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Engine Details

Irrlicht

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The Irrlicht Engine is a cross-platform high performance real-time 3D engine written in C++. It is a powerful high-level API for creating complete 3D and 2D applications like games or scientific visualizations. It comes with documentation and integrates all the state-of-the-art features for visual representation like dynamic shadows, particle systems, character animation, indoor and outdoor technology, and collision detection. All this is accessible through a well designed C++ interface, which is easy to use.

Author

Nikolaus Gebhardt

Graphics API

OpenGL, DirectX, Software

Operating Systems

Windows, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, Xbox

Programming Language

C/C++

Status

Productive/Stable

Documentation

Yes

Features

General Features

Object-Oriented Design, Plug-in Architecture:

•	Using C++ the engine is completely object-orientated yielding platform independence and graphics API abstraction
•	features a plugin-mechanism in that it supports external image and mesh loaders and provides a factory pattern support to enable automatic loading of those structures.
•	Integrated fast XML parser
•	Unicode support for easy localisation
•	Support for .ZIP files
•	Support for 64-bit
•	Joystick support included in Windows, Linux and OSX

Built-in Editors

•	irrEdit: a free functional scene editor and lightmap generator
•	GUI Editor

Physics

Collision Detection:

•	Bounding box and triangle based collision detection and response

Lighting

Per-vertex, Per-pixel, Lightmapping:

•	Supports dynamic lighting and light maps
•	Support bumpmapping / normalmaps
•	Supported through vertex and fragment programs as well as fixed function pipeline

Shadows

Shadow Volume:

•	Dynamic shadows using the stencil buffer

Texturing

Basic, Multi-texturing, Bumpmapping, Mipmapping:

•	Basic texturing support with texture animation
•	Supported texture formats: BMP, JPG, PCX, PNG, PPM, PSD, TGA and WAL.
•	Save textures in BMP, JPG, PCX, PNG, PPM and TGA

Shaders

Vertex, Pixel, High Level:

•	Supports low level assembly vertex/pixel shaders and fragment/vertex programs as well as HLSL
•	Support for GLSL: ARB Vertex Programs, ARB Pixel Programs, HLSL, GLSL 100 & 110, VS1.1 - 3.0, PS1.1 - PS3.0

Scene Management

General, BSP, Octrees:

•	Easily extensible hierarchical scene graph
•	Mix indoor and outdoor scene seamlessly together
•	Supports picking,

Animation

Skeletal Animation, Morphing, Animation Blending:

•	Meshes are linear interpolated from one frame to the next
•	Mesh is manipulated by animated joints
•	Load Quake 3 BSP Levels

Meshes

Mesh Loading:

•	Supports 3DS, Milkshape, COLLADA, Maya, DeleD, DirectX .X, FSRad .oct, Cartography shop 4 .csm, Pulsar LMTools .lmts, My3DTools 3 .my3D, Quake 2 models
•	Supports native formats: Irrlicht Mesh (.irrMesh), Irrlicht Scene (.irr), Blitz Basic (.b3d), Alias Wavefront (.obj), Stereolithography (.stl), Lightwave (.lwo), Quake 3 (.md3, .bsp), Ogre (not animated)
•	Support mesh saving for Collada, IrrMesh, OBJ and STL formats
•	Exporters for common formats are available from third-party sources

Special Effects

Environment Mapping, Billboarding, Particle System, Sky, Water, Fog:

•	Sphere mapping
•	Realistic water surfaces
•	Customizeable Particle systems for snow, smoke, fire
•	Supports parallax mapping

Terrain

Rendering, CLOD:

•	provides geo mipmapping with several LODs

Rendering

Fixed-function, Render-to-Texture, Fonts, GUI:

•	2D drawing functions like alpha blending, color key based blitting, font drawing and mixing 3D with 2D graphics
•	Alpha blending for transparency
•	Transparent objects automatically managed
•	2D GUI System with Buttons, Lists, Edit boxes, etc.

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Date Added

Thu, 24 Jun 2004

Last Updated

Wed, 14 Apr 2010

There are currently 59 reviews for this engine

License Name	Price	Source Code	Comments
zlib/libpng	Free	Yes

Screenshots:

Member Reviews

NOTE: The ratings and reviews below reflect the opinions of their respective authors and as such, do not reflect the opinions of DevMaster.net or its staff. The reviews are not moderated and some are completely inaccurate. Therefore, most reviews should be taken with a grain of salt. If you find any inaccurate or inappropriate reviews, let us know by stating in detail why you think the review should be removed and any links/documents that support your contention.

irrlicht needs its own mesh format

Posted by: horace3d at Dec 30, 2005

i agree with panoramix!

irrlicht desperately needs its own mesh format!

i like that irrlicht isn't very bloated compared to other engines. that's one of its strenghs. so it would be nicer in my opinion if the rest of the supported model formats (except maybe collada) were put outside of the engine into an external conversion tool.

i think stencil shadows have no future. irrlicht should support depth map shadows.

irrlicht.net is a very nice addition! with .net languages irrlicht is even easier to use. it's a pitty though that it doesn't support mono since it's done with managed c++.

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Irrlicht

Posted by: HUNT3R at Aug 10, 2004

Irrlicht is very easy to use, well-documented, and very well designed. It is not as powerful or good-looking as commercial engines but it is free. The full source is included so you can easily modify or add on anything you want.

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Great for learning to develop 3D applications

Posted by: Saigumi at Aug 10, 2004

Irrlichts two strengths is its ease of use and its support.

