Horde3D

Hi,
I read in an earlier post that alpha sorting would be implemented in the future. Any ideas when this might get added to Horde?
Thanks!

Can you explain what you're planning to do with alpha sorting? In many cases there are better options depending on what you're going to sort and how much of it there is.

e.g. Sorting regular classic glass is pretty much unnecessary, but sorting red, blue, green, and yellow panes needs to be done in a shader or during drawing. Foliage shouldn't be sorted, alpha test and slide the test value to disolve it. If there's tons of sorting going on constantly then you're better off using an offscreen buffer composited onto the main buffer.

All of those cases except sorting during rendering can already be done with either vanilla horde or some minor modifications.

Basically I want to create an underwater environment with translucent models such as jellyfish, squid etc...

There could be quite a few models present in the scene.

I'm not an expert in rendering for alpha - all I know is that is needs to be sorted properly otherwise things might not be displayed in the right order. Any suggestions?

We're planning to implement sorting in the next weeks since it is also required for occlusion culling. But it will only work on a mesh/scene node level which should actually be enough for your scenario. Sorting single polygons is out of the question since it would usually just be too slow.

Sorting on the mesh level is all I would need I think! Sounds great, very much looking forward to it. I'm very impressed by your engine by the way, I have yet to port my work to it but I'm looking forward to it...it's both a powerful tool and an excellent educational resource.

I won't be making any more feature requests by the way With alpha _and_ occlusion culling I'm going to be very content. Keep up the good work, and I'll post my project once it's done.