Has anybody heard of the IrrLicht engine?

[pjrulze]

Hey everybody,

We are currently doing a project at TAFE SA which involves creating a workable game level. We are currently a team of 3 artists who do everything from the initial artwork and concept, up to the 3D models (Using 3DS Max 8) and animations, 1 sound engineer and at the moment are programmerless (that will be changing within the next week).

The endgame for us is to import our work into into a game engine, and with assistance from students from the University of Adelaide (who will be doing the programming) and a student from Uni SA (the sound engineer). The only problem that we seem to be having at the moment is choosing an engine. The campus has licenced copies of Torque for us to use, but we have recently discovered a game engine called IrrLicht, which looks very good, and is completely free with no drawbacks (that are immediately apparent anyway).

I suppose I'm asking for a couple of kinds of feedback, the first being from anyone who has had experience with the Torque engine and can offer us any advice on importing and exporting our models and animations, basic polygon counts for an RTS (eg character counts, total poly limit etc). The other feedback that I am looking from anyone who has had experience with IrrLicht, as our mind is far from made up about which engine we will be using.

Cheers
Paul Summers
Student at TAFE SA

[TheMysteriousStranger]

I've never used Torque's engine, but I dabbled with IrrLicht. Although I never finished a project using it, from what I did with it, it seems to be a very solid, pretty easy to use and pretty fast 3D engine. It has a decent set of features, and is indeed free to use (you have to include an IrrLicht splash screen for a few seconds, and I think they wanted a link to their site as well). When I was using IrrLicht (about a year and a half ago now) the forums were great. Your question would get answered within half an hour and the answer would be full of useful info and links. The API was pretty straight forward, using the standard scene graph method to build your world. It also had support for BSP trees and could load/import Quake3 maps and models - so there are lots of tools out there for editing stuff. However, quake3 map compilers are still pay-to-use commercially, I think, but if this is a non-commercial project then you can use q3map2 - which is a great Q3 map compiler.

You should also consider Ogre3D - it's a very popular engine with a great feature list. I've never actually used ogre though, so I can't comment on the API.

[MacMan45]

You should also consider Ogre3D - it's a very popular engine with a great feature list. I've never actually used ogre though, so I can't comment on the API.

Ogre has a fantastic API & community, it is however just a render engine, if you want to just jump straight into building a game, Ogre although powerful, is probably the longer path to take.

[supagu]

what some one from Adelaide on these forums r u crazey?

[Sybixsus]

However, quake3 map compilers are still pay-to-use commercially, I think, but if this is a non-commercial project then you can use q3map2 - which is a great Q3 map compiler.

Not any more. I can't recall exactly the terms, but probably something like GPL now. I think it changed when they GPL'ed all the Quake3 source, but I do recall reading about how the tools could be used as well now.

Incidentally, you probably already know but it wasn't made clear in what you said, but the format was never the reason you had to pay. You only had to pay if you were using ID's code to compile BSP's and most, if not all, of the BSP compilers were using at least some of ID's code. I believe there are now alternative Q3BSP compilers which don't use any of ID's code. It's been a long time since I even considered using BSP's though, so I'm afraid I don't have any links handy.

Anyway, it's worth looking around for more information if BSP's are what you want.

[Paul-Jan]

Ogre ... is just a render engine

So is Irrlicht. It does do basic collision detection and response though. Oh, and it's pretty good.

[esrix]

From personal experience, I can tell you Irrlicht is a very well thought out engine and it's documentation is highly detailed and rock solid. However, keep in mind that it's a rendering engine, so sound and any networking capabilities will have to come from other libraries.

You may also want to look at it's fledgeling scene graph editor, called IrrEdit, (http://irredit.irrlicht3d.org/) also a free download. It is a side project started by Irrlicht's creator, Niko, although he is purposely not releasing the source because he doesn't want to deal with managing another open-source project.

[MacMan45]

So is Irrlicht. It does do basic collision detection and response though. Oh, and it's pretty good.


Thanks, i wasn't actually aware of that, i've had my head stuck into Ogre's api since late 2003, so i havn't looked elsewhere :P

[Pallav Nawani]

I thought I'll throw in my two cents here, but first, the
Disclaimer: I haven't developed a 3d game, ever, and I don't know how to do it either, so take my opinion with a pinch of salt.

