Defining a TriangleSelector without an associated mesh

[Ablaze]

I'm trying to make a space based scene and allow the user to select stars with the mouse. I'm getting stuck on trying to create a TriangleSelector, because the function (createTriangleSelector) wants a mesh, and I am not loading my scene from a mesh. If I pass it 0 for the mesh pointer it returns 0.

So I have two questions:
1) How can I create a triangle selector without associating a mesh?
2) Will this approach even work?

[laforced]

What are your stars composed of?
Are you just displaying a bitmap with images that look like stars?
Triangle selector requires some sort of mesh, meshes are made
up of triangles. If you are using just a bitmap, you could use the
coordinates of the star images in the bitmap and reference those
coordinates as the stars.

[Guest]

Yes, my stars are billboards. I load their positions dynamically based on an XML file. Here's a screenshot:



I would very much like to use the coordinates to build a triangle selector, but I can't figure out how to define that in irrlicht. Is there some way to make define a mesh on the fly without loading it from a file?

[Guest]

What method are you using to create the billboard?
Are you using a quad to contain the image or are you using
a point sprite? Are the billboards assigned to a node?

[rincewind]

why do you need a triangleselector? you could use ISceneCollisionManager::getSceneNodeFromScreenCoordinatesBB()
for mousepicking, which uses boundingboxes to select the scenenode.

greetings, rincewind

[Ablaze]

I'm not sure what a quad or a point sprite is, but yes.. each star image is assigned to it's own node, and there is a node for the center of the galaxy so I can rotate the whole thing if I need to.

I didn't realize that would work if there wasn't a selecter, rincewind. I'll try that, thanks.