Horde3D

Hi,

I'm a student, mostly doing compilers theory and parsing techniques, not game programming at all. I'm doing 3D programming for few weeks only, I got the basis of OpenGL from this tutorial, so this is the first engine I use.

I read the entire manual (http://www.horde3d.org/docs/manual.html), it seems very incomplete for me. Now I really don't see how to learn more, did I missed a link with a more complete documentation ? The best I can do is to use grep on the engine code (which is well commented by the way, but it's not very easy to learn in the middle of ~30k lines).

This leads to my first, very beginner, question. I followed this how-to to generate a simple plane. But I don't understand why it's not lightened correctly, as the sphere is (from the Knight sample).

Here is the code that generate the plane:

Bonus question: are the data copied by the engine ?

And here is what the program produces:


Thanks in advance

Just a shot in the dark here.

You are creating a quad that is textured on side. I know it's probably obvious, but have you tried... Looking on the other side? I am not 100% sure, but since you chose negative z-Indexes for your pos_data, your index_data may have to be reversed to work as well.

If that doesnt work, try a different material that doesn't use an advanced shader. What your bitplane might be missing is a tangent/bitangent vector per vertex in order to render some advanced material using bump mapping or something similar. Alternatively, just add those vectors in in your call for h3dutCreateGeometryRes() (in your case those arrays are similar to the normalData and should be pointing into x and z directions respectively).

Also check the .html log that horde generates. That should contain all real errors like missing ressources etc..

That solved my lighting problem. Many thanks !
About my documentation problem, do you have any advice for me ?

Horde3D should probably be ideal for your original task. To learn how Horde3D truly works, I would suggest to analyze all the stuff going on in the Utility library (functions starting with "h3dut"). From there you can see how vertex buffers etc. are passed to the engine and how the parsing of the .xml ressources is handled. That could actually be pretty interesting.

As for documentation, sadly there is very little. The engine itself is pretty straightforward (the Utility lib obfuscates this) and I got my way around with the documentation and trial/error alone. However, since the engine is a product of a university and there are regular projects by students that use it, maybe they have done some more work on your specific task when designing and expanding the engine. While I am not sure who to talk to for this, I guess they are reading this forum and may even jump to your aide.

@Admins: Please seriously consider opening up the Wiki for anonymous editing (there are reliable wiki tricks to block casino/viagra spam). Sometimes I have some useable code that could probably help others, but I really don't want to create an account or login for that. That is often all that is keeping me from sharing Horde3D related material. Also encourage the university of Augsburg students to publish snippets of their awesome games into the wiki for extra credit or something.

The wiki uses the same account as the forum, so there is no need to register again if you already post on the forums.