Irrlicht hits 1.0

Irrlicht has been updated to 1.0 - a stable release. I'm glad to see this engine is still being worked on. Niko says he plans on extending the functionality of the engine (hopefully for HDR, more advanced shaders, etc) which is good to hear. Irrlicht is great because of it's simplicity and good design. It was very easy for me to pick up and start using, unlike some other 3d engines out there. Feature wise it about up to Quake2 or Quake3 which is a few years behind the curve, but with some per-pixel lighting and better shadows it could look a lot better. Good art makes a big difference which is one reason I'm working on this 3d modeller.

On that front, things are progressing well. I am working on the code to generate the heightmap/normalmap and color texture for the Low Polygon mesh from the High Polygon mesh. I will also add the option to 'bake' the lighting into the color texture, which will make it look better if you are not using the bump map. I have the basics working now, but there are still a bunch of things to do.

I also finally got around to checking how deep Irrlicht's support for bump/parallax mapping goes and was a little disappointed. It doesn't look like most of the animated mesh formats will work with parallax mapping since it requires a different vertex format than they use. I'm wondering if there are some changes that can be made to irrlicht's mesh formats to allow all meshes to be used with parallax mapping but this will require some changes to a bunch of classes. I'll look into it once I get some more things finished on the modeller.