About 8 Months ago I looked into irrlicht with the intention of using it for developing a 2d game. I found out that Irrlicht was not suitable for it at all, and it did not have support for simple things like fading in/out of an image with alpha etc. So I switched to PopCap Framework. That was my first encounter with a 3d engine. My impressions of Irrlicht are:

(a) Easy to pick up: If you want to get started with 3d stuff, this is the engine for you.
(b) Not field tested: Nobody has yet made a full fledged game with irrlicht, so I am not sure what its capabilities really are.
(c) Hidden gotchas: You can load a q3 bsp level in Irrlicht, but the bump mapping won't work.
(d) I am not sure how stable Irrlicht is, couple times I had unexplained crashes, though they could be my own doing.
(e) Lots of goodies are supplied with the engine, like a widget system, a zip file system, xml parser, basic collision detection etc. However, you are better of writing your own widgets, as the one supplied with irrlicht look as dull as the ones in windows.

I just had a strong gut feeling that Irrlicht was not ready for prime time.

[pjrulze]

Cheers for the responses so far everyone, but I also have another question to add to my above 2, and that is about decent tutorials for both IrrLicht and Torque. Are there any decent websites around that have comprahensive tutorials for either engine? We already know abou the tutorials for Torque on the GarageGames website, but we are interested mainly in user written tutorials that may address issues that will crop up.

Cheers

[Sysiphus]

A deep glance to Openbsp could be great :

http://www.osmanturan.com/downloads.aspx

Is a free q3 bsp compiler. Even is open source, fully usable.

this was another project/author, but seems got stalled :
http://map3bspc.sourceforge.net/

you have a free for comercial also general map editor (QUARK):

http://quark.planetquake.gamespy.com/

which u can configure with a q3 bsp compiler, or a free HL bsp compiler,like :
http://collective.valve-erc.com/index.php?go=mhlt

But Irrlicht loads only q3 BSP files, I think.
bsp and map viewers here, plus some other tools(but surely based on the Half Life route..) :
http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?p=1

[paulm]

@supagu: Yes, there are people from Adelaide on these forums, including myself. Game development in Adelaide is very low profile, but if you look hard enough you can find people. I'm not just talking about HardCover or Krome either.

@pjrulze: I think you'll find there's quite a few people who are using Torque from Adelaide, although I don't know of anyone using Irrlicht. This may simply be because of their visibility on forums.

As for user-written tutorials, I can't say I know of many. TGE is pretty bare out of the box. The additional code you can get for it, both free and commercial, helps spruce it up. Best bet is the artists' section of the website (as sparse as that is).

As for poly limits, it will depend on your engine of course, although I'd take a wild stab at around 600-800 polys for TGE. Again it would depend on the requirements of the game itself and the engine you'd be using. If you manage to get a hold of the TGE RTS kit, I'd say it would give you a good estimate of the polycount.

Have you considered modding an engine, perhaps like Source? Clearly it would take some work converting what is clearly a first-person shooter engine, but the opportunities for level design would be great. I guess it depends on your programmer's confidence and the amount of time you have.

Anyhow good luck. It's good to see the Game Art course is attracting some entrepreneurial talent.

Cheers,
Paul.

[pjrulze]

Cheers for the feedback Paul. As a team, we had considered modding a pre-existing engine, possible Dungeon Seige 2 or Dawn of War, but we also saw the potential in TGE for our purposes. Our minds were made up when TAFE decided to get programmers from the Uni involved. Our biggest problem at this stage is that it has been a very laborious task of getting the TGE installed here at TAFE, and in hindsight, we probably should have modded an existing engine. But, with the knowledge we gain from having to try and speed learn an engine, that is getting used here in Adelaide, it will put us in good stead for the future.

It is good to here that there are game developers here in Adelaide, as I don't particularly want to move interstate at this stage, and hopefully I will be joining the fairly well hidden game developers community here in Adelaide in the next 12 months.

Cheers
Paul (pjrulze)

[area51]

My 2 cents worth:
Irrlicht is a very capable engine, solid, robust, easy interface with a shallow learning curve. Definatly worth a visit.