Irrlicht server side

Question

I'm currently developing a multiplayer game with Irrlicht.

So obviously, on the client side we have Irrlicht, to perform the rendering, and server side we have Bullet to perform the physics calculations.

We are using Qt for the rest (GUI, network, ...).

There is some useful features from Irrlicht, like :

• loading mesh, texture, ... from an archive file without decompressing it.

We have all our resources stored in a TAR file, the server send it to the client, and Irrlicht load it (without decompressing it), really usefull.

But Bullet needs to know the models to perform collision detection, so I need to load the models.

A solution is to develop a TAR parser with Qt and libarchive, and tell Bullet to load it with ConvexDecomposition::WaveFrontObj. But a easier solution would be to use Irrlicht to load the mesh from the archive (since the code is already done).

So, is there a way to use Irrlicht, server side, without rendering to a video driver ?

Answer 1

I finally found a way to use Irrlicht server side.

So, I want Irrlicht to perform some calculations without any rendering. The solution was pretty easy, I just have to create the device with a NULL driver type :

SIrrlichtCreationParameters params;
params.DriverType = EDT_NULL;
device = createDeviceEx (params);