Strange to wake up and see this on Hacker News - in 2025. I originally created this but am no longer involved - AMA if you like.

▲

rafaelmn a day ago | parent | next [-]

Thank you for doing it ! What was the motivation behind it/when did you start building it ?

I never built anything with it but reading through the source code got me to learn so much about programming. I probably spent more time copying stuff from Irrlicht/Ogre3D/ODE (although I never managed to grok that one) than anything else in high school.

▲

irrlichthn a day ago | parent [-]

I originally wanted to create a 3D game - and needed an engine for it. Never made it to the 3D game part, though :)

	▲	uncircle a day ago \| parent [-]
		Many such cases

▲

digitalbreed a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

An old gamedev teammate sent me this link - got hit with a wave of nostalgia. Big thanks for creating Irrlicht back in the day.

▲

lasagna_coder a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What was the main learning you got from building the engine? Was there some feature you wanted that no other engine at the time had? If you built an engine today, what would you do differently?

▲

irrlichthn a day ago | parent [-]

I thought most of the existing engines out there were too complicated, so I wanted it to be easy to use. Probably that's also why it became that popular.

For a modern engine today - I think the architecture of the engine would look different - and would focus more on creating and organizing content then mostly on rendering.

	▲	ta12653421 a day ago \| parent [-]
		I was involved in 3D back then wenn Irrlicht & Co had some traction: Todays graphics engine look completely different than the first flexibel pipelines around 2002-2005, and the rise of AI for usage during rendering will change the tech paradigms further (for the younger ones: In 2001, NVidia announced the Geforce1, we had 1 pixel shader and 1 vertex shader :-D LOL)

▲

le-mark a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I spent a lot of time studying this code way back when, it was a valuable resource in my personal journey, so thank you x1000!

▲

jarrell_mark a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thanks for the quality software. Had some good times in high school trying out Irrlicht

▲

kaiokendev a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It was a great engine. You built a great piece of software.