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.

Portal Renderer, new SotW

Brian Conner sent in some impressive shots of a project he is doing with the Irrlicht engine. I made one of the shot of the week, you can see it to the right. I also added the shot to the screenshot section.
If you would like to use the portal rendering method with the Irrlicht Engine, you are now able to do this: Maarten Bosma sent in an Addon to the engine, which does portal rendering. It is not yet finished and a little bit unstable and Maarten is asking for help to bring it to an end. You can find a link to it in the offtopic forum.

Iso LevelLoader, forum moderator

Torsten Damberg published the source of his Iso-LevelLoader for the Irrlicht Engine on his homepage. (Beware, it is in german language.) Maybe a good place to learn how to create games with the Irrlicht Engine.
Another news item: We’ve got a forum moderator: After creating eve-corp.com providing free web space for Irrlicht Engine related projects, writing lots of tutorials for the Irrlicht Engine at his homepage, and helping hundreds of Irrlicht Engine users in the forums, he finally became the official forum moderator: Who can it be, if not saigumi. I don’t know how to thank you, guy 😉

Tokamak integration and orthogonal 3D

I added some new tutorials on the tutorials page:
If you need a physics engine in your program or game, you should take a look at the new tutorial, which was written by Matthew Couch. It shows how to integrate Tokamak into Irrlicht.
Saigumi wrote a Howto on orthogonal 3D rendering with Irrlicht. You can find it at this homepage, saigumi.net. It shows that it is quite easy to create isometric games with the engine. I added links to all his tutorials on the tutorials page too.
And as you can see, we’ve got a new shot of the week. I stole it from Shane Parker’s venom page. It shows a scene created with venom (a phyton binding using Irrlicht) with only 13 lines of phyton code.
And last but not least: There are a lot of new game projects using the Irrlicht engine: “Project 84 Shadows of the past” made by Carlos Jose Ortiz and his team, a fps/RGP game, located at sls.webcindario.com. “Raptor“, which will be a remake of the cool game by Cygnus/Apogee, there is already a small demo waiting for you at the raptor homepage. “Heartland” by saigumi and pharoseer, which uses the orthogonal 3D technique described in the new tutorial. You can find some nice screenshots of the game on the homepage of heartland. In addition, I added links to the already mentioned projects “Monsoon” and “The Scout“.

Venom & Extenic

Shane Parker is working on ‘Venom’ which is a Irrlicht binding for Perl, Phyton, Ruby, etc. and it sounds very promising. Take a look at the venom homepage, which is also hosted by sourceforge.
But that’s not the only cool news: Fabian Kranen is working on ‘Extenic’. It will be a portable layer on top of Irrlicht, which provides a generic way of managing a complete virtual world.
As always, I’ve added links to these two new projects on the link page.

New SotW, german forum

Christian Lins sent news to me, that there is an other forum for the Irrlicht engine, in German language. It can be found here. I added a link to it from the link page.
Taking a look at the eve-corp webpage, you can see, that there are already 4 new projects with the Irrlicht engine on it. I’m looking forward to see the first screenshots of these games.
Some development news: The next version of the engine will have a lot more new features than planned, because some users sent in their personal enhancements, which I will integrate into the engine. I will talk about details later, but be prepared: It will be very cool. 😉
And last: I updated the shot of the week, with an image you maybe already know.

Free webspace & new project

You are doing a project with the Irrlicht Engine and need some free webspace for it, including a forum and an email adress? Take a look at www.eve-corp.comSaigumi set up this free site for Irrlicht Engine projects only. I think this is a very great service. A very big THANK YOU! goes out to Saigumi. For details take a look at the eve-corp site or into the open discussion forum.
Another interesting news: There is a new project using the Irrlicht Engine. It is a game AID for the role playing game ‘Shadowrun’, created by WhytWulf. Seems that he has used Ogre before and now switched to Irrlicht.
I added links to saigumis eve-corp and the shadowrunonline.sf site on the link page and updated the author page.

Terrain renderer preview

I played around with terrain rendering last week, and because the results look really nice, I will definitely include a terrain renderer in the next release. Take a look at the new screenshots, they show the alpha version of the renderer, drawing some ultra realistic looking terrain.
And as you can see, we’ve got a new shot of the week: Cleves sent in this picture showing a scene from a game he is working on. The game has not a name yet, but he says he will think about it soon. 🙂

New project using Irrlicht

Hunter Poitevint announced that he and his team are developing a 3D action game with the Irrlicht Engine, called ‘Supa-G’. They’ve set up a webpage for it at www.supa-g.com, I already added this to the link section.
Just a few words on the current development status: I implemented now the new texture loading code and everything seems to work perfectly. From the next release on, the engine will no more be limited to 16 bit textures. I added two new screenshots which show 32 bit textures in action to the screenshot gallery. But I don’t know yet when this release will be out, I’ve got to fix some bugs, and add some additional features.
I updated the development page with the new status and added a new question to the FAQ.

More examples

SaigumiJrnovoaJoi, and Gorgon Zola now posted 5 example applications using the Irrlicht Engine with source code included into the offtopic forum. Gorgon Zola for example posted a very impressive quad tree terrain scene node, with LOD rendering. I made screenshots of 4 examples, you can take a look at them on the left or in the screenshot area.
I also added one of the shots representatively of the others as shot of the week

API doc uploaded

The API documentation for 0.4.1 is uploaded now.
I also updated the development page and changed some colors of the website.
If you take a look into the forum, you’ll see that I’ve splitted the help forum into a beginner and an advanced developers category. Hope the forum is a little bit clearer now.
There are some new interesting threads in the offtopic forum, started by saigumi and jrnovoa, who posted some demos they made with the Irrlicht Engine, source code included. Maybe some other users want to post their demos (with source) too, to let other people be able to learn from it?