Horde3D

I'm currently working on a project using Horde3D and was wondering what exactly the GroupNode did, and how it could be used in a game engine environment.

If someone could enlighten me that would be great.

Thanks.

GroupNode is actually just a generic container for other nodes. The rootnode for example is a GroupNode. The only special thing is that it can have a min and max visibility distance which makes it possible to realize level of detail.

Also, say that in your game a room is only sometimes visible - you can put all of a rooms geometry into a group node, and when you know that the room isn't visible, you can hide the group node, which tells horde to ignore all of that geometry.

alright, thanks for clearing that up

How is this hiding achieved? I skimmed through API docs but couldn't find a way.

Do you search for setNodeActivation?

Oh... "activation" didn't come to mind. I just searched for 'visibility' and 'hiding' etc. Maybe the docs could have a list of keywords or just explicitly mention this kind of words? Well, at least now when the forum is searched, people will bump into this thread... previously there wasn't one.

Agreement - when I hear 'node activation', I think of a physics engine. Visibility or Hiding would be better terms

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

Well as far as I know the node and it's children are completly excluded from the update method, that may be the reason why it is called Activation and not Visibility.

You are correct, but since the update method only affects visibility related attributes...

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

This is working fine. But how would I be able to obtain knowledge whether a node is "active" or not from the engine? I think this information is crucial and I don't like caching this kind of things. Should I provide a patch?