Scene-by-scene rendering

teddiebeer · Post by **teddiebeer** » Thu Jul 15, 2004 9:59 am

Hi All

I only recently discovered Irrlicht and I must admit it looks exceptional.

I am looking to replace my own, rather crude, gaphics engine with another one, so far, comparing features, irrlicht looks the most promising. I looked through the posts and tutorials but could not find any clear answer to my questions, so here it is...

My setup is a game similar to Final Fantasy where you move from scene to scene. Currently I pre-render the scene in Maya as tiled images, then save a simplified version of the scene as a .x file. I tile the images to the screen, overlay the simplified mesh and use this for collision detection. My characters are 3D models(.x).

Looking at Irrlicht I now have this question, can, instead of pre-rendering images, can I load each scene as a mesh and still do collision detection on it? The examples only load full .bsp maps. My game will load scene-by-scene, so it will probably be in Maya's native .obj format.
If I can do this, will I still need to load the mesh into an octree or such, even though the scene will stay static, unlike a FPS for instance?

Sorry for the lenghty post and I hope I made sense.
Any help would be appreciated.

Sincerely
Johan (Teddiebeer)

thesmileman · Post by **thesmileman** » Thu Jul 15, 2004 1:26 pm

Yes you can use any mesh that irrlicht imports for collision detection and you can convert to an octtree though you do not have to. and it is okay that the scene stays static Irrlicht will not care. Also you can load directly from obj files into irrlicht just fine.

teddiebeer · Post by **teddiebeer** » Thu Jul 15, 2004 2:09 pm

Wow that was fast!

Thanks for the speedy reply. I think I will definitally be using Irrlicht from now on.

If I may ask one more question, I noticed, working through the tutorials that input is handled using EventReceivers, do they use DirectInput for handling the input, if not are they as responsive as DirectInput?

thesmileman · Post by **thesmileman** » Thu Jul 15, 2004 2:14 pm

I do not think they are using DirectInput because that is windows specific is it not and the engine runs on linux and with a few modifications runs on mac os x. I know the input can be very response and there is an example of how to do input in the forums that is very good it is written by Keyless. It deals with using an array to hold the keyboard input and it makes for very smooth and response input.

saigumi · Post by **saigumi** » Thu Jul 15, 2004 8:43 pm

Plus, you could not use Irrlicht's event receiver for keyboard/mouse input and instead use any library you want.

The event reciever would still be needed for GUI elements though.