While most of the support comes from the community and not the primary developer, that community is large, helpful, and active. Even basic Learn C++ questions are answered without flames and RTFM n00b.

Irrlichts scenengraph is easy to use, robust, and fast. Any type of game should be writable without any need to write or re-write your own scenegraph.

On the downside, Irrlicht is missing many advanced features, like shaders. Though since it is currently only on version 0.6, more advanced features should be expected.

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Irrlicht IS powerful

Posted by: soconne at Aug 10, 2004

I find Irrlicht to be very powerful in the fact that it is the most modifiable and well constructed engine I've worked with. I think it does look as good as other engines, such as Ogre or Truevision or even Torque, the only difference is the textures or models used. Take any media content from any engine and use it in Irrlicht and you will produce the exact same results.

I personally implemented texture splatted terrain, geomipmapping, dot3 bump mapping, shadowmaps and many other graphics techniques with Irrlicht in a matter of no time. It is very easy to understand the structure of the engine and change one part of it without effecting the rest as a whole.

The only aspect of the engine I would criticize is perhaps the speed of Irrlicht's implementation of the Octree structure and collision. Other than that, everything else has met my needs thus far.

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The best engine to get into game development

Posted by: jonathanschmidt at Aug 11, 2004

The two main features of Irrlicht are that it that easy to use and its use-it-for-ever-you-want-and-its-free licence.

Unlike in other engines you'll be able to create games and fast 3d applications from the start, without the need of undergoing a long learning process. Yet the engine is quite powerful, it has for example collision detection and response, cool 3d special effects and is very easy to extend.

In addition, you'll find a helpful community wich gives a lot of support.

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Engine of my choice

Posted by: lxguy at Aug 12, 2004

I'm using Irrlicht for my diploma work at university. Its fast, easy and powerful. The engine of my choice. (And I tested a lot.) I never had a problem with crashes etc, so stability seems to be ok. Support is excellent, because of the nice people in the forum.

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Irrlicht is damn nice

Posted by: bal at Aug 13, 2004

It's fast and very easy. It is my first 3D engine and I am learning a lot (3D graphics and C++) by working with it. It does miss some features (which Ogre has, that engine is still Irrlicht's big brother ;) ) but niko (Nikolaus Gebhardt) is working on v0.7 which will bring a new material system (shaders and such, hurray :) !) and other nice things. Also the community is great and very noob-friendly.

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So So

Posted by: Robomaniac at Aug 14, 2004

Irrlicht is a so so engine in general

+ Easy as Pie
+ Stable
+ .NET port a coming soon
+ Cross Platform

- Lacking a cvs
- Lacking needed features
- "Bug Fixes" has been on the development list for 3-4 releases, but has not been done due to useless features (XML parser!?)
- S L O W

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Excellent

Posted by: TKF15H at Sep 25, 2004

Advantages: VERY easy to use, new projects can be set up quickly, very organized and uniform. One of the draw backs, (lack of shaders) has been taken care of in version 0.7. Yay!

Disadvantages: No terrain LOD (yet)
But since it's open source, you can add your own LOD support or anything else you might need.

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A great engine.

Posted by: cmoibenlepro at Aug 15, 2004

(sorry for my bad english)

Personally I use Irrlicht 3d Engine because it is very easy to use. My c++ knowledge only came from reading the book "c++ for dummies" and few projects I made in 2D with allegro. Anyway, I'm able to create a lot of great things very easily: only 20 lines of code and you have a working fps with a map, moving camera, etc.
Others things like collision, dynamic lightning or loading external files are also easy to do because there are a lot of good and complete tutorials.

While it's easy to use, Irrlicht is also quite powerfull and it has lot of interesting features.

in the coming version 0.7 there will be even more features with a new material system (including shaders) and .NET support so you can use other languages.

I also like it because it is portable, pretty stable and fast enough (but there still could be improvements in speed and some more optimizations...)

Irrlicht have also a big and dynamic community on a great and interesting forum.
There are also a lot of third party developers on IrrlichtNX so there is a lot of future for the Irrlicht Engine. :-D

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commercial C++ grade engine for free!!

Posted by: afecelis at Jul 15, 2005

Irrlicht is one of the greatest free engines I've ran into.

Specialized on the graphics part, it's the one I've found to be easier to work with. It supports all major 3d model formats, as well as image formats, and the engine itself includes a complete set of functions and instructions that let your project grow in any direction you want it to.

It's very moddable and external engines like physics or audio are easily added.

It's got one of the most active communities I've seen on the net and everyone is very supportive.

If you're a programmer you'll squeeze it to its limits and add all the things you need in no time.

ps. It already has a CVS version.
ps1. Irrlicht kicks butt!

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Free Stuff is good

Posted by: H4Games at Nov 15, 2004

A free C++ engine is always good; But Irrlicht is the best one out there. I intergraded this into my In-Studio tool and it worked great. It’s well worth the small download and gives you good quality, for little to know experience.

H4Games http://www.h4games.com

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Best free engine

Posted by: uhuru at Dec 13, 2004

I checked out several engines now, and Irrlicht is the best engine so far. It has the best documentation you can get with its tutorials and the compiled html help file. In addition, the API is so well designed, you'll never want to switch to another engine.

