Irrlicht Engine

Irrlicht Engine is an open source, cross-platform, high performance and real-time 3D game engine written in C++ and ported to the .NET/Mono languages.

Irrlicht Engine features its very own software renderer, but it also uses the OpenGL and D3D technologies. The software includes state-of-the-art functionality, which can be found in commercial 3D gaming engines.

Among some of its top-notch features, we can mention a huge built-in and extensible material library that includes pixel and vertex shader support, seamless outdoor and indoor mixing, a character animation system, particle effects, light maps, billboards, stencil buffer shadows, environment mapping, and others.

Irrlicht Engine is a platform-independent application that has been successfully tested under the Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.

What is new in this release:

• We just released Irrlicht version 1.7.1, fixing a few bugs of the latest major release.
• All users of 1.7 should update to this version, because it also fixes a severe bug in the aabbox collision test which causes reduced rendering speed.

What is new in version 1.7:

• Added Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
• Added support for geometry shaders (OpenGL)
• Addes possibility to access texture mipmaps and to provide custom mipmaps
• Ogre .mesh format animations now supported, and Ogre 32bit indices as well
• NPK (Nebula device archive) support added
• New VertexManipulator interface for simple creation of vertex manipulation algorithms
• Added Separate TextureWrap modes for U and V coordinates and the option to mirror wrap
• Added Bzip2 and LZMA support and AES encryption
• Added options to 2D drawing like thickness, anti-aliasing and filtering.
• VBO Support for skydomes and similar
• Support for external windows in Mac OS X
• Lots of other improvements and bug fixes

What is new in version 1.6.1:

• This version contains a lot of bugfixes and corrections, like improvements with the GUI Environment, Lightmap rendering and DMF loading, and keyboard mapping under Linux.

What is new in version 1.6:

• This release includes new features such as new mesh and image loaders (.PLY mesh loader, .RGB, .RGBA, .SGI, .INT, and .INTA textures), new material properties ColorMask, Mipmap LOD, depth test function, AlphaToCoverage, selective Anti-Aliasing, new console device and the possibility to create different devices from the same library, an OverrideMaterial for changing material properties globally, a new Filesystem with tighter integration of different archive types (ZIP, TAR, etc), and an improved software rendering engine.

What is new in version 1.5:

• This release adds new features like support for COLLADA 1.4 and LWO files, an .OBJ file writer, an enhanced software rasterizer (burning video), FSAA for OpenGL, OGRE .mesh loader improvements, nicer and faster terrain rendering, volume lights, various improvements for the WindowsCE port, shared depth buffers for RTT in D3D, a font creation tool for Linux, and improvements with the dynamic lights, particle systems, LMTS, PNG, and PCX loading and writing, and a lot more.