Horde3D

First i'd like to say that Horde3D looks very impressive, and perhaps is just the 3D engine i'm looking for, however i have a couple of questions that i could not answer myself by skimming over the docs.

Is there any mechansim for using a procedurally generated mesh/textures within the engine? (e.g terrain)

I'm also thinking of using FreeType to allow me to use TrueType fonts within the engine, this would also require the ability to generate a quad, and also upload texture information about glyphs from the chosen font.

EDIT: reading a little further i've come accross another forum thread with a similar question, and the proposed solution looks ok at least as far as small objects, or font meshes for example. However how about for large terrain systems that need to implement there own specific LOD algorothim rather than the scene graphics generic one?

Many thanks,
John

Hello John,

as you obviously already have seen the preferred way for procedural meshes or textures is to create an in-memory resource and send it to the engine using the standard resource management functions. An idea is to write some utitlity functions to make this more convenient. For textures there is already such a function which builds a tga from specified pixel data. So this is no problem. It is also possible to dynamically update pixel data if you want to display a video. We are using these features in some projects.

More complex entities which require special (e.g. culling) behavior should be integrated directly into the engine core as derived scene graph nodes. This is necessary because Horde is designed as a self-contained component with a simple (and easy to wrap) interface rather than a class-library which is just a thin layer over some graphics API.

Hi marciano,

Thanks for replying so quickly, i think the best thing i can do is get some test code running and see what I can achieve using in-memory resources.

I would be interested to learn more about creating a derived scene graph node, i suspect i first need to get myself more familiar with the engine and source code to fully understand what is involved.

Many thanks,
John