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Recommended for starter

Posted by: Panzooka at Nov 1, 2006

This engine is very easy to get started, with great uptodate tutorials.
the engine is completly and nicely written in OO fashion, the documentation is good.
however the engine have its limitation when you trying to implement more advanced feature.
for example you cannot apply more than 2 texture to 1 object, without extensive digging into the source code and modify to your needs.
there are many custom codes written for irrlicht engine, which adds more feature, but everyone works on different version of irrlicht engine, which makes the implementation to your own code much harder.
the community is large and friendly, most the time your questions are answerd by the community, not the developers
there are also many other project that works closely with irrlicht such as IrrKlang(new), which is a nice and easy sound library(by the same person wrote irrlicht), that can work standalone; IrrEdit, which is a scene editor, capable of generating lightmaps, particle editing, etc and save in .irr format. IrrEdit and IrrKlang are both written by same person who wrote Irrlicht, so i count them to be part of the irrlicht engine

overall, this engine is great for people learning how 3d game, and engine works. once you get hang of it, its better to move on to more advanced engine, such as crystalspace, ogre etc

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WORKS WITH GCC!

Posted by: xteraco at Aug 23, 2006

ok, first off, i love this engine coz i can use it with gcc, i absolutely hate VCpp, so this engine definately gets props for that. Secondly, the engine structure is kinda messy but not completely hopeless, its definately usable by the intermediate coder. third, software rendering rox! lol

features:
this engine is feature rich, i mean, it has everything, and its not terribly difficult to implement it in your code, so i give it 5 star :)

ease of use:
i give it 4 stars coz its kinda messy, the engine structure has a slight learning curve. not that theres an engine that doesent, but this one is a lil steeper than i was used to.

stability & performance:
works great with gcc, and hasnt crashed my machine yet. performance wise, i've been meaning to test the software rendere on my old laptop, but as far as HW gfx goes, this engine is BLAZING FAST!

support:
i've not needed any support, so i cant really say, i'll assume a 5.

note to dev's on irrilicht:
please please dont stop supporting gcc! and keep up the good work

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it's really easy for use

Posted by: yjlchina at Apr 2, 2005

I start learning 3d program six month ago. luckly I found irrlicht. It's really nice, easy and popular. The most impotant thing is that irrlicht is progressing every week, as you can see.

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Great engine!

Posted by: Ed Mack at Jan 1, 2005

Whether you are just reading other's code for ideas or setting out to build your own game on top of this engine, it's a very well designed place to start. It's a very fast engine with a great community and nice feature turnover (i.e. new things added often).

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Greate engine, cool & easy effects

Posted by: katahari at Feb 11, 2005

Never used an engine with that nice learning curve. The effects are great, and now it looks like the next version will get some decent shader effects like per pixel lighting and normal maps. Can't wait for that version!

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Very Good

Posted by: finalfantasyfanatic at Mar 6, 2005

This engine is very good. Surpasses many capabilities of commercial engines, and seems to be easy to use. It has cool features like shaders and goes extremely fast. It also has a large community with many tutorials out there to aid this engine

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Excellent 3d engine

Posted by: Pheel at May 5, 2005

An extremely comprehensive, easy to use engine, nearly no bugs, continous updates/patches, a must-have for games-programmer, Irrlicht is one of the cleanest designed libraries I ever used. Well done, go ahead Niko!

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THE BEST 3D ENGINE EVER!

Posted by: Sh3ik at Jun 11, 2005

You can forget Crystal Space and OGRE with their steep learning curves and their LGPL licenses, Irrlicht is by far the BEST 3D engine EVER! It has all the up-to-date features such as those in CS and OGRE and then some! You don't havto convert your 3D models into CS or OGRE format, Irrlicht supports just about all the major formats! Man, you just have to take a look at the features. Also this engine is LIGHTNING FAST! I think the real reason for this is it's clean, organised, and small code, which compiles into ONE .dll file with a SMALL file size! You WILL NOT BELIEVE THIS, but using the latest version of Dev-C++, and the latest Irrlicht SDK (0.10.0), I compiled the source code without ANY ERRORS WHATSOEVER! I just extracted the source, opened up the dev project file, and compiled, and BOOM! Its seriously that easy, check it out yourself! I can go on blabbering about how great it is. Even if you are a beginner C++ programmer (as in you are able to write and compile code) you can learn this FAST! I think this is enough blabbering. Please, do yourself a favor and DOWNLOAD IT NOW! Not to mention its i-dont-care-what-you-do-with-the-code license, you can just about do anything you want with it! Dont be bummed by the crappy models and levels (low poly count) in the SDK, Niko only did this to reduce the size of the SDK download. Take your own High-Poly models and levels and run it in the engine and see for yourself the DOOM-3-QUALITY! As in, take DOOM 3 models and levels, and use them in Irrlicht and see the SAME RESULTS, BUT FOR 100% FREE! w00t! Ok ill be done now.. :D

PS: Please note Irrlicht is a 3D Engine, NOT a GAME ENGINE, but, you can EASILY integrate physics and sound libraries (there are TUTORIALS on how to do this in the SDK!) and make your own game! :P

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one of good engine for beginner

Posted by: minho ha at Jul 7, 2005

excellent!

This is one of good engine to make simple result.
In my summer holiday, I spend lots of days to reading documnets and compiling 3d engines.

I'm looking for a job to make online game.
I'm 36 years old and useful Project Manager.
Call me if you are CEO of game company in Korea.

