Irrlicht not being chosen for development?

[theweirdn8]

Hello fellow coders and game developers,

I've been doing extensive research into many 3d engines for C++. Of all of the searching I've done it seems as if Irrlicht does not have too many games besides Octodad, 2 anime mmos, and that is about it. Is there a reason for this. I heard that once a project starts in Irrlicht it is really difficult to finish it, in opposition to the other engines that may be initially harder to do. What do you all think about this?

[senergy]

irrlicht is graphics engine, not game engine, this means that you have to create your own game engine, however, since irrlicht is opensource graphics engine you can modify it (add sound lib, physics etc), so when you pick up irrlicht you have basically 1/2 of work done on game engine, this is why I prefer irrlicht, you can create own game engine but you don't have to do it from scratch and you can save a lot of time, also it is really easy to use in my opinion

[hendu]

Just like any library with a liberal license, there are a ton of projects you're not going to hear about. Irrlicht is used in surprisingly many iOS and Android games, just as an example.

Just to pick another library, try to list all games that use Bullet. You can't, there's no requirement to list it in the credits even.

[REDDemon]

the only way you can see if a engine is for you or not requires you to know basics of OO design and a quick look to the API of the engine. You can read 100+1 opinions but until you try you'll never know.

[CuteAlien]

There's also for example at least 3 racers done with it, h-craft championship, Supertuxcart and Stunt Marble Racer. Having done the former I can tell that the engine worked rather well for that. Still it depends a lot on games which engine will work for you. Irrlicht is easy to use, but if you need certain features which are not already in the engine it can be hard adding them (for example if you need support for streaming large scenes or if you need advanced animation mixing).

So you should consider as first step which features you will need exactly in your game - and then check if engines support those. No engine supports everything - and sometimes it's also worth changing your game-design to make it work better with an engine (this will even happen if you buy the best engine on the market - good game design always means breaking down ideas to work with the tech).