changing materialsystem/cleanup method

[Nox]

Hi,

i know its a nasty topic but i miss a cleanup method to release unused meshes and textures. This would require a change of the material/texturesystem but dont you think, that a proper cleanup is needed for bigger apps? Dropping all and load it again is a way but it is not the nice way. I dont want to tell the user "hey, get 4GB ram or wait 3 minutes for reload". May be this change could be combined with a more flexible materialsystem with native shadersupport? (please dont kill me )
What do you think about it? Do i have to leave the forum now?

[hybrid]

What is native shader support? And don't you need some kind of resource management for larger apps anyway (in terms of which characters and objects are visible/used), which should to some point also provide the necessary information for material cleanup. In most cases releasing a texture and loading it again some time after is much more overhead than finding some more RAM to store the texture for the whole time.
However, Irrlicht 2.0 (or something around that number) might/will get a new material system, which might also include a morestrict texture handling.

[Mel]

In my opinion, a general resource manager would be also great, so the memory Irrlicht uses is always under control. I've tested that unloading and reloading stuff in the engine always leave a small amount of memory that keeps growing but that in fact, is doing nothing, so, if there could be a way to keep under control any memory usage in the engine, (say vectors, say any resource that is not related directly with the mesh cache, the scene nodes, or the texture cache, that clears well) it would save resources.

[Nox]

Okay native shader support is the wrong term and i could not really describe it. It is the way how shaders are loaded and handled. But this is okay at the moment. More important would be a more proper way of handling the resourcereleases.