Going Into Irrlicht

As more day passes, we need to give more interest to our term project and Irrlicht is one of the most important component of it. All the graphics of our simulation will be drawn by Irrlicht. So it is important to learn its usage as soon as possible.

I started this process by simply drawing a terrain and adding military objects to the environment. Doing it was an easy job thanks to the tutorials of Irrlicht.

First of all, it is so amazing that, there are lots of methods for specific usages. For example there is a specific function to draw just terrains and lots of similar metohds. For all the rendering process you have to just get a reference to 3 important objects initially: your device driver, scene manager and gui environemnt. All the process will be realized by this 3 important references.

to draw a terrain by using just a greyscale image file, it is enough to call scene managers addTerrainSceneNode method with appropriate arguments, and that' is. Later on, you can apply some texture mappings and etc. to make your enivornment look very realistic.

Another thing that I did was adding external 3D models into the environment. It was also an easy job. Irrlicht provides a mechanism to load a wide range of models and set texture of them. Just calling addAnimatedMeshSceneNode adds a specific model in to the environment: So amazing!

You can also add a FPS (first person shooter) camera, therefore you can walk around anywhere in the terrain by just using the arrow keys. The one of the most important feature of Irrlicht that I should definitely mention is that Irrlicht also provides a collision handling mechanism for your camera. So you can not run into an object.

It is really exciting to work with Irrlicht and I am so glad to meet with it.

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