In our game “Burnt Islands” that is a heavy physics based game in a dynamic world we needed to make physics shapes of the objects in the scene. We use Irrlicht graphics engine in the game with “Bullet physics” as a physics engine. In a previous post “From Irrlicht mesh to Bullet Physics mesh” we described how to make a physics mesh from a graphics mesh.
It was time to implement some animations in our game “Burnt Islands“. The task was to add a catapult that was going to throw stones at enemies from the distance. A catapult needs to rotate towards the goal and to throw stones in the right direction. The whole thing without animation would look really weird.
There is typically no physics functionality in graphics engines like Irrlicht. If you are using graphics and physics engines instead of one like Unity or Unreal Engine then you will run into a problem called “Irrlicht physics”. Recall that Irrlicht is just a graphics engine. It renders object on the screen and that is all. In order for an object to be able to have physics properties you would need to integrate physics and graphics engines.
We’ve recently had major performance issues while testing the game. Debug information has shown that it was the graphics that was taking from 60 and up to 300 milliseconds per second to redraw all nodes. One of the issues that was discovered in analysis is that terrain ISceneNode had automatic culling EAC_OFF:
