Irrlicht engine for cross-platform game development with C ++ (1)

The irrlicht engine is a high-performance real-time 3D engine written in C ++. It can be used in C ++ProgramOr. NET language. By using direct3d (Windows Platform), OpenGL 1.2 or its own software coloring program, the engine can be fully cross-platform. Despite being open-source, the irrlicht Library provides artistic features that can be used on commercial 3D engines, such as dynamic shadows, particle systems, role animation, indoor and Outdoor technologies and collision detection (see figure 1 ).

Figure 1. irrlicht 3D Engine

Irrlicht is the name of an animal in a German mythical story. It can shine and fly and be found near most of the swamp. The word "irrlicht" is a combination of two German words ("IRR" means crazy, and "Licht" means light. In English, it is translated as "Ghost fire ".

Irrlicht is fortunate to be supported by a large number of projects for an active development team. However, irrlicht is designed primarily by the game guru Nikolaus Gebhardt, so the game is very coherent in design. You can find irrlicht enhancement programs everywhere on the Internet, such as optional terrain generators, entry generators, output generators, world layer generators, related tutorials and editors. Moreover, it independently creates bindings to Java, Perl, Ruby, basic, Python, Lua, and even more languages. The most important thing is that it is completely free.

Ii. irrlicht features

Before in-depth analysis of the API, let me introduce more specifically what functions irrlicht provides to 3D Game Developers:

· An engine that can run on Linux, Windows 98, me, NT, 2000, XP (MACOs is under planning), and other operating systems

· Provides anti-aliasing support for direct3d 8 generator or direct3d 9 generator (optional)

· Skin-changing GUI environment (including a cool metallic shadow skin), with beautiful appearances for some vintage dialogs

· Scenario Management System, which allows seamless indoor/outdoor transition

· Role animation system with skeleton and deformation target animation Functions

· A special effect system, including particle effects (rain, smoke, fire, snow, etc.), notice boards, light maps, environments, maps, template buffer shadows, fog, texture animations, parallax texture, concave & convex texture, and more

· Built-in material support, including support for pixel and vertex shaders versions 1.1 to 3.0, ARB fragment and vertex programs, and HLSL (glsl is under Planning)

·. NET language binding, which enables the engine to be used in all. NET languages such as C #, Visual Basic. net, and Delphi. net.

· A built-in platform-independent software generator with features: Z-buffering, Gouraud shadow, Alpha mixing and transparency, and fast 2D plotting (see figure 2)

· Your long-awaited 2D drawing functions, such as alpha mixing, key-color-based bitmap copying, font painting, and hybrid 3D and 2D graphics

· Direct import of common modeling file formats: Maya, 3 dstudio Max, Collada, deled, milkshape, quake 3 levels, quake2 models, DirectX, Pulsar, my3dtools, fsrad, and cartography shop

· Imports textures directly from BMP, PNG, Photoshop, JPEG, Targa, and PCX

· Fast and easy-to-use collision detection and response

· Optimized the Rapid 3D operations and container Template Library

· Directly read the file (which can be compressed, for example, A. ZIP file)

· Integrated quick XML Analyzer

· Unicode support for easy local development

Figure 2: irrlicht-based game yet another space shooter (yass), which shows the surprising coloring effect in a static game Frame

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