Irrlicht Engine – a cross-platform realtime 3D engine
12 comments
·September 11, 2025jsheard
monkeyelite
In retrospect, I think you are far better off forking Quake rather than messing with these kinds of 2010 projects which attempt to solve all problems, and do none of them very well.
frainfreeze
Blast from the past indeed! I ve toyed around with it, Ogre3D and others, finally setting down on P3D. Over a decade ago I maintained unofficial Panda3D Facebook page, and had page analytics track followers count again Ogre3D and Irrlicht Engine pages, trying to surpass them..
garaetjjte
Ogre3d also seems to be alive.
steve_taylor
I remember a time when the topic of a lot of forum posts was Irrlicht vs. Ogre3D. If I recall correctly, Ogre3D was harder to get started with and had a smaller scope (just the scene graph), but was the better of the two 3D scene graph implementations.
skocznymroczny
I miss the era of websites like flipcode (archives are still available https://www.flipcode.com/ ), people sharing screenshots of their OpenGL/DirectX engines. Nowadays making a 3D engine is more of a hobby, because you'll never catch up with the big ones.
thegeomaster
Well this was a trip down the memory lane. I built a small game on Irrlicht at the time and I remember these discussions also.
Irrlicht had its editor (irrEdit), a sound system (irrKlang), and some basic collision detection and FPS controller was built right into the engine. This was enough to get you a considerable way through a fully featured tech demo, at the very least. (I even remember Irrlicht including a beautiful first-person tech demo of traversing a large BSP-partitioned castle level.)
However, for those not afraid to stitch these additional parts from other promising libraries (or derive them from first principles, as was fashionable), OGRE offered more raw rendering prowess: a working deferred shading system (this was the heyday of deferred shading), a pop-less terrain implementation with texture splatting, and more impressive shader and rendering pipeline support, with the Cg multi-platform shading language. I remember a fairly impressive ocean surface and Fresnel refraction/reflection demos from OGRE at the time.
protocolture
Yeah classic haha. I think the Ogre forums especially had quite a few of these comparison threads.
"Ogre3d is a graphics engine, if you want to spend the time to strap a game to it, go for it."
gatane
Luanti (ex Minetest) also uses this engine btw
jsheard
Kind of, they forked Irrlicht and took it in their own direction.
brcmthrowaway
How does this compare to Godot
monkeyelite
Not at all similar. Godot follows the Unity model of focusing around a GUI editor. This is a set of cpp libraries.
Now there's a blast from the past. Irrlichts heyday was around ~2010, but it looks like there's still a few people keeping the lights on.
TIL it was actually used in a commercial game (Bugsnax) relatively recently, although the devs said that it will be their final release on the engine.
https://xcancel.com/luthyr/status/1271866001467080705