Irrlicht Engine

I'm currently using Irrlicht 1.8.

I've taken a look at the source code on the direct x side of things and can tweak the code in CD3D9Driver::setRenderStates2DMode to change the alpha blending between the vertex alpha and texture alpha, but there seems to be something going on at the actual texture ...

I know that you can use alpha on the vertex level, but I want to be able to load a texture with an alpha channel and have it use that for alpha blending.

Currently, if you try and do this now, it clamps the value to all invisible or all visible.

Is it possible to use the texture's alpha values when drawing 2D images?
I know you can get it so that either all or none of certain pixels are transparent, but what if I want a value in between for each pixel?

Thank you so much for your help. I feel stupid but this stuff is important if I want my code taken seriously.

Also, is it generally typical to name the classes with the prefix in front too.

Example,

class CSceneNode

Hey, so this is going to sound really dumb but can someone explain to me the prefixes in irrlicht source code.

Im pretty sure I can guess at what it means but I want to know for sure.
I-interface
E-enumeration
C-??

I notice some files don't get named with a prefix too.
What is the convention here?

If anyone is curious I was able to solve this problem by extending IMeshBuffer with my own buffer class that is essentially CMeshSceneBuffer but with 2 texture coordinates instead of the generic template for vertices. And creating extra functionality of specifying the amount of instances you want ...

Another thing. How does the "setMaterialType" "setMaterialTexture" "setMaterialFlag" work in the SceneNode class? How is it able to actually do as it says in the MeshSceneNode class when they're not virtual and don't know about the MeshSceneNodes material variables?

Thank you so much. I understood the functions weren't 100% the same, I just meant that they gave the same result in my case. And I honestly had never heard of using references like that. It bugs me sometimes how I want to learn and improve my programming skills faster than my classes will teach me ...

I'm sorry for this dumb question but I don't quite understand why

node->setMaterialTexture(0, texture);
and
node->getMaterial(0).setTexture(0, texture);

give the same results.

the returned material isn't a pointer, so how come when I change the texture, it changes the texture in the material for ...

So I'm pretty sure I already know the answer, but when I try and change the material of an empty scene node it stays at its defaults. The basic empty Scene Node isn't meant to care about materials is it?

So while trying to apply GPU instancing I run into a problem that comes from having to render the instanced set with different materials. The max number of batches varies across shaders due to different amounts of data that need to be passed to the shader.
Now here's the problem...
The mesh buffer ...

Thank you so much for your help! I don't think there's any easy way around the problem, but I tried

so then, worldViewInverse = viewInverse*worldMatrix ?
If this is true than all I need to do is pass the viewInverse and I can multiply it by the particular instances world matrix.



or is it worldInverse*view, bringing me no where

So I have a working solution now. I realized its the light direction that needs to be multiplied by the inverse world matrix. This is simple if all the instances have a uniform scale because I can simply transpose the world matrix to get the equivalent inverse. But Im still gonna try and find an ...

And you were saying that it's probably not the best idea to simply run the matrix multiplication in the shader itself, because the multiplication would occur for every vertex, right?

And theoretically, couldn't I adjust the light direction before its passed to the shader so that I don't even need ...