Okay, this took longer than anticipated. But here are some more winners. First those of the Screenshot of the Month contest for April and May 2009. These are three in total, because the voting in May resulted in two winners for that month: wing64 with God Tower in April and wing64 with Middle East and xhrit with Sol, from Terra in May. Congrats to both of you. As always, you can find the screenshot and all other contestants in the forum and the gallery. And don't forget to submit your pics for the June contest, there are only a few days left for submitting on the forum.

An even more important news, also some days old already: We have two new dev team members. Please welcome BlindSide and CuteAlien. You should know both from many submissions and activity on the forum, on IRC, and everywhere you can meet Irrlicht users. It's really cool to have you in the team!

A more recent news: Irrlicht was chosen as an approved project of the BeagleBoard Sponsored Projects Program. This means that we got a BeagleBoard for further development of the OpenGL-ES drivers. I already have the board here, trying to set everything up and get Irrlicht running. I'll post some pics once I have it rendering. Thanks a lot for this grant.

With some delay we can proudly announce the first winner of the Screenshot of the Month contest for March 2009. It's Suvi with Gekkeiju Online. You can find the screenshot and all other contestants in the forum thread. I'll update the gallery next.

Another important thing. The SourceForge Community Awards 2009 are nominating again. Please vote for Irrlicht..

One of our latest Irrlicht features, the OpenGL-ES 1.x driver, has made some important advances. The code allows for iPhone development, cell phone apps, and handheld consoles. Read the latest success stories for the Pandora console - Irrlicht is the first reportedly working 3D engine for the Pandora and the OMAP processor series.
More winners to come in the next days ;-)

Update from Google: We didn't make it into this year's Google Summer of Code. What a pity. Let's hope for next year :-)

This year, Irrlicht applied for participation in Google Summer of Code^(tm). In case we are elected by Google, we will host some Irrlicht related development projects, e.g. those listed on our Ideas list. Students who want to work on one of those projects have to apply as well, starting on March 23rd until April 3rd at Google Summer of Code 2009 site. In case of successful finalization of the project, the student is paid $4500 from Google for about 3 month of work - much more than I was paid as a student :-).

In case you're interested in joining this program, just contact us immediately, and discuss issues in the forum.

The winners of the Irrlicht In Motion competition are found.

1. randommesh: Flocking boids
2. omaremad: Coin jump
3. strong99: The Island
4. blindside: Against the tide
5. fmx: Miku in Motion
6. zillion42: irrSolarSystem
7. Ion Dune: WarEngine RTS
8. night_hawk: Power Pong
9. 3dmodelerman: Demo
10. eye776: Platform

CONGRATULATIONS!
Thanks to all participants! It was really much fun to play around with your submissions.

We are happy to announce that we just released Irrlicht version 1.5. This version contains a lot of new features, here are some few highlights:

• Vertex Buffer Objects, i.e. storing meshes on the GPU
• Joystick support on all platforms
• Added support for collada 1.4 and LWO files
• 32bit indices for large meshes
• Added an .obj writer
• Improved software rasterizer (burning video)
• Improvements for dynamic lights, particle systems, LMTS, PNG and PCX loading and writing
• Added FSAA for OpenGL
• OGRE .mesh loader improvements
• Nicer and faster terrain rendering
• Volume lights
• Various improvements for the WindowsCE port
• Shared depth buffers for RTT in D3D
• Added a font creation tool for Linux

The MacOSX package for Irrlicht 1.4.2 is now available for download as well.
Happy downloading.

We are happy to announce that we just released Irrlicht version 1.4.2. This version contains a lot of bug fixes and improvements:

• Unified handling of the zwrite enable flag for transparent materials for compatibilit with older Irrlicht versions. There are now functions in IVideoDriver and ISceneManager to enable/disable ZWrite flags of transparent materials.
• Improvements of the file loaders, OpenGL renderer, memory usage
• Optimization of the skeletal animation rendering code
• Tons of other bug fixes and small improvements

Irrlicht has been nominated in the Sourceforge.NET 2008 Community Choice Awards in two categories: 'Best Project for Multimedia' and 'Best Project for Gamers'. Please vote for us!.



In other news, Mac Burns just let us know that the Irrlicht nightly build server is now up and running. Thanks for all this work!

Irrlicht 1.4.1 for MacOS is now available at the sourceforge servers. It comes as 85MB sized .dmg file. Happy downloading.

