Description
The Irrlicht Engine is a high performance open source and cross platform 3D engine for creating realtime 3D applications. Its main targets are to be easy to use, extremely fast, extensible and crash safe.
The engine is a quite flexible graphics engine, and it is possible to write lots of different applications with it. Some are: complex 3D simulation applications, first and third person shooter games with indoor and/or outdoor scenes, real time strategy games, 2D games, etc
Cluster support
I couldn’t find any posts on the Irrlicht forums stating that they successfully set up a cluster system. However, there are ways to get cluster support in Irrlicht, it seems – via Project Verse et al.
Interoperability
Irrlicht runs on a multitude of operating systems:
- Windows
- Mac OS X
- Linux
- Windows CE
And because of this, it should co-exist peacefully with E-ON Studio (which runs on Microsoft Windows).
Importing from 3D Studio Max
Source: http://www.irrlicht3d.org/wiki/index.php?n=Main.FAQ#riggedmeshes
There are exporters for popular 3D packages (i.e. 3D Studio Max) included in the SDK.
Character Animation
Source: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/features.html#characteranimation
Irrlicht uses two different types of character animation
- Skeletal animation
- Morph target animation
Morph target animation was used in the Quake 1-3 series and use .md2 or .md3-files. Meshes are linearly interpolated from one frame to the next.
In skeletal animation, a skin is manipulated by animated joints. Irrlicht supports, among others, .3ds and .r meshes
Speed
Source: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/faq.html#speed
The Irrlicht Engine prides itself that it is lightning fast, and gives the following explanation to why that is.
Also, the Mark 4 Engine blog states that “this is the fastest 3D graphics library ever”
- The Irrlicht Engine does not use that conservative culling algorithms like most other engines do, which works better on today’s 3d hardware. It uses 16 bit textures by default (but all other formats are possible too) which enables the engine to transfer and/or display textures 2 times faster than other engines.
- The engine does not rely on lots of other slow libraries, almost everything is implemented directly inside the core of the engine.
Other thoughts
Irrlicht seems to be mainly developed by one person and is not open source per se. The project seems to have an active community that offers both support and code submissions. It is however important to acknowledge this fact when considering this engine. I fear that a project like Irrlicht is more likely to cease development than for example Delta3D.
[…] Irrlicht […]
Hi,
Irrlicht is open source with BSD license. Some of the supporting tools are closed source though.