Horde3D

It seems a bit counter-intuitive, as nodes already have an identifier (their ID), and makes Horde3D a bit offputting for procedural generation.

It is used, for example, to find internal parts of the mesh, like hand joint in the knight example. Without the name, how would you find the required joint? You could do a for loop to find the required one or hard-code it (something like "int handjoint = 35; h3dSetNodeTransform(handjoint,...)"), but it makes the code harder to understand/maintain/etc. So the main reason is probably convenience.

As far as I know, practically all engines allow getting node by name. Some hash it, some not (this is more of a performance issue), but the functionality is there.

Well, I suppose I'll have to find a workaround in the case of procedural content. Currently what I thought of is to just call it the pointer to "this".