Creating a water plane

[xlr8freefly]

I see that some guys here are a bit feisty in this forum regarding ‘dumb’ questions… but is that not the way we learn? And a am at the ‘BEGINNER‘S HELP FORUM!

I’m a programmer, new to 3D game development…Not new to using 3D engines though. I love the fact that I can use Irrlicht with my language of choice. Other engines have scripting languages etc. Don’t like that at all!


Now…to get to my question: I’d like to create a water plane…Some engines have a mesh object called plane, and you can texture it and even set transparency. I’d like to create a water plane, set it slightly transparent and then move it up and down slowly…I’ve done this before and as you might know, works well for very basic oceans.
The waterplanenode is a bit overhead…and if you make it too big, it slows everything down. I did some reading on plane3D.. Not sure what it is used for in Irrlicht. The help documents the code, so examples would have been better. So, if someone could guide me in the right direction I would appreciate it!!

Thanks

[MikeR]

In Irrlicht, water is made using a sceneNode.
If you look in the specialFX tutorial, it uses Irrlicht water.
It appears to be an XZ plane with 2 textures.

[SanderVocke]

I think that plane3d in Irrlicht is only used for calculations (intersections with lines etc), I haven't seen a visual representation of a plane onscreen yet. Is the water scene node really that slow?

[ghs]

Oh, that's a nice question. I'm also looking for answer to it.

In general, how to create a mesh dynamicaly by adding vertices and triangles to it? Should I use Vertices and Indices array of MeshBuffer object?

[MikeR]

I haven't noticed any drop off in fps in my app using the water scene node.

[Guest]

not possible. only if you scale it small and crappy otherwise it has an fps impact (when you set it very big and with much more waves)

[xlr8freefly]

I think I might be scaling it like my butt...
I’ll try and play with some different values. I’ve noticed that Irrlicht has a IMeshManipulator class, looks like I can use that to make my water a bit transparent…

Thanks guys, I’ll try it out!

[Guest]

I see much improvement over how the engine handles the water note/
I use rather large water meshes for my sims and with older V of the engine
it lagged and you could see jittery movements in the cam when using large water plane/ I also posted someplace in the forums many months ago
about posible adding of animated texture support to the engine/ So that
insted of using the system hog water plane lol you could use a standard low
poly flat plain and just add your textures and set animation for a water
texture/ the responce I got was just use an animated texture insted lol.
I do belive that spintz posted some code here somplace a long while back
that could be used for animating textures accros meshes?
Maybe he can help you with alternate ways of creating less system demanding water planes!