Recently I brought you the YouTube movie showcasing a 3D game creation environment called Virtools. I wish it was made available to PSP homebrew scene, but as much as I would like to put my hands on it I doubt its creators will release for free. Still, that has given me the idea to present you one of the free alternatives.
Irrlicht is one of the most popular open-source 3D game engines. It offers quite sophisticated solutions that should be more than enough for most of applications. There is quite a lot of serious applications based on it, as well as some amateur projects (you can see some of them here).
Irrlicht is one of the most popular open-source 3D game engines. It offers quite sophisticated solutions that should be more than enough for most of applications. There is quite a lot of serious applications based on it, as well as some amateur projects (you can see some of them here).
Wireless sensor boards.I myself used Irrlicht for a project that I have been working on in NTT Laboratories in Japan. The project consisted of hardware and software part : we used Freescale Zigbee kit for wireless transmission of data gathered by independent sensors. The data would then be sent (also wirelessly) to a PC running a 3D visualization program, which would display the position (including rotation angles) of sensors in three-dimensional world. You can think of it as something similar to Wii and its Wiimote, only a wireless cluster of them.
At some point, when I already had bought my Playstation Portable and started dabbling in programming it, I thought that it would be cool to have Irrlicht ported to PSP. I pointed it out in Irrlicht forums - you can read it here. It turned out that I was definitely not the first person to have thought about it : a couple of days later the port was announced.
The port is called LTE Game Engine and it is available here :
However, there is one thing that spoils the overall good impression: the team behind it forgot to give any credit whatsoever to Irrlicht devs (or at least I do not know anything about it). That is a bit nasty, especially since Irrlicht is open source and its license allows modifications and porting, so it wouldn't really hurt to admit that most of the job was in fact done by someone else.
One of Irrlicht devs wrote a post on his blog about how ungrateful the guys behind LTE are, having forgotten to mention Irrlicht anywhere in their documentation, which goes to show that it hurt their feelings a little.
As for the engine itself, I cannot write more about its efficiency and speed, as I didn't have time to really push it to the limits and see what comes out. Recently I installed a new Linux distribution over the old one, which means I need to set up PSPSDK once again (and it is quite a long process indeed). Still, I thought I would bring it to your attention, even if there is a little controversy surrounding it. A free alternative to commercial libraries is a good thing after all.
