[irrlichthn]

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]

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]

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

[lasagna_coder]

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]

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.

[digitalbreed]

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

[le-mark]

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]

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

[kaiokendev]

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