page_title: Irrlicht Engine
section_title: Features
hierarchical_section_title: Irrlicht Engine / Features
caption_attribution_description: English: Screenshot from a project using Irrlicht Engine which shows using lightmaps alongside with vertex lighting to create professional look and dynamic lighting at the same time.
context_page_description: Irrlicht is an open-source game engine written in C++. It is cross-platform, officially running on Windows, macOS, Linux and Windows CE and due to its open nature ports to other systems are available, including FreeBSD, Xbox, PlayStation Portable, Symbian, iPhone, AmigaOS 4 and Google Native Client.
  Irrlicht is known for its small size and compatibility with new and older hardware alike, ease of learning, and a large friendly community. Unofficial bindings for many languages exist including AutoIt, C++Builder, FreeBASIC, GameMaker Language, Java, Lua, .NET, Object Pascal, Perl, Python, and Ruby, though most of them have not been maintained for five years or more.
  Irrlicht's development began in 2003 with one developer, Nikolaus Gebhardt. Only after the 1.0 release of Irrlicht in 2006 did the team grow to ten members as of 2011, most of them being developers.
  Irrlicht is a common German term for a will-o'-the-wisp.
context_section_description: Irrlicht supports 3D rendering via OpenGL, DirectX 8, 9, and 11 (with DirectX 11 extension), and internal software rasterizers. DirectX 8 will not be supported after 1.8.1, effectively ending support for Xbox. External renderers and windowing systems plug in through simple interfaces, giving rise to a community-made Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) video driver and support for iPhone and Symbian devices.
  The engine comes with a library of standard material renderers, allowing fallback materials where user hardware is unable to handle advanced methods. New materials can be added to the engine at run-time, allowing users to write their own as needed. In addition to legacy fixed-function pipeline materials, programmable Pixel and Vertex Shaders (1.1 to 3.0 and 4.0 using GLSL), ARB Fragment and Vertex Programs, HLSL, Cg and GLSL materials are supported.
  Irrlicht supports many file formats. It will load and display 3ds Max files, Quake 2 MD2 Models, Wavefront .obj objects, Quake 3 .bsp maps, Milkshape3D objects, and DirectX .x files. Additional format loaders have been written as external plugins. Lights, cameras and 3D objects are managed as a tree of Scene Nodes, arbitrary groupable entities linked together in a scene graph.  These nodes are responsible for their own behaviour, but can also be managed by animators, each other, or manually by users.
  Many built-in node types exist and can be used together to make complex indoor and outdoor scenes. New nodes are trivial to make and can be added at runtime; many additional node types are available from the community. Node types packaged with Irrlicht include a terrain renderer and sky domes-boxes for outdoor rendering, binary space partitioning (BSP) for indoor rendering, bone based animated meshes, stencil shadows, billboards and particle systems, water surfaces and primitives.
  A skinnable 2D graphical user interface (GUI) is available, supporting many controls and the ability for users to plug in their own (or community made) custom widgets at runtime. Irrlicht's internal event system provides mouse, keyboard, joystick and GUI events without having to rely on additional libraries.
  Filesystem access is abstracted allowing platform-independent file and folder access, and transparent access to files within ZIP archives. Other I/O features include an XML reader and writer, the ability to take screenshots, manipulate images and meshes and then save them in several different file formats.
  Irrlicht provides support for simple collision detection including mouse picking, but users are advised that this is not intended as a replacement for a full featured physics engine.
caption: Lightmaps and vertex lighting in Irrlicht, rendering a simple dungeon scene
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