Min Ho Ha
SEOUL
011-9723-2389

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Just the best free 3D Engine

Posted by: CryXor at Jul 11, 2005

This is by far the best free 3D Engine I've seen around. I'm currently working on an Game Engine that uses specialized engines already out there.
For the renderwork, I've choosen Irrlicht after trying to get OGRE and Crystalspace3D to work.
Features are nearly the same (Irrlicht supports all the popular 3D formats, that's the point OGRE and Crystalspace just lose) and Irrlicht ist astounding fast (don't trust the people saying Irrlicht would be slow! That is not true!). Plus it is easy to use, you got tutorials and help from the forums.
The licence is perfect!
Give Irrlicht a try, you won't be dissapointed!

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Nice

Posted by: HeToC at Jul 28, 2005

Thus Engine have a lot of features, but there is an incomplete set of those that are MustHave , such as DetailedTexturing support(but mb will be implemented in future versions)
Very easy to use but there is no Scene mangment support
As what about stability, i have seen no problems with it =)
Performance is nice, except .Net sources, afaik Net platform is not for gamedev =)
Superb support meke this engine to be on top, cause a lot of people are writing additional modules, model loaders, and other stuff

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Great engine, but it has it's flaws...

Posted by: toopz at Jul 29, 2005

First off, it's a great engine. Supports animated meshes, bsp's, per-pixel lighting, bump and parallax mapping, is extremely easy to use, and a number of other features that you can simply scroll up on this page to see. however, rather than walk you through this, I'll tel you about it's *missing* features.

For starters, there's no IK bones animation. This doesn't sound bad at first, unless you want certain real time animations to happen. For example, in my game, I'm planning on having it so when not jumping, the player's feet are always on the ground. This would mean like on a hill side, his right leg would be bent so that the foot would stay on the ground properly, while his left leg might be extended to reach the lower ground. However, IrrLicht has no support for this. No IK also means that ragdoll animations are impossible. Not to mention only two of the mesh formats (.x and .ms3d) support animations. Due to this I would have to entirely rewrite the mesh and animation system, which would make other engines, such as Ogre, much more appealing.

The parallax mapping also tends to have quite a few artifacts show up, such as in this screenshot (http://img107.imageshack.us/img107/9064/newparallax4ty.png), but overall it's pretty nice. Those artifacts may just be with parallax mapping in general though, so disregard that if so.

Lastly, I'm somewhat dissappointed by the shadow system. It works, but I think it could possibly be handled better. Overall, I applaud niko for including the possibilty for self-shadowing.

It's a good engine, and a great one to start with (I can understand it and I still don't have a decent knowledge of c++) but if you want to work on your game and not spend time rewriting the engine's black sheep parts, use something else. However, if you don't require all of the advanced features for today's games, it's perfect.

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nice good engine for the start

Posted by: Sagor at Aug 2, 2005

Pretty nice engine.
Very easy to use, very nice architecture of the engine.

But if you wish to use this engine, you have to understand that you have to complete it on your own or wait for official releases.
Engine had a good ground and basis for adding new features, but its need a lof of work to optimise it.

Another one plus, is that licence is really nice. You can use it where you want. And you can modify it without any restrictions.

So, this engine is good if you want to write something on your own, but don't want to start everything from the scratch.

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As of ver. 0.11, irrlicht is still pretty rough

Posted by: SuperElectric at Aug 8, 2005

I chose irrlicht over ogre in my most recent project (without having used either) since it was way better documented and seemed easier to use. After a few months of using Irrlicht though, I've decided that I'll give Ogre a shot in my next project, despite its steeper learning curve. Irrlicht won't disappoint as long as the complexity of what you want to do is within the range of the demo code it comes with, e.g. very simple ellipse-against-world collision detection, FPS-style mouse navigation, etc. Once you start poking further, though, it becomes very apparent how all of this functionality is held up by more than a few messy hacks. The cameras don't update view matrices when you rotate their scene node (e.g. they remain pointed in the same direction). When you set the scaling of a 4x4 matrix, it overwrites its rotation, and vice versa. Scaling a node doesn't scale its collision detection ellipses. Etc. A lot of this is just a symptom of there being only one developer, and unlike ogre, irrlicht tries to provide its own implementation of everything. This puts everything under one nice umbrella, but it also means that the individual components (such as collision detection) seem hastily slapped together. It makes me appreciate ogre's approach of focusing on the graphics and providing interfaces to proven external libraries for other functionality, like ODE for physics.

Having said that, Irrlicht is definitely easy to use, and if you're putting together just a quick project it might be for you.

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Great engine

Posted by: eye776 at Sep 26, 2005

If you want to develop games fast, this is the way! The best engine to start with. Irrlicht is also good as a base for your own engine, since the source code is smaller than the one of other engines. It's also very small (around 3-4 mb without data) and it comes with all the libraries (except DirectX headers) included, so you can recompile it anytime. It does have a few problems with speed, and sometimes it performs differently on different machines but it's ok. A must try!

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That engine's 'purty

Posted by: haxorphreak at Oct 12, 2005

Really easy to use, and pretty user-friendly. Nice set of features, all of which can be implemented rather quickly.
Good selection of model formats (although I'm waiting for .md3) as well as BSP, which can have an octree applied with one like of code.
I gave support a 2 because of the forum. It usually starts with the poster not searching, or asking the wrong questions, but there are a few (not mentioning names) members who 9/10 posts I see from them are really terrible, blind, flames.
Other than that, very nice engine. And open source to boot.