We just released Irrlicht 1.4.1, it is now available at the sourceforge servers. Happy downloading. Version 1.4.1 is mainly a bugfix release and includes:

• Improvements to the COLLADA 1.3 loader, support for Milkshape 1.8 files, Enhanced .3ds, .obj loaders, Microsoft .x file animation playback improvements
• Added X11 support on OSX
• Several speed optimizations
• Tons of bugfixes, API enhancements and other small improvments

There is now a new project available at sourceforge net, named IrrExt. Although the status message on the project page indicates the contrary, the project is active and its SVN contains a collection of extensions to the Irrlicht Engine, like scene nodes, animators, GUI elements, materials, shaders, mesh loaders, physics wrappers and more. It is managed by bitplane and Zeuss, and extended constantly. The official forum announcement can be read here.

Following the release of Irrlicht 1.4, the package for Mac OS is now available as well: download Irrlicht 1.4 for Mac OS 1.4.
The dmg file contains all source files but no precompiled binaries, you need to compile it yourself using XCode. It was created by Varmint, and we are happy to announce that he now joined our team to keep on maintaining the Mac OS version of Irrlicht.

We just released Irrlicht 1.4. It includes all features from the beta version such as

• A rewritten unified skeletal animation system with some more sophisticated long awaited features such as manual joint animation.
• Irrlicht's own file format: .irrmesh, for static meshes.
• Mesh writing support: Write collada, .stl and .irrmesh files. Irrlicht now can also read .stl files and be used to convert any file it can read into these file formats.
• Enhanced Particle System reintegrated from the irrSpintz fork
• Improved GUI: Keyboard control support (tab, shift etc), SpinBox,
• PointSprite support
• Improved collada, .obj, .my3d and loaders
• Tons of bug fixes and other feature enhancements

Happy downloading!

We just released the first beta version of Irrlicht 1.4. Basically, this is revision 1012 from the subversion server, with precompiled binaries, examples and documentation. Irrlicht 1.4 will have the first major (breaking) API changes as we are moving towards a better engine, so we are releasing this beta for all people to try it out and to help us to improve it until the stable release.
Thanks to all people helping out, and especially to all members of the Irrlicht Team. Happy downloading, and please be aware that this release is beta only.

We are currently working heavily on the next Irrlicht Engine release. But in the meanwhile, take a look at these new or updated Irrlicht releated projects:

• AMELIA is a project for High-Energy physics featuring the ATLAS detector at CERN, the world's largest particle physics lab. It uses Irrlicht for 3D graphics and irrKlang as sound engine.
• Galactic Dream: Rage of War has been released, a commercial realtime strategy space game using Irrlicht
• Stefan Dingfelder released Jirr 1.3.1, the Irrlicht 3D engine for Java. It is now compatible with Irrlicht 1.3.1, and includes more demos such as a physics demo using JNewton, and an examples on how to load and display .irr files. It also now supports JDK1.6 and script languages (Javascript).
• irrKlang 1.0, the audio library with Irrlicht integration has been released.
• GameIterator published the first part of an article on how to create a computer game, it uses Irrlicht as example.
• Amulet of tri color is a a cool looking commercial game by WiredPlane Labs team, Razinkov Ilya. It will soon be published in Russia.
• A new version of irrEdit, the Irrlicht Editor, 1.4alpha has been released
• Loris Bognanni created an alternative irrlicht font tool.

Support for Irrlicht.NET, the wrapper written in Managed C++ which makes Irrlicht available for .NET languages such as C#, VisualBasic and similar will be dropped with the next release. Instead, we encourage to use Irrlicht.NET CP, which is a separately maintained sourceforge project with much more functionality than Irrlicht.NET. It is very easy to switch from Irrlicht.NET to Irrlicht.NET CP, and it also has the advantage that your projects will run on Mono and on other operating systems such as Linux as well then. Extending Irrlicht scene nodes is also possible with this library. The latest release, Irrlicht.NET CP 0.8 also supports Irrlicht 1.3.1.

Thanks to all of you, Irrlicht has been nominated for the Sourceforge.net Community Choice Awards! Now you need to vote for the nominees, please go to the nomination voting page and vote for Irrlicht again, in the categories "Best Project for Multimedia" or if you like "Best Project for Gamers" in addition.

Please vote for Irrlicht in the SF.net 2007 Community Choice awards. Please click this link or below and select 'Best Project for Multimedia'. Thanks!

We just released Irrlicht in version 1.3.1. This is intended to be a bug fix release, but there are also some new features:

• Works seemlessly with the also just released irrEdit (0.7.1).
• Support for Ogre 1.4 .mesh files
• Added an optional SDL device, to let Irrlicht run on not yet natively supported platforms like embedded devices.
• Added support for more texture creation flags in OpenGL
• Cloning of whole scene graphs is now possible
• Improved GUI editor
• Multiple dozens of bug fixes and other small improvements

For a detailed list, please take a look at the changes.txt file. Happy downloading.