Horde3D

You can ask pretty much anyone who has used the engine about using raw opengl alongside Horde3D and they will probably tell you that it is a rather big pain in the ass. So I propose an extension to the API that allows for low level drawing through Horde3D's device abstraction. It could be implemented as a single node on the scenegraph that stores a queue of drawing commands and then goes through them when the engine renders. I would personally love to implement this, as I already have something similar, however finicky. This however is limited to 2D only as a sort of "canvas". However, I find myself very short on time these days and am polling the forum for anyone who would like to assist me in this.

Such an extension could prove to be very effective at allowing things such as debug rendering for systems such as Bullet and PhysX, Heads up displays, and other debug information. I am actually a bit confused as to why such an API was not implemented from the beginning.

So... thoughts?

This might make some things more convenient for sure. But if you want to render between some specific steps of the currently used Horde3D pipeline, you have to make sure, all states are properly saved and restored. If you only want to draw over the currently used framebuffer, it may sufficient to have a function for restoring states.

Its not so much an issue with rendering between stages so much as it is rendering outside horde at all. Since the rendering device is already abstractee it could be easy to add such functionality.