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a peace of cake

Posted by: quark at Jun 8, 2006

Irrilicht is so simple that it doesn't even need a huge or better explained documentationtion. Almost everything is allready explained in examples, which are ALL working very good for me on (shitty) Intel Graphics 2.

This engine doesn't need extensive previous experience, only base one. If you have diifilcuties to understand how things are working there, don't hestiate to ask on forums. This engine is free and open for everyone.

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Ease of use is up, asset creation down. (v0.14)

Posted by: panoramix at Dec 29, 2005

Irrlicht is probably the most easy to use 3d engine out there. It also packs a lot of power and very nice features, but I would warn people from using it unless they're up to the challenge of doing major rewrites to accomodate missing features. One of the features I missed the most is probably the one no-one complains about: Irrlicht does support a lot of file formats, but most of them are only partially supported. Depending on the model format you work with you either have to choose between no lightmaps, no shaders, no animation, or no bones. On this I would also like to note the pipeline from 3d modelling packages to Irrlicht (at the moment) is terrible... a custom model format (with support for the materials and features the engine packs) and exporters for it would be really nice.

Having said that, Irrlicht is in itself a nice engine, support forum is indeed very helpfull, and it's ease of use will get you going in no-time... just keep in mind you'll have to hack it appart unless one of the already supported file formats fits your needs. It was fun working with irrlicht and I'm sure I'll check it out again at some point in the future.

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Great 3D Engine

Posted by: ElvenRoth at Jan 11, 2006

I tried many 3D Graphics Engines out there, trying to find one to suit my needs. Irrlicht was the first to do just that. It's extremely easy to use, and has a lot of features that just make it one of the best Open Source 3D Engines.

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average engine

Posted by: Wannes at Dec 29, 2006

I've tried 4 engines (Sdl, irrlicht, ogre and Panda3D) and well I was least happy about irrlicht
I initially chose it for its good 2D support (as opposed to ogre) but the importing of skeletal animations and working with them was really a pain in the *ss
good basic documentation, decent community
except for the animations no notable good or bad points ... average engine

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great FREE engine

Posted by: K@li at Sep 25, 2006

ps : a Blitzmax wrapper exist, then update our plateform list please.

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A great flexible 3d engine for Beginning Video Game Developers

Posted by: fungames at Jul 3, 2006

I'm new to video game creation and have moderate C++ skills. Some of the commercial engines seemed to rigid or expensive. I use one compiler, Micorsoft Visual C++ 6.0 (Standard Edition). The Irrlicht Engine compiled right away with no additional hassels with setup compared to CrystalSpace which seemed very difficult to setup with MS VC++ 6.0. I was running the demo games in no time. Ease of initial setup is a huge advantage to beginners such as myself. It's hard enough to learn all the other things it takes to create a video game (Character creation , maps and so on...). What's great about this engine is that it uses Quake 2 models which are extremely available all over the net with Quake 3 maps. The last thing you want to face is a huge learning curve with the 3d engine. While this engine lacks alot of features, but the user community is huge and they are constantly adding to it. The 3d engine is stable and very flexible. It's free. I was able to easily add video/cutscene capability as a moderate C++ developer. Not bad. The graphics and visuals effects are are very good for being a free engine. It's not bug-less but as you learn more about it, they are easy to resolve. Overall if you're new to 3D game programming, download this engine immediately and start learning. I've followed this engine for about 3 to 4 years now and only seen the support and community grow and grow. A word of advice: Once you've gotten comfortable with a certain version of this engine and its feature, stick with it and disregard any updates unless they offer a major improvement. Otherwise, you may have issues with 3rd party software that it used at the time. Another thing is that the documentation is not strong, however, searching through the user forums can answer most of your questions. But the main thing is to just stick with it and learn. I've already created my first game with it and is working on my second one. After you've downloaded it and set it up, try to compile and run the techdemo example until it works. Good luck!!!

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back from Ogre.

Posted by: holczhammer at Jul 18, 2006

I had a problem with pre 1.0 releases in Irrlicht. I was able to fall thru terrain in the provided demo. It was pretty annoying. Due I was absolutely beginner (mostly copy-paste code) for cpp that time I found no way but abandon what I had created and find another way to have fun with Cpp.
Recently I started using Ogre. I would say it has many advanced features which seems amazing. All good things turned bad when I learnt that I won't be able to import ogre skelatal animations into blender due to lack of support (the importer is v0.5 and no updates for the last 4-5 months and we talking about a python script here bleeewwww).
Due Ogre have the misconception to have a format which can not be seamlessly turned to e.g. 3ds (which I guess handled by ALL of the modellers) I understood that an 3d engine is not only about buzzwords but a bunch of code which must have:
1, documentation :)
2, support for modells WITH animation without having anything extra to code (my own mesh format for my 3d engine? come on! you think you will have a better generic 3d mesh format than the professionalsalready have?)
3, open architecture for adding non scene rendering driven objects (ogre have a very bad concept on this imho) with examples (easy to find examples i would say). I mean timers, sound and physic call back. Basicaly a support for multithreaded environment. Those who think 3d engines are and will be single threaded You should keep the architecture of PS3 in mind...

