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.

28-Apr-05Irrlicht/Ruby interface && Paco Jones

Jerome Nichols created a comprehensive Ruby/Irrlicht interface. It is called Irr or IrrRuby and its homepage is located at irr.rubyforge.org. A good reason to try out ruby at least now. 🙂
Another good news comes from the Lemon Team. They created a game called ‘Paco Jones’ during a fast game competition. It is available at their homepage for free download, more details and screenshots can be read in this thread in the forum.
I added and updated links in the link section and the contributors list for this.
And last, I am sorry for the recent lack of updates, I currently have a lot to do at university. At least I created a blog where I post from time to time to show that I am not dead already.

By CuteAlien | Posted in News, Projects | Comments Off on Irrlicht/Ruby interface && Paco Jones

17-Apr-05Irrlicht-Engine.com and video download

Again, there is more than one news to tell:

  • Thanks to Joe Oliveri, this webpage is reachable now via Irrlicht-Engine.com too. Cool.
  • The next version of Irrlicht will be able to do parallax mapping. I’ve uploaded a short video which demonstrates this new feature. In addition, the new shot of the week shows it.
  • The link to the devpack for dev c++ I posted last time was incorrect. Now it should work.
By CuteAlien | Posted in News, Projects | Comments Off on Irrlicht-Engine.com and video download

09-Apr-05Unanswered emails

Maybe you’ve recently sent a mail to me and did not get an answer. This happens sometimes because of my spam filters and I’m very sorry for this. But during the last few weeks, not a single mail sent to me has been answered, because I simply haven’t received them. I had some problems with my domain (code3d.com) and all mails sent do me did not reach their target. So it would be nice to not to be angry with me, and resend the mail(s), but please don’t use the old one (niko (at) code3d.com) but instead email anti-spam image or directly email anti-spam image. Thanks. Also, the irrlicht (development) blog has been moved to irrlicht3d.org. Other news:

By CuteAlien | Posted in News, Projects | Comments Off on Unanswered emails

01-Apr-05Irrlicht Wiki

Saigumi created The Irrlicht Wiki. Wikis are currently quite popular, and undoubted usful. So it would be cool if some articles/tutorials etc get posted up there. Added it to the link section, which has also been restructured a little bit. Some other news:

  • The Irrlicht Forum has been hacked for the second time. I updated, patched, modded and restored it some hours later, and (nearly) no data has been lost. Now we really know that script kiddies do not have any respect for free open source software. Sorry for any inconvenience.
  • Andrew Yee is creating a 3D fighting game for University of Victoria named Stickman Fighters.
By CuteAlien | Posted in News, Projects | Comments Off on Irrlicht Wiki

28-Mar-05Irrlicht 0.9 released!

Irrlicht 0.9 has just been released. There are lots of bug fixes in it, but also many new features. In addition, some of the most popular community extensions have been integrated directly into the engine. Some of the most important changes are:

  • Irrlicht now includes a completely new and working terrain renderer. It is based on the GeoMipMapSceneNode by Spintz which is based on Soconne’s terrain renderer.
  • Multipass rendering for SceneNodes is now possible, which means a scene node can now contain multiple types of materials (transparent/opaque) but all parts will be rendered in the correct order. This was previously only possible by creating spearate scene nodes for transparent objects.
  • A lot of external importers have been integrated into the engine which means Irrlicht can now load a lot more file formats directy. The new ones are:
    • FSRad (.oct) file loader
    • Cartography shop 4 (.csm) loader
    • Pulsar LMTools (.lmts) loader
    • My3DTools 3 (.my3D) file loader
  • If the now 9 supported formats are not enough, there are some exporters for 3DSMax, Gile[s] and Blender included in the SDK.
  • Multitexturing support for Linux
  • A new tutorial (about terrain rendering) and an updated tutorial which shows how to use HLSL in Irrlicht.
  • Lots of other things, please take a look at changes.txt for details.

You can download the release from the download section. Ignoring the tradition, the API documentation has already been uploaded. In addition, the new tutorials are also already online and the new shot of the week shows a scene from the newly added tutorial.

By CuteAlien | Posted in News, Releases | Comments Off on Irrlicht 0.9 released!

03-Feb-05More than 30.000 posts!

Hurra, now we’ve got more than 30.000 posts in the Irrlicht Engine forum! Some additional statistics: We’ve got 1517 registered users, 57.29 posts and 9.79 new topics per day, and a database size of 47.68MB. So our community is quite active. 🙂 Some other good news:

  • Reinhard Ostermeier created a website with some of his extensions to Irrlicht: Currently you can find an image list, a tree view and his addition for making it possible to load 32 bit bmp’s in Irrlicht.
  • James K. Aladar created an alternative Irrlicht engine logo. Can be usful if you want to use it inside of your games for example.
  • As you can see to the right, we’ve got a new shot of the month. It shows a project of Dusan Benasic.
By CuteAlien | Posted in News, Projects | Comments Off on More than 30.000 posts!

22-Jan-05Localization and Tutorial updates

Major tutorial update and announcement of a new localization of this webpage:

By CuteAlien | Posted in News | Comments Off on Localization and Tutorial updates

03-Jan-05Related projects

Another short list of new interesting Irrlicht Engine related projects:

  • Arena of Honor is a multiplayer first person shooter created by Artur Hallmann and Nils Keller which uses Newton for physics, RakNet for networking, Audiere for sound and, of course Irrlicht for graphics. The game already looks quite well and is entertaining, there is a demo waiting for you to download. You can discuss the project in the Irrlicht forum in this thread. I’ve added the Arena of Honor homepage to the link section.
  • IrrSED – A scene editor for Irrlicht created by Tom Williams with export into .h and .cpp files and particle editor. The new shot of the month shows it in action. Notice that IrrSED uses Irrlichts internal graphical user interface system. 😉 I added IrrSED to the link section. (forum thread)
  • Paul Zirkle aka Keless released his ICE framework in version 2.0. Very cool.
  • IrrGame – A gamestate system for easily creating games by Friedrich Schick. (forum thread)
  • Drac’s Irrlicht GUI Designer, a tool for creating Irrlicht GUIs. (forum thread)
By CuteAlien | Posted in News, Projects | Comments Off on Related projects

12-Dec-04Small updates

There is a russian Irrlicht Engine webpage available, created by Panchenko “Andrushka” Andrew. He already translated big parts of the site and also some tutorials. Added the page to the link page.
I added a sphere file to irrlicht.sf.net for the exWARE German Irrlicht Portal. And if you haven’t taken a look at the GMax Video Tutorials by afecelis yet, I’d recommend to to that now.

By CuteAlien | Posted in News | Comments Off on Small updates

05-Dec-04Irrlicht Forum hacked

Few hours ago, the Irrlicht Engine forum has been hacked. I don’t know exactly what they changed and how they did this, but it seems that they only changed the forum frontpage. I restored it, upgraded to a newer version of the forum and changed some passwords. That’s the only thing I can do. I you are a registered user in the Irrlicht Forum, please notice that your password may be insecure now.
From my personal point of view, I cannot understand why anybody would hack an open source project website like Irrlicht. I am doing this for free, and in my spare time, of which I currently don’t have a lot. I thought hackers have some honor, but obviously I was wrong here. The Irrlicht website isn’t the only 3D engine project which has been hacked recently: The one of Purple# is another example. I’m not pleased at all. Hey guys, if you want to stop people from creating great free and open source software, you are on the right way.

Some other, better news: This month, I received serveral submissions for the ‘shot of the month’. I chose the one sent in by Brent Cowan, which shows his game ‘Space Madness’.

By CuteAlien | Posted in News | Comments Off on Irrlicht Forum hacked