Its main features are:

• High performance realtime 3D rendering using Direct3D and OpenGL [more]
• Platform independent. Runs on Windows95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Linux, OSX, Solaris, and others.[more]
• Huge built-in and extensible material library with vertex and pixel shader support [more].
• Seamless indoor and outdoor mixing through highly customizeable scene management. [more]
• Character animation system with skeletal and morph target animation. [more]
• Particle effects, billboards, light maps, environment mapping, stencil buffer shadows, and lots of other special effects. [more]
• .NET language binding which makes the engine available to all .NET languages like C#, VisualBasic, and Delphi.NET.
• Two platform and driver independent fast software renderers included. They have different properties (speed vs. quality) and feature everything needed: perspective correct texture mapping, bilinear filtering, sub pixel correctness, z-buffer, gouraud shading, alpha-blending and transparency, fast 2D drawing, and more.
• Powerful, customizeable, and easy to use 2D GUI System with Buttons, Lists, Edit boxes, ...
• 2D drawing functions like alpha blending, color key based blitting, font drawing, and mixing 3D with 2D graphics.
• Clean, easy to understand, and well documented API with lots of examples and tutorials.
• Written in pure C++ and totally object oriented.
• Direct import of common mesh file formats: Maya (.obj), 3DStudio (.3ds), COLLADA (.dae), Blitz3D (.b3d), Milkshape (.ms3d), Quake 3 levels (.bsp), Quake2 models (.md2), Microsoft DirectX (.X)... [more]
• Direct import of Textures: Windows Bitmap (.bmp), Portable Network Graphics (.png), Adobe Photoshop (.psd), JPEG File Interchange Format (.jpg), Truevision Targa (.tga), ZSoft Painbrush (.pcx)... [more]
• Fast and easy collision detection and response.
• Optimized fast 3D math and container template libraries.
• Directly reading from (compressed) archives. (.zip, .pak, .pk3)
• Integrated fast XML parser.
• Unicode support for easy localisation.
• Works with Microsoft VisualStudio 7.0-9.0™, Metrowerks Codewarrior, Bloodshed Dev-C++, Code::Blocks, XCode, and gcc 3.x-4.x.
• The engine is open source and totally free. You can debug it, fix bugs and even change things you do not like. And you do not have to publish your changes: The engine is licensed under the zlib licence, not the GPL or the LGPL.

There are lots of common special effects available in the Irrlicht Engine. They are not difficult to use, in most cases the programmer only has to switch them on. The engine is constantly extended with new effects, here is list of effects which are currently implemented:

• Realistic water surfaces
• Dynamic lights
• Dynamic shadows using the stencil buffer
• Billboards
• Bump mapping
• Parallax mapping
• Transparent objects
• Light maps
• Customizeable Particle systems for snow, smoke, fire, ...
• Sphere mapping
• Texture animation
• Skyboxes and skydomes
• Fog

The Irrlicht Engine supports 6 rendering APIs, which are 5 more than most other 3D engines do:

• Direct3D 8.1
• Direct3D 9.0
• OpenGL 1.2-3.0
• The Irrlicht Engine software renderer.
• The Burningsvideo Software Renderer
• A null device.

When using the Irrlicht engine, the programmer needs not to know, which API the engine is using, it is totally abstracted. He only needs to tell the engine which API the engine should prefer.
There are three reasons why the engine not only focuses on one API:

• Performance. Some graphic adapters are optimized for OpenGL, some simply run faster with Direct3D.
• Platform independence. Direct3D will not be present on a Mac or a Linux Workstation, while maybe OpenGL will. And when OpenGL is not available either, there are still the Irrlicht Engine software renderers, which will always operate on any platform. In this way, the user will see something on the screen for sure.
• Driver problems, which are a common problem a user encounters when using 3D software. There are thousands of hardware configurations out there, and often games and 3D applications are crashing, because there is an old driver installed. Letting the user switch the driver might solve the problem.

