Today the first official version of Sirrf, the Simple Irrlicht Framework, has been released. After two months of steady development Sirrf has finally reached the initial goals of Sirrf 0.1.0: being an extensive, but simple open source framework to enable rapid game development. In its current state Sirrf is able to do exactly that. That’s also the reason why Sirrf has jumped directly from pre-alpha status to beta status.

But what can Sirrf do for you? In it’s current state Sirrf offers game logic, graphics, scripting and sound control. Some noticeable features are:

• Data Store
  The Data Store allows you to store primitive value types such as integers, floats and doubles in a type-independent format. These variables can be accessed from anywhere within the framework, from both native and interpreted code, through the DataStore and DataStack classes.
• Entity Management
  In Sirrf entities are component-oriented. The idea behind Component Oriented Entities is to make entities data-driven. In order to do this the functionalities are split in various individual components. As a result an entity is in fact nothing more than a collection of components. So, what an entity represents, is defined by its components. Sirrf currently offers various components in the fields of graphics and sound. Furthermore Sirrf also provides an Entity Manager which should be seen as the central interface point to all entity related issues.
• Event Management
  Sirrf’s event management is build upon sigslot. This means that Sirrf follows an observer model where objects have to subscribe to an event if they want to react to that event. Currently observers can subscribe to game logic events, input events (passed from Irrlicht) and GUI events (again, passed from Irrlicht).
• Game Management
  The Game Manager performs generic game initialization and deinitialization. It also provides functions to access sub-systems of the framework, such as the Event Manager and the Entity Manager. It’s main function, though, is to control the flow of the game through game state management. This class provides various features to this end.
• Scripting
  Sirrf is almost completely accessible through AngelScript, a free and open source scripting language. AngelScript allows users to extend applications on run-time using scripts that follow a C/C++ like syntax. Furthermore it’s easy to extend Sirrf’s AngelScript bindings even further.

You might be wondering, though, if Sirrf is really something for you. It’s obvious that Sirrf is ideal for newcomers to Irrlicht and game development, but Sirrf should also be useful for experts. Especially now experts are more than welcome as Sirrf is still in beta status.

In the coming time focus will lie primarily at adding additional documentation. This will be an crucial step to make the framework more accessible to newcomers. And of course Sirrf will also be extended with new features.

Useful links
Development Hub – http://sourceforge.net/projects/sirrf
Downloads – https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=260711