So I HAD TO MOVE back from Ogre (due I understood that falling thru terrain happens with every 3d engine if MY code is bad ;) btw have a look what was done just by a week (only nights!) in ogre, but I still have to abandon it or write a decent importer in python (it a language like javascript - can't do any serious with it) :((((
http://developer.expert.googlepages.com/gba

If you have problems compiling the examples then you can solve all the problems within 10 minutes (add includes, add linraries, add /D "_CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE" to command line) by reading the net. have fun ;)

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best and easy

Posted by: omar shaaban at Oct 31, 2006

Well I have searched for many engines to find a good and mainly an easy one the best answer was Irrlicht Because:
1-very easy for making good 3d games
2-it has all the functions u will need to make a 3d game
3-it is better than crystal3d and ogre
Because first ogre is made for rendering for some cases and crystal 3d is a bit complicated and so good as Irrlicht
So if u wants to make a 3d games with c++ make it with Irrlicht!!

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terrible, dead end engine...

Posted by: notalive at Jan 23, 2010

i've used irrlicht for several months. while the engine is relatively easy to get up and running, that's basically all that it's good for. try to make something more than a simple demo and you'll run fast into a wall.

there is no directx 10 or god forebid, directx 11 support whatsoever. see, this is why this engine is a dead end. it pales in comparison to ogre3d (which have preliminary dx10 and dx11 support). it constantly tries to compare itself to ogre3d but it's simply not that good. irrlicht is many years behind ogre3d.

what kind of engine that still support dx8 but not dx10 or dx11? you got to ask yourself what are you getting yourself into when the developers don't give a rats arse about new technology. it doesn't even come with x64 library. hello? this is 2010 not 1985?

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Best thing in 3D to exist

Posted by: rohitchauhan802 at Jan 21, 2007

I have tried and assessed many 3d libraries ,

OGRE / Torque - too hard to understand (Developers only , not for application Programmers) ,

CrystalSpace - too hard to setup ,

Blender - too Large Worlds lead to unacceptable drop in FPS ,

Panda , jME - too Unconventional due to Python/Java usage (C++ still a 3D standard),

TV3D SDK/RealityFactory - Sort of obsolete features (directX 8/directX 7).

So, Coming to Irrlicht ,

1) C++ - Standard language usage , really fast .
2) Very Easy API - For Application Programmers .
3) Easy setup - Breeze to install and get going .
4) Rendering - No problem rendering large worlds , just run the 2 nd Tutorial .
5) Features - Latest directX9/OpenGL , Shaders 2.0 et al .
6) 2D/3D Sound - With the Integrated irrKlang sound library.

----------------irrKlang---------------------
ALL CODE TO WRITE TO PLAY SOUND

ISoundEngine* engine = createIrrKlangDevice();

engine->play2D("/home/rohit/mysong.ogg", true);

-----------------------------------------------------

7) irrEdit - Gives you a WorldEditor and LightMapper .
8) Docs - Excellent bundled Tutorials , Documentation.
Huge Forums .
9) What else do you need ? :)

10) So , Irrlicht rules .

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Brilliant Open Source Engine

Posted by: Raedwulf at Feb 2, 2007

It is an extremely fast 3d engine, whose simplicity and power is its main advantage.
The interface, unlike other 3d engines, is very straight-forward.
There are some nicer features to be added, but the core features are all in place and the development is extremely active. The community that uses the engine is very large, and any questions about 3d-graphics and irrlicht in particular get answered within a few hours.

The license for the engine is very non-restrictive, allowing it to be used, modified freely for commercial and non-commercial use.

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Free, fast and flexible engine

Posted by: 8oranges8 at Feb 16, 2007

Irrlicht is a very fast and good organized engine.
The clear structure makes it possible to learn the basics in less then one day. Amazing.

Some more things:

+ Multi platform. Windows, Mac, Linux
+ C++, C# and Java
+ Very flexible and external engines like physics or audio are easily added.
+ Very active community and everyone is very supportive. The comments are very friendly and no flames.
+ Free and open license. It is great to use in commercial and non commercial projects because of the free license.

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Great!

Posted by: combine at Mar 16, 2007

Irrlicht is a great engine, its very easy and u can get fast help with the large community.

First i have used Ogre, but i have lots of Problems with Ogre.

With irrlicht you get a very easy start in the World of 3D Programming.

Features:
But i hope Irrlicht get Shadow Maps, coz only 4 Points by Feature.

Easy to Use:
Very Easy

Stability:
No Problems yet

Support:
Very large and friendly community

And if u use Irrlicht with .NET(Or Irrlicht NET CP) then is it Super Extremely easy to use.

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Not as easy to use as other reviews hint

Posted by: at Dec 31, 2007

There are a lot of reviews advocating irrlicht saying it's very easy to use. Don't get me wrong, I am a novice/intermediate c++ programmer and irrlicht is the first graphics engine I am trying so you may still find irrlicht easy but for the first timer it still seems daunting. THe bundled API documentation and tutorials are nice but I could not find and documentation on how to use it with just mingw without any IDE. The speed was good, I was getting about 80 FPS on the techdemo using opengl renderer and my system is p4 1.5 g/256M ram /128M GeForce fx 6200 which is very low-end hardware. It has various Also, irrlicht is only a graphics engine which is a +/- depending on the way you look at it but I found that there is a lot of documentation on how to integrate it with other tools so it should not be a problem. I would suggest novices to first try using the ioquake3 engine which is a full-fledeged game engine but not as feature rich as irrilcht and then start irrilcht.

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Down load ??

Posted by: shiribido at Apr 17, 2007

minh khong biet engine co phai free tuyet doi ko.
va down load bang cach nao ?? cach su dang co kho khong
,minh da thay do hoa cua no roi that an tuong,minh rat thich.

