Horde3D

i`m just curious concerning the next release, and more exactly the particle system feature. will it contain emitor emitors, particle magnets and deflectors?

It is a bit too early to tell you. I'm still looking which features work best with Horde.

One thing i must know as i am a big fan of it. Each particle is basically a billboard (sprite). Will standalone sprites be added to the feature list in this release? This way you can easily add detail to a scene with little cost. For example some grass sprites will change the aspect of a nature scene dramatically.

Paul

This is already possible with the current version. You just create a standard 3d model containing your billborad polygons and apply a vertex shader which aligns them to the camera.

It all comes to shaders...

Well I`ve just bought "Open gl distilled" and the orange book. I`ll learn how to create shaders once and for all

But one more thing i liked about sprites was the ability to make them static (wont turn with the camera anymore) and having 2 normals. If i have a normal geometry plane wont it be backface culled? Or i need a custom vertex shader for this?

Shaders are not that difficult to learn although you will always be confronted with some maths. But when you know how to use shaders you have the freedom to create nearly any effect you want. That's the cool thing and that's why all morden engines are using them

Having two sided materials could also be handled in the shaders. You can check if a fragment is backfacing and invert the normal if that's the case. But I still need to add a flag to the material files with which you can disable backface culling.