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.

Monthly Screenshot Contest – August and September 2009

Here are the winners of the Screenshot of the Month contest for August and September 2009: Silencer-WTW with YASS in August and Mel with KaoS in HDR in September. Congratulations. You can find the screenshot and all other contestants in the forum and the gallery.

Irrlicht 1.5.1 Released!

We are happy to announce that we just released Irrlicht version 1.5.1. This version contains a lot of bugfixes and corrections, but also some new features:

  • Support for Range Fog in OpenGL
  • Improved X11 support
  • Better .x, STL and Collada file loading
  • 32bit indices for large meshes
  • Terrain rendering using hw buffers
  • A lot of bug fixes and corrections

See changes.txt in the SDK for details. Happy downloading!

Monthly Contest and Interesting Code Snippet

We have more winners of our Screenshot of the Month contest. This time for June and July 2009. The winners are godfather86 with Heaven City in June and wing64 with gothic in July. Both of you made an awesome job, and wing64 seems to already have a fixed place in the top three each month! Congratulations to the two winners and of course also the rest of the participants. You can check the submissions at the forum and the gallery. As always you can submit pics for the August contest for some more days.

In order to give this news update a little more content I wanted to remind of an interesting add-on which was posted some time ago on the Code Snippets forum. It perfectly fits into the current hype of stereoscopy. Luke made this post which uses some useful features from the upcoming Irrlicht 1.6 release to create an anaglyph rendering. Really fun to play with it, and easy to integrate with your next project!

More Winners

Okay, this took longer than anticipated. But here are some more winners. First those of the Screenshot of the Month contest for April and May 2009. These are three in total, because the voting in May resulted in two winners for that month: wing64 with God Tower in April and wing64 with Middle East and xhrit with Sol, from Terra in May. Congrats to both of you. As always, you can find the screenshot and all other contestants in the forum and the gallery. And don’t forget to submit your pics for the June contest, there are only a few days left for submitting on the forum.

An even more important news, also some days old already: We have two new dev team members. Please welcome BlindSide and CuteAlien. You should know both from many submissions and activity on the forum, on IRC, and everywhere you can meet Irrlicht users. It’s really cool to have you in the team!

A more recent news: Irrlicht was chosen as an approved project of the BeagleBoard Sponsored Projects Program. This means that we got a BeagleBoard for further development of the OpenGL-ES drivers. I already have the board here, trying to set everything up and get Irrlicht running. I’ll post some pics once I have it rendering. Thanks a lot for this grant.

Current and Upcoming Winners

With some delay we can proudly announce the first winner of the Screenshot of the Month contest for March 2009. It’s Suvi with Gekkeiju Online. You can find the screenshot and all other contestants in the forum thread. I’ll update the gallery next.

Another important thing. The SourceForge Community Awards 2009 are nominating again. Please vote for Irrlicht..

One of our latest Irrlicht features, the OpenGL-ES 1.x driver, has made some important advances. The code allows for iPhone development, cell phone apps, and handheld consoles. Read the latest success stories for the Pandora console – Irrlicht is the first reportedly working 3D engine for the Pandora and the OMAP processor series.
More winners to come in the next days 😉

Update from Google Summer of Code

Update from Google: We didn’t make it into this year’s Google Summer of Code. What a pity. Let’s hope for next year 🙂

Irrlicht applied for Google Summer of Code

This year, Irrlicht applied for participation in Google Summer of Code(tm). In case we are elected by Google, we will host some Irrlicht related development projects, e.g. those listed on our Ideas list. Students who want to work on one of those projects have to apply as well, starting on March 23rd until April 3rd at Google Summer of Code 2009 site. In case of successful finalization of the project, the student is paid $4500 from Google for about 3 month of work – much more than I was paid as a student :-).

In case you’re interested in joining this program, just contact us immediately, and discuss issues in the forum.

Irrlicht in Motion Competition winners

The winners of the Irrlicht In Motion competition are found.

  1. randommesh: Flocking boids
  2. omaremad: Coin jump
  3. strong99: The Island
  4. blindside: Against the tide
  5. fmx: Miku in Motion
  6. zillion42: irrSolarSystem
  7. Ion Dune: WarEngine RTS
  8. night_hawk: Power Pong
  9. 3dmodelerman: Demo
  10. eye776: Platform

CONGRATULATIONS!
Thanks to all participants! It was really much fun to play around with your submissions.

Read the full story.

Irrlicht 1.5 Released!

We are happy to announce that we just released Irrlicht version 1.5. This version contains a lot of new features, here are some few highlights:

  • Vertex Buffer Objects, i.e. storing meshes on the GPU
  • Joystick support on all platforms
  • Added support for collada 1.4 and LWO files
  • 32bit indices for large meshes
  • Added an .obj writer
  • Improved software rasterizer (burning video)
  • Improvements for dynamic lights, particle systems, LMTS, PNG and PCX loading and writing
  • Added FSAA for OpenGL
  • OGRE .mesh loader improvements
  • Nicer and faster terrain rendering
  • Volume lights
  • Various improvements for the WindowsCE port
  • Shared depth buffers for RTT in D3D
  • Added a font creation tool for Linux

See changes.txt in the SDK for details. Please note that we also updated all Irrlicht tutorials on this website now thanks to hybrid’s script.
Happy downloading!

Irrlicht 1.4.2 for Mac OS now available

The MacOSX package for Irrlicht 1.4.2 is now available for download as well.

Happy downloading.