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Best free 3D Engine

Posted by: RedDragCZ at Apr 17, 2007

It is great open source 3d engine, it is very, really very easy to use, suitable too for beginners, stable, with many features, and with perfect documentation and community support :) and now - there is available an irrrlicht xml parser too - irrXML, irrlicht sound engine - irrKlang and irrEdit, free realtime 3D world editor .. additionaly, irrlicht is supporting many languages, including C++, all .NET languages, and there is a an irrlicht java binding, jirr :)

ps: and sorrry for my (maybe :D) bad english

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Simply a must

Posted by: Grellin at May 17, 2007

What can I say that hasn't already been said about this fantastic engine. From set up to execution, this engine is, well, fantastic. It was as easy to set up and use as was SDL. That in itself is saying something. If you are looking to get into 3d game programming, this may very well be the engine for you. There are also some very nice tools that work with this engine.

If you don't want to commit to making a decision just yet, download it, and try the hello world tutorial to see how the system works. It will take less than an hour of your time so you don't have anything to lose.

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If you want to develop games fast, this is the way!

Posted by: Pr3t3nd3r at Aug 11, 2007

Irrlicht is a powerful engine.
Easy to use, easy to understand, easy to compile, to run examples, easy to start new applications, a easy learning curve. It have an very nice and big community.
Very useful for beginners or people who want fast results.
An incredible zlib license. Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it freely. With some small restrictions. (check the zlib lycence for more details)

How right is rohitchauhan802
OGRE / Torque - too hard to understand (Developers only , not for application Programmers) ,
CrystalSpace - too hard to setup ,
The bad pint of irrlicht are some lack with animations and shadows features.

It have an good and easy 2D & GUI support.
It is one of the few 3D engines (commercial/noncommercial) that have and world editor!

If you you to see a very good example of irrlicht power with Galactic Dream - Rage Of war: a game made with irrlicht.
Here are some screenshots:
http://www.rageofwar.net/screens.html

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If you want a graphic engine; this is it!

Posted by: kalo at Aug 15, 2007

I'd say this is one of the best for MSVC; ogre i think it old and therefore can't operate on MSVC (i may be mistaken, but it didn't work for me) the major advantage is that it can work with DirectX, OpenGL, Software, and it's own graphic software.

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Great rendering engine

Posted by: dudMan at Nov 29, 2007

Overview:
Irrlicht is by far my favorite rendering engine. It is lightning-fast(Some users have reported framerates up to and over 1000FPS, i get 75FPS with a cube in the scene using OpenGL), extremely easy to use, and has excelent support.

Support:
Everyone on the forums are very nice and helpful, but if you need an answer *Right Now*, you can join the IRC chat and get near-instant help!

Features:
Irrlicht has your standard features for a 3D graphics engine. mesh loading(.X, .3ds, .my3d, .lwo, .md2, and many more), but also others such as a built-in GUI library, 2D rendering, and lots of others.

Ease-of-Use:
Irrlicht is extremely easy to use. wish i could give the ease of use 6 stars, because in 8 lines of code you can init the engine, load a model, and have a full render loop going. ~20 more lines will get you a full event reciever with movement for that model.

Conclusion:
If you're looking to develop a 3D game, look to irrlicht. in only a few minutes you can have a simple FPS-style movement on a quake-3 map(infact, thats one of the tutorials!)

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Irrlicht vs. Axiom

Posted by: longhorndkr at Dec 3, 2007

As a newb coming into this (and looking for .NET graphics engine), I first found out about Torque via the book "3D Game Programming All in One" in local bookstore. But then I found out Torque has license issues, etc., if you want to build something (outside another Torque game). After learning some more I saw the book as somewhat of a marketing tool. Sorry, Torque.

My question is this--yes, Irrlicht seems to have a great community and great (working!) tutorials that pretty much amazed me in about five minutes of downloading to my VStudio. However, I also looked at Axiom, which is an OGRE port, and while its community is smaller it's pics look awesome. By far some of the best display pics I've seen. So I'm wondering, what do you folks think of the two? Are they really not that different or are there pros and cons to one or the other?

As far as the pics, these are taken from right here on the devmaster site--check out what I mean here:

http://www.devmaster.net/engines/engine_details.php?id=81

I am I no way advocating one or the other, I am rather asking for advice. I simply would like someone to help point out the pros and the cons for a VB.NET guy looking to learn a quick yet awesome FREE 3D engine before I go invest a ton of time in one or the other. From what I've seen, they both look amazing; Irrlicht having more support whereas Axiom may have different shaders and is pretty well handled by smaller yet active dev base (Borrilis).

Also, I see VB.NET listed on both Axiom and Irrlicht but I don't see any VB in Axiom myself whereas Irrlicht has Irrlicht .NET CP, although that doesn't really appear to be VB either, more C#.

Thoughts? Thanks in advance.

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The engine with the easiest learning curve!

Posted by: unixguru88 at Dec 31, 2007

I have tried OGRE, Crystal Space and now irrlicht and I must say Irrlicht is by far the easiest to use. Not mention that it is amazingly fast(I do not have a benchmark to prove this). Irrlicht can also be integrated with irrKlang to set up a full fledged game engine. irredit can be used as a world editor but it was a bit unstable. You can also use gtkradiant the id tech 3/4 editor. The tutorials and wiki are very helpful and also have a professional feel. I suggest installing it and trying out the tutorials, you will be amazed how much can be done in an hour. Another notable point is that it supports a lot of formats natively(3ds, .md2, .obj, .pk3, .ms3d, .bsp, .x, .bmp, .tga, .jpg, .psd, .pcx...).

