Hey,
I am currently getting a bit into Irrlicht to learn something new.
I just wanted to ask if anyone here already made some experiences with it

I am working with Irrlicht for about two weeks now and especially the ease of use is really great.
Of course the first thing I want to get working are shader :P

Here are two screenshots with bad values for the shaders to show the effects better:
Here is my first try on bloom:

and here is some normalmapping together with a lightmap (which somehow doesn´t look that bad even if the normalmapping calculations are wrong because of currently no right vertexformat for this (I failed on recompiling the engine... :P)):



Nils

mk_1 has converted to the irrlicht religion lately. so ask him, he's already got some playable results.

beside the fact that the lower pic looks ugly (but i assume this was intended to see the spec-nm better), the 1st one is quite nice at first glance. at second glance, you couldn't (yet) fix the model self shadowing error, did you (black triangle artifacts at the guard's ass and back)... too bad.

PS: you taskbar is damn overcrowded...

Oh, that was really mk_1 on the Irrlicht IRC channel I thought about asking if it is him, but decided against it :P

I guess that you now the problem with stencil shadows and open meshes? I hope that that is the problem causing the strang selfshadowing. The problem can also be seen in the example, though it is far not that visible. I did not check it, but I guess that the mesh is open.
The normalmapping shader supports a glossmap but I did not have one. And I dropped that shader for now anyways.

Yes, I know that my taskbar is crowded and I don´t like it, but the only window I did not really need was SED.

Hi,

I looked at Irrlicht a month or two ago to possible use for a subject at college...but never got to trying to use it.

I just wonder how powerful the engine is ( comparitively to 3dgs? ) and how easy it is to actually create a game with it (as it is apparently meant only as graphics engine). Not that I'll be getting into it soon but I am just interested.

cartoon_baboon

irrlicht is very friendly, about a year and a half ago i was playing around with it when i was trying to get a little further aquainted with c++ (I only had a very basic understanding of it, and up until then, i still hadnt even figured out the point of pointers) but I was still able to build levels, and make a poor 1st person camera. It works pretty well, although the biggest issues are speed oriented, it is quite slow and has no real scene management. still a very good starting block for a custom game engine.

Irrlicht has a scene management, its an Octree and works quite good. I found the speed not so bad. It's slower than A7, but definitely faster than BV for example.

How did you measure the speed differences? Do you have the same scene for all 3 engines to check them? What scene is it? Interior, Exterior?

I just put a collection of models in different sizes together, so I guess you can call it an outdoor scene.

Ok, then this might be true for this special case. You find more infos about the scene management of Irrlicht here:
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/features.html#SceneMangagment

I think the comparison to GameCore / BV is another story. You can create special (very simple) Occlusion geometry there to create your own scene management. If you set it up right then it will beat the other methods in many situations. But it needs more work.

For indoor it is another story as well. A system with portals and zones like in C4 or Torque will always beat the methods like Octree, ABT and similar. Only because of such an efficient system it is possible to create rooms with tons of shaders and dynamic lights in C4 while making big indoor levels with dozens of rooms.

The scene management is very important and should differ depending on the game you are making. ABT is better for outdoor but not good for indoor and a PVS system is better for indoors or faked outdoors like you see in HL2 games.

If you are going to make an ambitious project with bigger worlds then this has to be taken into account.
For 2d casual games you dont have to care about it.

I just wanted to give some updates about my progress:
So far I really like working with C++ and Irrlicht but am still working a lot with A7/Lite-C and thus don´t make that much progress.
I wrote myself two classes, one for postprocessing which gives me the same possibilities as the Lite-C stages and one for objectshaders, which allows me to add any shader to a object and with setting the textures and needed parameters automatically.
I am currently trying to get several physicsengines to work with Irrlicht. That is really a lot of fun :P I am done with Newton so far and am now trying to get PhysX working.
The problem I´ve got with newton is currently an fps independant updating, but I guess that I will somehow find a way that works without too many problems.
Here is a simple level with 1000 boxes falling from the air using newton. It is running with about 20fps the lowest is at about 9 and the highest around 70 (in the beginning when nothing collides):


In case you are interested here is a demo application showing bloom using my postprocessing class. I compiled it and Irrlicht on windows and thus this exe will only run on a windows system You also need a least shadermodel 2.0 to see the effect and it does use DirectX for rendering: http://files.filefront.com/PostProcessing+V01+DX+exerar/;10439611;/fileinfo.html