Ogre was increasingly difficult for me to manage, so once again I had moved engines. It’s always a good idea to stick with something, but for someone who has not had extensive knowledge previously in programming, Ogre was not the best way to do things.

So I moved to Irrlicht. Irrlicht seems quite similar to Ogre3D. It uses some similar features which helps with the migration to the new engine, but it is a lot easier to manage. No external plug-ins are required for most basic actions, and it is more than just a rendering engine with all of the features included. It is no way actually better than Ogre, and it may even have some slightly outdated features, but what I’m really enjoyin so far is the ease of use of it. It’s not a “click this and let the program do it for you” engine as it still gives you direct control over everything you do, and then there’s always the additional plug-ins I can include such as PhysX, FMOD, and so on.

I’ve been mostly just playing around in Irrlicht and finishing the tutorials. I tried to combine some of the features in the tutorials and have come up with a nice little demo that I’ve actually spent some time on. The difference between the demo I use and the original tutorial I based it off is that it allows the user to move around while using collision detection on the walls and further user control on the parallax mapping involved in the scene. There are a few smaller features available which can just be seen in the changelog and such.

Download V1.1

It is NOT a game, it is simply show casing these features.

A reasonable graphics card is required for anyone willing to see the full effect of Parallax mapping on the walls, which requires at least Pixel and Vertex Shader 2 on your graphics card. I am running the demo at roughly 1000 frames per second with a 2 year old computer. (A 8800GTS graphics card).

The source file is included for anyone who shares interest in programming, though please don’t ask me how to open a ‘cpp’ file.

Instructions: Extract the contents to any place of your choice and open the example.exe file. Be sure to read the readme.txt, it has some useful information.

Move around with W, A, S and D and the mouse. Use Q, E, Z and C for various scene tweaks. No fancy nuclear weapons yet.

Enjoy!