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Irrlicht - Fast Realtime 3D Engine

Posted by michael on from the do-it-yourself dept.

Surye writes "Though a few days late on the release, Irrlicht has released version 0.7 of its engine. The site describes it as 'an open source high performance realtime 3D engine written in C++. It is completely cross-platform, using D3D, OpenGL and its own software renderer, and has all of the state-of-the-art features which can be found in commercial 3d engines.' Bindings for java, perl, ruby, and python, and it is platform independent (only implemented currently on Windows and Linux, but when it moves to other platforms, the code will be completely portable). The feature list is simply amazing, and since it's still being quite actively developed, I can see this becoming a major player soon."

3 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. game applications by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is neat and all, but they need to make a complete game with it. Without the game, the engine developers don't really know what game developers need, thus insuring that it's never used in commercial games.

    1. Re:game applications by nofx_3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Exactly. A project like this is actual one of those instances where a GPL license might be a bad idea. If both commercial and open-source developers all work on one engine, there are bound to be some contributions from both fronts (all from the open source camp) but there is the benefit that if this engine matures we will have games that are playable on any platform. I don't give a damn about my games being free as in beer, as long as developers are willing to make good games that play on linux I will be happy, even if the code is not open source.

      I do think that even commercial developers would give something back to a community that provided them with a free, robust, and mature game engine.

      -kaplanfx

      --
      Visualize Whirled Peas
  2. Will It Last? by chesp3 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I came across this engine once while looking for a good 3D engine for one of my games. It was great but people are afraid of the "iron fist" developer.

    Apparently the engine has only one developer who can supposedly drop the project at anytime. Probably not likely though. Maybe there are more developers now, this was weeks ago.