To be able to create realistic environments quickly, there are lots of common built in materials available in the engine. Some materials are based on the fixed function pipeline (light mapped geometry for example) and some are relying on the programmable pipline (normal mapped/parallax per pixel lighted materials for example) todays 3d hardware is offering. It is possible to mix these types of materials in a scene without problems and when using a material which needs features the hardware is not able to do, the engine provides fall back materials. However, if the built in materials are not enough, it is possible to add new materials to Irrlicht at runtime, without the need of modifying/recompiling the engine. Currently supported shader languages for this are:

• Pixel and Vertex Shaders 1.1 to 3.0
• ARB Fragment and Vertex Programs
• HLSL
• GLSL

The Irrlicht Engine is platform independent. Which means in this case it will run on more than one platform, which are currently:

• Windows 98, ME, NT 4, 2000, XP, XP64, Vista, CE
• Linux
• OSX
• Sun Solaris/SPARC
• All platforms using SDL

More platforms are planned, but have not yet been implemented. The Engine works with all supported platforms in the same way. The programmer only has to write the game/application code once, and it will run on all supported platforms without the need to change one single line of code.

Rendering in the Irrlicht Engine is done using a hierarchical scene graph. Scene nodes are attached to each other and follow each others movements, cull their children to the viewing frustum, and are able to do collision detection. A scene node can for example be a camera, an indoor or outdoor level, a skeletal animated character, animated water, or something completely different.

In this way, the Irrlicht engine can mix indoor and outdoor scenes seamless together, gives the programmer full control over anything which is going on in the scene. It is very easily extensible because the programmer is able to add his own scene nodes, meshes, texture loaders, GUI elements, and so on.

Currently there are two types of character animation implemented:

• Morph target animation: Meshes are linearly interpolated from one frame to the next. This is what is done in the Quake game series, and how the Irrlicht engine does it when importing .md2 and .md3 files.
• Skeletal animation: A skin is manipulated by animated joints. The Irrlicht Engine will do this when loading .ms3d, .x, and .b3d files. It is easily possible to attach objects to parts of the animated model. It is, e.g., possible to attach a weapon to the hand of a model, which will be moved as the hand moves, with only one line of code.

The programmer doesn't need to know about all this, if he doesn't want to. All he has to do is to load the files into the engine and let it animate and draw them.

Lots of common file formats are supported, and are able to be loaded (and partially also written) directly from within the engine. In this way, data is never needed to be converted for using it with the Irrlicht Engine, saving development time. The list of all supported formats is constantly growing. If you need the Irrlicht Engine to be able to load a file format which it cannot currently handle, simply raise a feature request and ask for it.

Currently supported textures file formats:

• JPEG File Interchange Format (.jpg, r/w)
• Portable Network Graphics (.png, r/w)
• Truevision Targa (.tga, r/w)
• Windows Bitmap (.bmp, r/w)
• Adobe Photoshop (.psd, r)
• Zsoft Paintbrush (.pcx, r/w)
• Portable Pixmaps (.ppm, r/w)
• Quake 2 textures (.wal, r)

Currently supported mesh file formats:

• Irrlicht scenes (.irr, r/w)
• Irrlicht static meshes (.irrmesh, r/w)
• 3D Studio meshes (.3ds, r)
• B3D files (.b3d, r)
• Alias Wavefront Maya (.obj, r/w)
• Lightwave Objects (.lwo, r)
• COLLADA 1.4 (.xml, .dae, r/w)
• Microsoft DirectX (.x, r) (binary & text)
• Milkshape (.ms3d, r)
• OGRE meshes (.mesh, r)
• My3DTools 3 (.my3D, r)
• Pulsar LMTools (.lmts, r)
• Quake 3 levels (.bsp, r)
• Quake 2 models (.md2, r)
• Quake 3 models (.md3, r)
• DeleD (.dmf, r)
• FSRad oct (.oct, r)
• Cartography shop 4 (.csm, r)
• STL 3D files (.stl, r/w)