI certified’ and W3C logos
  • Added Wiki link
  • Added google search-this-website link (right upper corner)
  • Removed shot of the month
  • Added project screenshots. Currently under contruction and quite empty.

About the shot of the month removal: I’ve recieved a lot of submissions every month and it was always difficult to choose the best and not to make any one angry because of this. So I decided to drop it. Instead, I created a new section on the screenshots page, where I now want to add shots of projects using Irrlicht, together with short descriptions. I also removed the game links temporarily because of this. So, if you created / are creating a game with Irrlicht, please send me a link and shots of it, so that I can add it. Would be very nice. And free advertisement for you.
I tested the new page with FireFox, Opera and IE, but if you encounter any problems, don’t hesitate to tell me.