Irrlicht Engine

Since each light apparently has its own separate shadow map with its own resolution setting, would it be possible to solve the aforementioned problem (shadowing on large landscapes) by using at least two lights for the sun, where each light would have a different "field of view" cone and resolution ...

Blindside: are there any plans to make a version that uses varying levels of detail? I ran some of the original demos again, and wished that I could have that degree of realistic shadowing in a large landscape... but I don't think I could adapt it myself. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

I've found my problem, although I'm not sure how to solve it - I was using enormous distances for the "nearplane" and "farplane" values for the light representing the sun, since I'm using a large landscape rather than a small room (as in the XEffects demos). Reducing the scale greatly improves the ...

Does XEffects ever use per-triangle shadowing (rather than the more realistic pixel-esque patterns)? It didn't used to do that in my program and I didn't think it was ever supposed to, but for some reason my program now only has shadowing on a triangle-by-triangle basis. At first I thought I had ...

I assume that "endScene()" waits for the video card to finish drawing the scene before returning from the function ? Or am I completely misunderstanding "beginScene" and "endScene" ?
I'm trying to figure out whether there's any way to perform other programming tasks while waiting for the frame to ...

Static VBOs as well as all other VBOs are part of Irrlicht since version 1.4. Instanced rendering has not so much performance gain, but if someone finds a place where this could be easily added into Irrlicht, we will take a look.

The main advantage would be to greatly reduce the amount of video ...

I think this would be useful enough to add as a standard feature - I'm surprised it already hasn't been.
Here's why it could be used in _most_ programs to dramatically speed up rendering:
Most applications make use of objects that are composed of the same set of standard components - many buildings ...

I'm hoping someone can explain how it would theoretically be done - i.e. how does it work on the graphics card?

Maybe this isn't the place for this question, but:
I assume it's possible to use a single static VBO pattern in GPU memory while still having multiple instances of it displayed at different locations on the map - e.g., use a single VBO for a tree model but have a thousand trees at different ...

I've looked over Irrlicht's Quaternion library, but it's barely documented. I assume the variables X,Y,Z (capital letters) define the direction the user is facing (e.g. 0,1,0 would be straight up) and W is the rotation around this axis (the degree of "banking" if it's an airplane ) ? But when using ...

Since I'm writing a very general 3D system that has to be usable for a number of different applications, I need a method that isn't tied to a specific way of tricking Irrlicht into rotating the camera correctly.

You could try putting the ship in front of the camera and making the ship the camera's child. That would leave pretty strict movement of the ship to the point that you were always looking at it from the same angle though.
As to there being code out there, I don't know. If I had about a week I bet I ...

I need to be able to not only rotate the camera, but also move the user in any direction & orientation without problems at certain angles. Surely there's some code out there that will do this basic task...

Use quaternions, they're not too hard to get used to, and even though they might seem odd to represent rotations, you'll find they're a lot better and don't have any of those problems Eulers have with Gimbal lock.

I assume that just means using a vector plus rotation - (x,y,z) + angle ?
Is ...

lymantok wrote:@AW111 see:

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... php?t=4680

Yes, I already posted to that thread asking for an alternative version that doesn't create the gimbal lock problem, since that code does.