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.

New shot of the week

It’s monday, so here is the new shot of the week: It shows a scene of the new techdemo I am currently working on. The demo will show some of the new features like real time shadows, reflections, and skyboxes and it will be included in the 0.2 release which I hope will be ready this week. The progress of version 0.2 can still be viewed on the development page.

Reflections, projects using Irrlicht

A new material type is implemented: EMT_SPHERE_MAP, already working in both Direct3D and OpenGL drivers. Just set the material type of anything in the engine to this one, and it will reflect its environment using asphere map. Looks really cool. Take a look at the screenshots. Can’t wait for release 0.2. 😉

Another good news: The first projects using the Irrlicht Engine are awakening. Torsten Damberg sent a screen shot showing his iso level loader made with the Irrlicht Engine, which has now become the first external shot of the week. Torsten also has a homepage at www.damberg.de, where you can take a look at the progress of his project.

Skyboxes

Because of a request in the forum, I added a new feature to the engine: sky box scene nodes. It was a task of a few minutes and they work perfectly. And because it is a new week, and my first working skybox looked really nice, there is a new shot of the week as you can see on the right side. The screenshot is also available in the screenshots section.

Website update

A very small website update: Played around with the colors of the website, fixed some minor bugs and added a ‘shot of the week‘.
The engine now seems to be a little bit more popular. Using google, you’ll find links to irrlicht.sourceforge.net from all over the world.

Shadows

I made some performance tests with the engine and stencil buffer shadows, and because it worked so good, I’ll include them into the next release (0.2). They have some bugs and currently only work with the Direct3D8 driver, but there is still some time to get around this before the next release. Have a look at the new screenshots.

Website update

I updated som parts of the website: The FAQ and the Author section, and the API documentation were updated. Also I added a new screenshot showing the hill plane mesh in action, which is available since 0.1.5.

Tutorial update

There is a new tutorial available on the tutorial page. It is intended for more advanced users, and shows how to implement and use your own customized scene nodes in the Irrlicht Engine. I also fixed some minor bugs in the two other tutorials because of changes the 0.1.5 release brought with it.

0.1.5 release

As announced yesterday, the 0.1.5 release is available now. It is a non-sdk-release, which means there are no external documentations, tools, tutorials, examples, and media in it. The next full release will be still version 0.2. But it is worth downloading the 0.1.5 release, new features are: Full OpenGL device implementation, simplified dynamic light interface, custom scene node support, first person shooter camera control, cursor control, g++ and Dev-C++ support and a lot more. Download it from the download section. I want to thank Mark JeacockeTorsten Damberg and Florian Wagner here for their helpful comments and ideas in the forums and per email. Helped me a lot. And a last thing: the FAQ section was updated, and I created a news archive.

OpenGL driver completed

Today, the OpenGL 2D and 3D driver implementation was finished. As you can see on the new screenshot, now there is no difference anymore between the Direct3D8 and OpenGL1.2 device. Because there are so much new things already implemented, and some people cannot wait for the release of version 0.2, I think I will make the modified source of the engine available tomorrow. There are two possibilities of release modes, I will do only one of them. Please tell me which mode you prefer most:

  • A small pre release (0.1.5) with all the sourcecode and a precompiled engine.
  • The source of the engine avaiable through sourceforge CVS.

You can use the forum for that, or if you want, send me a mail.

All the way to version 0.2

The development of the Irrlicht Engine 0.2 keeps going on. There are some new features already 100% implemented which I would like to announce here: I created a tool for making fonts for the Irrlicht Engine GUI called IrrFontTool. This program and its complete source will be included in every SDK from now on. Some other additions to the engine are: A first person shooter camera control like in Unreal™ or Quake™ has been implemented, an interface for the manipulation of the mouse cursor, and it is now possible to add external custom scene nodes to the engine. Tutorials how to use all this will be created before release.