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. Irrlicht is not a game engine, it only does graphics.
The engine is a quite flexible graphics engine, and it is possible to write lots of different applications with it. Some include: complex 3D simulation applications, first and third person shooter games with indoor and/or outdoor scenes, real time strategy games, 2D games.
Irrlicht is popular due to its small size and compatibility with new and older hardware alike, a gentle learning curve and a friendly and supportive community. There are a number of free, open source and commercial games which use the Irrlicht Engine. A few examples are SlamSoccer 2006, MikoChess, Crimson Glory, Alpha Foundation, and H-Craft Championship.
Features include:
- Easy to use.
- High performance realtime 3D rendering using Direct3D and OpenGL.
- Huge built-in and extensible material library with vertex, pixel, and geometry shader support.
- Seamless indoor and outdoor mixing through highly customizeable scene management.
- Character animation system with skeletal and morph target animation.
- Particle effects, billboards, light maps, environment mapping, stencil buffer shadows, and lots of other special effects.
- Several language bindings which make the engine available to other languages such as C#, VisualBasic, Delphi, Java …
- Two platform and driver independent fast software renderers included. They have different properties (speed vs. quality) and feature everything needed: perspective correct texture mapping,n bilinear filtering, sub pixel correctness, z-buffer, gouraud shading, alpha-blending and transparency, fast 2D drawing, and more.
- Powerful, customizeable, and easy to use 2D GUI System with Buttons, Lists, Edit boxes, …
- 2D drawing functions like alpha blending, color key based blitting, font drawing, and mixing 3D with 2D graphics.
- Direct import of common mesh file formats: Maya (.obj), 3DStudio (.3ds), COLLADA (.dae), Blitz3D (.b3d), Milkshape (.ms3d), Quake 3 levels (.bsp), Quake2 models (.md2), Microsoft DirectX (.X)…
- Direct import of Textures: Windows Bitmap (.bmp), Portable Network Graphics (.png), Adobe Photoshop (.psd), JPEG File Interchange Format (.jpg), Truevision Targa (.tga), ZSoft Painbrush (.pcx)…
- Fast and easy collision detection and response.
- Optimized fast 3D math and container template libraries.
- Directly reading from (compressed) archives. (.zip, .pak, .pk3, .npk).
- Integrated fast XML parser.
- Clean, easy to understand, and well documented API with lots of examples and tutorials.
- Written in pure C++ and totally object oriented.
- Unicode support for easy localisation.
- No dependencies from other libraries. The engine needs no other libraries and sdks to be installed.
Website: irrlicht.sourceforge.io
Support: Blog
Developer: Nikolaus Gebhardt and other developers
License: zlib/libpng license
Irrlicht is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Return to Games Engines Part 2
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