Horde3D

Before I can compress normal maps and render PSSM with geometry shaders in just one go....

How on earth would I load normal meshes, .obj, .x etc.? Or at least can I convert them into horde3d native format etc. (since it seams that that format has some magic optimisations)

Also I have spotted somewhere that horde3d has some really weird trouble of accepting custom stuff, I mean irrlicht was great here as it allowed me to have a custom next gen skydome... it had a texture and a sun+moon control system. How would I just make a custom skydome with a custom shader?

When I look at the API reference horde3d seems very narrow minded, only way you can load things is add resources. No custom classes, manipulating the data before loading, I had a really nice interface for scaling down textures (my game settings for max texture size), but I have got no idea of how to put it in horde.

My team is building a map editor, there the user has to be able to "construct" an invisible occluder from planes. For this to occur I must be able to add triangles to a buffer/batch/mesh or whatever you call it in real time, not some workaround creating a virtual xml

So do I have to hack it open or is there a way of doing this stuff without modifying horde?

It doesn't - it's the collada converter which has optimization passes. And usually you want to convert your objects into .obj, you can do that either via direct exporters (blender) or via converting to collada and then to .scene.xml/.geo.


Write an extension? Or, if that suffices, load static models for it.


Probably the former. Manual resource creation is still just planned, no real code available for it.

Horde has a full asset conditioning pipeline which can compile meshes and animations (theoretically textures as well) into an optimized (possibly different per platform) format. That way we can do special optimizations without increasing the loading times.


Everything which goes beyond geometry+shaders (a basic skydome could be realized with just that) is implemented as extensions in Horde. Extensions have full access to the engine internals (e.g. you can derive from the scene node class). That way all rendering code is kept in one place and not scattered over your application.


You can create and update textures via the API. Unfortunately, we don't have that for geometry yet. It would be easy to add but as some changes are planned for the model format (see developer discussion), we didn't implement it yet.

I'm having fun just displaying logos, lets see how hard it will be to display a wireframe in my editor