Image Description, by
This image shows 4 shots of a relatively young but powerful 3D engine, which
is called The Irrlicht Engine. It is a completely free, zlib licence based
open source 3d engine, and exists now for about a year, being improved and
extended constantly. It is hosted at sourceforge and its homepage can be
reached at http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net. In September, the 6th release of
the Irrlicht Engine SDK has been made, named version 0.4. Since this
version, it is now possible to create high speed state-of-the-art 3d games
and applications with it.
Irrlicht uses a quite different approach than most other 3d engines do. It
tries to be fast, extensible and flexible, but the main aim is to be as easy
to use as possible. In this context, it is for example possible to start up
the engine, load a complete Quake 3 map, display it and let the user move
within this map with only about 6 lines of code. But it is also very
flexible, the programmer is able to change and influence almost everything
in the engine although it is that easy to use. To see how this works, just
take a look at the tutorials on the website.
To keep this text short, I'll list some main features of the engine for an
overview:
Uses both OpenGL and/or Direct3D for rendering. In addition, there is a
software renderer, and a null device.
It's platform independent. You'll only have to write your code once and it
will run on all supported platforms, which currently are Windows and Linux.
It supports standard 3D special effects like stencil buffer shadows,
particle systems, transparency, lightmaps, texture animation, realistic
water, .
It does not need exporters. For increasing your development speed, the
engine directy reads lots of common file formats like .bmp, .psd, .jpg,
.tga, .3ds, .ms3d, .obj, .bsp, .zip, and .md2
Due to its flexible scene graph, complex things like mixed indoor and
outdoor rendering is possible.
Detailed descriptions can be found on the engines homepage.
|
