The team behind the Austrian 3d graphics library/engine Irrlicht happily announced the 1.1 release of their core engine as well as the 0.3 release of their free real-time graphics editor, irrEdit. For those unfamiliar with Irrlicht, it’s an open source, completely cross-platform high-performance 3D graphics engine written in C++ (and available in .NET language), using D3D, OpenGL and it’s own software renderer. The community and thus support for Irrlicht is impressive with thousands of users in and out of the games industry around the world.

Changelist after the jump..

# Added support for making screenshots in all video drivers and a general possibility to save any IImage to several file formats. Currently OpenGL produces flipped images (left as is for performance reasons) and some image writers are not yet implemented. As a testcase screenshots are now available in the demo by pressing F9. This code was contributed by Travis Vitek.
# Improved .3ds and .obj file importers.
# Added support for .b3d (Blitz Basic) submitted by Luke Hoschke and .pak (Quake archive) files submitted by skreamz.
# Added sky dome implementation contributed by Anders la Cour-Harbo (alc).
# In addition to the Cube scene node (formerly test scene node) there is now also a sphere scene node available, with an adjustable amount of polygons. Use ISceneManager::addSphereSceneNode to create it. Thanks to Alfaz93 for making available his code on which this node is based on. Note that both nodes now use default material settings, e.g. lighting is enabled by default.
# Fixed Linux keyhandling for many keys.
# The aspect ratio has been inverted in the matrix, which means when setting a new aspect ratio for cameras, set it to screen.width/screen.height now instead of screen.height/screen.width as previously.
# added support for reading/importing binary .x files.
# .ms3d and .x normals are now correctly transformed in animations, bounding boxes are slightly better transformed, but not yet correct.
# Added possibility to load and save Irrlicht scenes to and from xml files via ISceneManager::saveScene and ISceneManager::loadScene. Note that not all scene nodes are supported yet, but most features should already work.
# Bounding box of the Skybox corrected (set to null)
# The SMaterial structure now supports 4 textures. (Currently ignored by the renderers and their materials.)
# Test scene node renamed to CubeSceneNode.
# Added scene node animator factories. This is the same as scene node factories, but for scene node animators.
# Added scene node factories. This is an interface making it possible to dynamicly create scene nodes. To be able to add custom scene nodes to Irrlicht and to make it possible for the scene manager to save and load those external scene nodes, simply implement this interface and register it in you scene manager via ISceneManager::registerSceneNodeFactory
# Introduced IMeshSceneNode interface with the possibility to set readonly materials to make it possible to use the mesh materials directly instead of overriding them. In this way it is possible to change the materials of a mesh causing all mesh scene nodes referencing this mesh to change, too.
# Added possibility to load OGRE .mesh files directly, thanks to Christian Stehno who contributed a loader for this.
# Merged with Irrlicht 1.0 for MacOS
# Added a method getType() to ISceneNodeAnimator.
# There is now a system to serialize and deserialize attributes of scene nodes. In this way it should be quite simple to to expose the attributes of your scene node for scripting languages, editors, debuggers or xml serialization purposes.
# Irrlicht containers and strings now have allocators, making it possible to use them across .dll boundaries.
# Changed the name of scene nodes from wide character to to char* for speed and memory reasons.
# Renamed IStringParameter class to IAttributes and enhanced it to be able to serialize its content into and from xml.
# Textures now have a method getName().
# Added the methods getTextureCount() and getTextureByIndex() to IVideoDriver.
# Most classes now derive virtually from IUnknown.

Read more: Irrlicht graphics library 1.1 released | Irrlicht graphics library | Irrlicht 3d blog