Question about the use of irrlicht and it's features

[Knitter]

Hi,

This is not really related to STK but since irrlicht is used in it I thought you could share some of your thought on this engine. How good do you feel the engine is, what are you problems with it and things you may have needed to work around when using the irrlicht engine.

I'm currently evaluating a few options and would like to hear a bit about the irrlicht engine from those that are using it. Any reason to choose this engine over other solutions?

Regards,

Knitter

[Funto]

Hi,

My personal opinion on Irrlicht: it's a very good engine for quickly getting a correct result.
The API and the code are really simple and intuitive, and it works well with authoring tools, including Blender through the B3D format, as Irrlicht supports many file formats.
Another advantage is its very few dependencies, making it very easy to integrate. Plus it has a strong community, which is important.

The downside of this is that the engine is very poor on graphical features, and is far from being "next-gen". It doesn't even support shadow mapping, nor hardware skinning, etc...
However the API lets you somehow adapt your own systems and create custom effects, but this has a limit.

So all in all, I think it's one of the best engines for prototyping and for newcomers, but it severely shows its limitations when it comes to doing more complex stuff.

This is just my opinion, and I'm not the one who used it most on this forum ^^

[Kinsu]

the engine is very poor on graphical features

Maybe with some extra libraries it can be a little improved (e.g. SPARK for particles), but this requires additional integration time.

I think Ogre3D has more graphical features (though I've read it's more complex to use than Irrlicht, which seems logical ^^)

[hiker]

Hi,

well, the big advantages (which is why we picked it in the first place) were that it's:

• easy to use, and 'good' license.
• it is 'complete' (i.e. we needed no other dependencies - images, mesh handling, animations, GUI, portable file handling is all included).
• easy to extend (we added a few irrlicht scene nodes and other functions to our source tree), and you can find additional scene nodes in the irrlicht forums.
• good community (we usually get very quick support if we have a problem, and missing functionality is added if we need it).

But there are of course some disadvantages:

• it's does not support the latest graphical features (a point we were aware of, but we thought that we don't need them for the more ';comic' style we envisioned for STK).
• the release cycle might be slow (e.g. our last two releases had to use unreleased svn versions of irrlicht to get the necessary bug fixes we needed).
• the GUI module missed quite a few features (auria could provide more details here).
• we actually had to implement a few extensions ourselves (like scene node with level-of-detail).

That's all I can think of, but if I remember anything else, I'll add it here.

Cheers,
Joerg

[Knitter]

Thanks for the replies.

The fact that it's a product that delivers most everything you need in one single place, instead of being just one engine that you'll need to integrate with a GUI system and other needed tools, is what I like the most. I don't really know much about 3D engines and related and it helps to read about irrlicht from those that use it.

Regards,

Knitter

[hiker]

The fact that it's a product that delivers most everything you need in one single place, instead of being just one engine that you'll need to integrate with a GUI system and other needed tools,

Just be aware that irrlicht is not a game engine. E.g. it does not come with support for a physics engine built in (though it can obviously be combined with one). For STK it was an ideal match, since we previously had added the bullet physics engine.

Cheers,
Joerg

[coug36]

I'd be interested to hear about the shortcomings of the GUI system, if Auria wanted to elaborate

[Auria]

I'd be interested to hear about the shortcomings of the GUI system, if Auria wanted to elaborate

hmm the list may be a little long first of all the skinning system is quite poor, it could only make GUIs that look like Windows 95 or basic GTK themes. To make the STK theme I had to jump through quite a lot of hoops.

Also it seems very geared towards making editors, etc. and not in-game GUIs; those big clickable icons you see everywhere in STK, for instance, were coded by me and not available in basic irrlicht.

Also their kit has no scrolled pane

etc. don't want to complain for too long ^^