Irrlicht Wrapper for FreeBasic

[Frank Dodd]

Hello Everyone
Due to pressures on spare time from my commercial activities I am unable to provide any further support for this project for the foreseeable future. I will still be making the package available and it is just as functional as it ever was however anyone using it should be aware that naturally within the course of development they may run into issues with the software or their use of it and that there may be no support available for them.

I have been very impressed with the Irrlicht package it has been great to work with, easy to set up and in particular I found the documentation and supplied examples to have been comprehensive and clear. My thanks go out to the people that have created Irrlicht, its media and to the authors of the work included in this wrapper people who made it a possibility.

[Guest]

Great !!! Keep working to put all functions in wrapper. I succesfully compiled examples with Free Basic 0.15. They all work. This is good alternative for 3D programming of Basic .

[afecelis]

Interesting! great work! Please let us know of updates and new releases. There might be some others here that may help you.

Ps. How much of Irrlicht does your wrapper cover? Or better said, what features does your wrapper have and which are missing?

EDITED:There's an interesting FB+IDE bundle here:
http://fbide.freebasic.net/index.php?menuID=56

[afecelis]

Oh yes! one question though, or better said 2:
1.Which dll should we copy the MS or the DEVC++ one?
2.Should we copy the media folder into the wrapper's? Or its content? (won't there be a lot of files floating around?)

thanks!
EDITED:Here we go!! Examples are compiling, but...


ps. I mirrored your wrapper here:
http://afecelis.gdlib.net/FreeBasic/IrrlichtWrapper.zip

[afecelis]

Nailed it! It's the "Win32-gcc" dll!

And the media content must be all around! hehehehe

[pax_tempo]

Hello, Frank, thank you very much for this. I'll be playing around (it seems quite a fast wrapper).

Afecelis, I think that if you add "path/ folder_name" they wilkl work from any directory

Code: Select all

For example, in sample12
Instead of:
IrrAddZipFile( "map-20kdm2.pk3", IRR_IGNORE_CASE, IRR_IGNORE_PATHS )

try:
IrrAddZipFile( "media/map-20kdm2.pk3", IRR_IGNORE_CASE, IRR_IGNORE_PATHS )

[afecelis]

thanks Pax! I think I knew that but I guess I'm a lazy cow!!! I'll correct the examples

[Frank Dodd]

Thanks for the comments guys, i am glad people are having fun with this. Afecelis the win32-gcc dll has caught several people out I forgot to update this thread with the corrected instructions, my apologies for that, however now with v0.3 Irrlicht.dll is included in the package. The wrapper covers the important functions for 2D images, Meshes, Node manipulation, Animators, Particles, Billboards, Terrain, Lights, Cameras and Collision. Most significantly at the moment it doesnt support pixel shaders nor the GUI.

pax thanks for the comments and the advice, the wrapper tries to put very little between the host language and Irrlicht to maximise performance (and so I don't have to write too much code).

I have uploaded a new version of the Wrapper v0.3 which includes the following : -

25 new commands now exposing 100 commands from the Irrlicht Engine
New collision commands
New mesh data commands.
New animation commands.
Includes a patched Irrlicht.dll for more accurate collisions.
A complete reference manual covering all wrapper commands and types.
The wrapper supports DirectX 8 and 9 although this is not included in the build of the supplied irrlicht.dll.

This concludes this phase of my work on the wrapper, however I may update it with corrections and bugfixes. I hope you guys have lots of fun and not too much frustration with it. My thanks for your comments and help.

[afecelis]

woooohooo! those are great news!! Thanks Frank!! Downloading new version immediately.

I was looking forward to check your "API" as well. Thanks for the documentation!

Finally, many thanks for your tough work. Please keep us informed of any updates.

[afecelis]

the new examples are great!!

great work!

[Guest]

THANK YOU ! @ Frank Dodd

i have install at first Freebasic with IDE. then the Wrapper
with Irrlicht.dll plus the Media folder under freebasic/inc

all .bas examples working nice here and very fast
i have test all with 1024/768/32col / NVIDIA GF6600

i must only change the path in the most .bas example files
to "media/... ".

i have test a Irrlicht wrapper for blitz3d and blitzmax too,
but this way over Freebasic is realy nice

[Guest]

Hello Frank, excellent work !!! Excellent wrapper - fast and small, for excellent graphic engine.Why not use Microsoft Visual C++ Express Edition (it's free for commercial use) to make wrapper who will work with Microsoft Visual C++ Irrlicht.dll. Тhat way, with 2 dll - wrapper.dll and Irrlicht.dll will be easy to access Software, OpenGL and DirectX rendering.

[imagination304]

Hi Frank,

The wrapper is excellent!!! Thank you.
For one thing, is it possible to exit the running program
without using Task manager?

Thanks in advance
Sammy

[alabaster]

Seriously awesome job.

I'm having some trouble with some of the example though.

23 or 16 for example, Windows error dialog box, error in IrrlichtWrapper.dll

Exception Information
Code: 0xc0000005 Address: 0x0000000010002374

some others also die with the same error.

Is someone aware of the cause of this problem? I'd be happy to post more details in hope of solving it. The last message I see from Irrlicht before the error is loading zumlin.pcx

Thanks in advance

[Frank Dodd]

I'm having some trouble with some of the example though.
23 or 16 for example, Windows error dialog box, error in IrrlichtWrapper.dll
Code: 0xc0000005 Address: 0x0000000010002374

Thanks for the comments again, I am glad people are having fun with it, I haven't heard of any similar problems mentioned, the wrapper itself does not do any checking of the parameters that are passed to it though I intended to have this left within the domain of the basic program.

The crash appears to be in IrrSetNodeMaterialTexture which would tie in with your description, please check that all of the materials are available to the executable directory of your FreeBasic program you could also try entering the complete path and filename to the pcx file. You can check that the zumlin.pcx was actually loaded by testing the returned object against 0.

Good luck