In version 0.7, together with some other enhancements of the engine, I’ll include the first version of Irrlicht.NET. This will be a .NET class library, making the engine available for C#, VisualBasic.NET, Asp.NET, Delphi.NET and whatever. From then on, Irrlicht.NET will be included in every SDK release and become an important part of the engine.
The first version of Irrlicht.NET will not be complete at all, but you’ll be able to do a lot of things already. My first test with C# worked with no problem and looked like this:

using System;

using Irrlicht;

using Irrlicht.Video;

/// <summary>

/// Example application using Irrlicht.NET

/// </summary>

class ExampleApp

{

  [STAThread]

    static void Main(string[] args)

    {

      IrrlichtDevice device = 

          new IrrlichtDevice(DriverType.SOFTWARE);

      device.ResizeAble = true;
      device.WindowCaption = "Irrlicht.NET test";      while(device.run())

        if (device.WindowActive)

        {

          device.VideoDriver.beginScene(true, true, 0);

          // draw something here.

          device.VideoDriver.endScene();

        }

    }

}

Exactly 365 days ago, the first version of the Irrlicht Engine (0.1) was released. This means, the Irrlicht Engine today celebrates its first birthday. Time for some statistics:

• In the course of the last year, Irrlicht evolved from a totally unknown C++ project to one of the most popular open source 3d engines. As for example sourceforge’s software map reveals.
• Thousands of programmers downloaded the Irrlicht Engine SDKs. Unfortunately, the sourceforge download statistics currently do not work, but for example: During only 2 months, version 0.4 has been downloaded 14000 times.
• There have been 10 official releases: 0.1, 0.1.5, 0.2. 0.2.5, 0.3, 0.4, 0.4.1, 0.4.2, 0.5 and 0.6. This means one release about every 35 days. That was a lot of work. Really.
• We’ve got a constantly growing community. Every day, there are 45.66 new posts in the forum. The database already has a size of 24 MB, and 2.5 new users are registering every day. Soon we’ll reach the 10000th post in the forum. 😉
• In version 0.1, there were 28.512 lines and 739KB of code in 183 source files. The latest version, 0.6 has 116.000 lines and 3473KB of code in 455 files. The engine now consists of 4 times more code than a year before.

As you can see, the engine is very young, compared to other open source 3d engines, but it is evolving rapidly.
A brief overview about my future plans:

• Head for version 1.0. Within the next year, we should find an end of adding new features to the engine and try to make everything stable and run without bugs.
• I’ve got an idea of creating a donation button on the homepage using paypal or sourceforge’s system to be able to buy more hardware and books for further development. But I don’t know yet if it works fine with austria, where I live. And also, I don’t think a lot of money would be donated, so I am still guessing.
• Maybe a top level domain for the engine would be cool. But I am unsure in this case too. irrlicht.sf.net is also cool.

Thanks to all users and supporters of the engine! All this would not be possible without you. Lets go on, for the next release. 🙂

During the last days I was adding some missing features to the engine. In fact, I had a long list with lots of user requests. One of the most basic missing features was fog. It was not very difficult to add, took me about 20 minutes to update the D3D and OpenGL renderer. In 0.5 it will be possible to choose between pixel and vertex, exponential and linear fog, and also range based vertex fog is supported. You can see the result at the left.
But the shot does not only show the new fog, there is also another new feature. Take a closer look. Okay, you cannot see it? Hint: It is a shot of the OpenGL renderer, not D3D. Right, if you are an Irrlicht Engine user, you should now see it. Another long missed feature. 😉
As always, the screenshot was added to the screenshot section.