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Easy but not very easy

Posted by: vegito at Dec 31, 2007

There are a lot of reviews advocating irrlicht saying it's very easy to use. Don't get me wrong, I am a novice/intermediate c++ programmer and irrlicht is the first graphics engine I am trying so you may still find irrlicht easy but for the first timer it still seems daunting. THe bundled API documentation and tutorials are nice but I could not find and documentation on how to use it with just mingw without any IDE. The speed was good, I was getting about 80 FPS on the techdemo using opengl renderer and my system is p4 1.5 g/256M ram /128M GeForce fx 6200 which is very low-end hardware. But, I feel it could be faster if it has some optimized native formats instead of supporting everything under the hood. Also, irrlicht is only a graphics engine which is a +/- depending on the way you look at it but I found that there is a lot of documentation on how to integrate it with other tools so it should not be a problem. The community support is excellent and the forum is the best place get your questions answered. Overall a very good engine and I am going to to do my first real project in it.

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I recommend it alll

Posted by: itzjac at Mar 13, 2008

Very good for a C++ programmer, has a very easy to use GUI interface which can save you lot of time. The graphics and special effects are very easy to use and I have been using it over 1 yerar in 3 very different probles without any limitacion. The user input is very well implemented in a sinlge class and all these in a sigle DLL.

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A great choice for anyone!

Posted by: Jedimace1 at Jul 24, 2008

Irrlicht is more then powerful enough to run a 3D commercial game. If you buy IrrKlang and get IrrEdit, it should be no problem. I'm working on making a free 3D/2D Sound engine to match IrrKlang(with more features), but it will be open source. IrrKlang wants you to pay if you use it for commercial use(WHICH IS A COMPLETE RIPOFF, I shouldn't have to pay some 800 euro for commercial engine. And I could make something that could match it(which I am)). After a few hours I had a Quake3 map with FPS movement, Collision detection and physics, an animated mesh, some lights, and it displaying dynamic text with the FPS in the corner. I'd say by far this is the BEST engine(especially when my sound system comes out...) I have to admit it could use more features though(like a Blender exporter!)

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One of the best free 3D engines available

Posted by: phyxx at Nov 21, 2008

Irrlicht makes creating your own 3D application incredibly simple. Most of the basic steps you need to perform (collision detection, resource loading, display models etc) can be done with only a handful of lines of code. If you are looking for somewhere to start 3D programming Irrlicht is an excellent choice.

The Java bindings are up to date too - most c++ engines have bindings to other languages, but they tend to lag behind the C++ release of the engine. If you want to see how you can use Java with Irrlicht check out http://www.brighthub.com/internet/web-development/articles/15493.aspx

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Great Irrlicht

Posted by: jsmurthy4 at Dec 8, 2008

Well i say Irrlicht is a wonderful Engine and easy to use.
its forum is really good and fast.
At first I use ogre but ogre is better 3d engine. When I try to convert my program into game I feel little difficult, so I use irrlicht its very good 3d Engine it has all game engine features like gravity, collision ,Bone animation ,terrain ,water look etc.

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Best Open Source Engine

Posted by: Makumba666 at Aug 27, 2009

I have worked (or, in most cases - tried) almost every engine listed here. Among them free engines, commercial engines, RAD tools, AAA engines, like Gamebryo, Jupiter etc. What I hate in many open source engines is lack of documentation, unclear code, problems with importers, lack of features, necessity to reinvent wheel, problems with integration third party libraries etc.
Must admit, that Irrlich is beyond of all above mentioned problems. You can create rendering application with just several lines of code and at the same time you are able to control every aspect of renderer - engine does not forced you to do this, but allows - ideal for me. Irrlicht supports a wide range of 3d/textures formats and you hardly can complain about it. It is multiplatform, supports DirectX, OpenGL, software rendering. It has very good and easy to use GUI editor. Irrlich lacks some features, like networking, AI, scripting or some next gen graphic options, but in most cases you can use third party free libraries to add those features or make your own modifications as you have full source code. Irrlich community is friendly and very helpfull.
Overall, I honestly think Irrlich is much better, stable and easier to use, than many commercial engines and of course it is completly free.
So, if you work on small/medium project I heartly advise to use Irrlich, instead throwing your money out.

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Irrlicht

Posted by: Chrism at Sep 14, 2009

Pro's - Good engine that is free. Easy to use with quite good documentation. Runs on low end PC's.

Con's - C++ coding needed. Rendering is not the best on the market but with a good artist this can be nullified.

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"More begginner-ish": panda3d is better at that.

Posted by: jokoon at Nov 13, 2009

Irrlicht looks like more a different concept of what OGRE already does:
multiplatform 3d with c/c++

I read some troll thread, the OGRE lead dev said irrlicht is better for begginners, I tried making stuff on XCode, I felt quite retarded failing multiple times requesting help, while panda3d works like a charm.

I'm not saying irrlicht is crap, because it is a different design, but it lacks finition since the lead dev doesn't wish to have other devs into the project, so maybe it is a personnal project.

To sum up, I learned python, toyed with the panda3d's samples, worked, I'm a beginner, but at least I don't have to fix stuff to do what I want.

Maybe one day I'll use OGRE, but irrlicht, surely not, at least on mac.

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