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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."

6 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. How does this compare... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's another OS 3d engine called crystal space 3d. It's been in development FOREVER now, and I'm still waiting for a completed cross-platform game, but it looks like a cool proejct. Anyone feel like porting this to mac?

  3. Within three hours of Irrlicht's release by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    3D Realms issued a press release saying that they had standardized on it for the final engine to be used in Duke Nukem Forever

    When asked whether the move to Irrlicht would interfere with the work already done since their announcement last week that DNF had standardized on the Mario Party 6 engine, 3D Realms declined to answer, instead apparently becoming distracted by and taking chase after a rabbit running through the grass nearby

  4. Re:Will It Last? by Mike+deVice · · Score: 5, Informative

    My understanding is that the developer simply didn't wish to put his code into CVS or the like until after a version 1.0 release. Some other people at Irrlicht NX decided to take the source, stick it in CVS, and apply patches and fixes and the like. The author had zero problems with this, and even lauded the effort.

  5. Crystal Space 3D by myspys · · Score: 5, Informative

    Another engine that is open source (LGPL) and possibly a bit more mature than Irrlicht is Crystal Space 3D.

    From the about us-blurb "Crystal Space is a free (LGPL) and portable 3D Game Development Kit written in C++. It supports: true six degrees of freedom, colored lighting, lightmapped and stencil based lighting, shader support (CG, vertex programs, fragment programs, ...), mipmapping, portals, mirrors, alpha transparency, reflective surfaces, 3D sprites (frame based or with skeletal animation using cal3d animation library), procedural textures, particle systems, halos, volumetric fog, scripting (using Python, Perl, Java, or potentially other languages), 16-bit and 32-bit display support, OpenGL, and software renderer, font support (also with freetype), hierarchical transformations, physics plugin based on ODE, ... See the extensive list of features for more details."

    Read more at http://crystal.sourceforge.net/