Version 1.7 of the Irrlicht Engine has been released. For those unfamiliar with Irrlicht, it's an open-source, real-time 3D engine that has OpenGL support as well as its own software renderer. Irrlicht is used within games, technology demos, and other projects -- even areas like using it as a 3D renderer in CAD applications. Irrlicht 1.7 is a particularly large release that is coming less than six months after the 1.6 release.

Irrlicht 1.7 provides support for multiple render targets, support for OpenGL geometry shaders, the ability to access texture mip-maps and to provide custom mip-maps, Ogre's mesh format animations now are supported by the engine, NPK Nebula device architecture support, Bzip2 and LZMA support, AES encryption support, Vertex Buffer Object (VBO) support for sky-domes and similar objects, and many other improvements.

The list of changes along with download links for the multi-platform Irrlicht engine can be found on its SourceForge project page.