Irrlicht Engine

personally i`m too like the "one dll for all" model, but it will be good if stuff that is not used in current project can be removed from irrlicht dll by commenting out a bunch of #defines and recompiling the "kernel"

what is really missed in irrlicht: material type that is able to use texture alpha channel AND user defined parameter for overall alpha (or vertext alpha) in the same time. This can be done for example by expanding ..._ALPHA_CHANNEL material type to support MaterialParam2 as alpha for whole texture.
This is must-have feature for game GUIs (popping/flying/fading menus, etc). i know that 2d gui is capable of drawing so (and draw2dimage), but 3d GUI is much more convenient becouse of animators that can be used to enlive elements automatically (VERY VERY convinient feature of Irrlicht )

i wonder is it possible to create user defined material type that is able to use texture alpha and apply overall alpha on top of it? can somebody point me? i need DX8 solution personally (or i`ll develop one by myself)

buhatkj wrote:i would never have considered 2mb a "large" DLL. 2mb to me is a negligible file size. i know i've had broadband for a long time, but still. its pretty damn small.

i'm more interested in extra scene nodes, and more advanced shader support.
.

I second your opinion, let irrlicht grow bigger , computers are only gonna get better , we should concentrate on the trend of the future instead of worrying about technology that will go out of style in a couple of years.

IPv6 wrote:personally i`m too like the "one dll for all" model, but it will be good if stuff that is not used in current project can be removed from irrlicht dll by commenting out a bunch of #defines and recompiling the "kernel"

i think this is the best compromise, bot the size people and the feature people

Another thing that is missed - make it possible to use multiline text in text scene nodes and GUI classes. in order to add multiline support (as far i can see) there is only 2 places to change - font->draw and font->getDimensions

also i would like to see a "remove all gui elements"-function. i mean its very simple to write but also needed very often and it sucks to write it over and over again

greets,
HAlan

Halan wrote:also i would like to see a "remove all gui elements"-function. i mean its very simple to write but also needed very often and it sucks to write it over and over again

make dummy element and use it as a parent to your GUI... then just ->remove() it

i would like to see normal mapping on animated meshes. in addition to shadows on non-animated meshes.
basically i want to be able to have normal mapping, animation, and shadows, or any combination thereof, on any mesh.

buhatkj wrote:i would like to see normal mapping on animated meshes. in addition to shadows on non-animated meshes.
basically i want to be able to have normal mapping, animation, and shadows, or any combination thereof, on any mesh.

i fully agree, It would allow some awesome next generation style games, and irrlicht needs some good looking stuff like this for its screenshots and tech demo. But is it hard to do all this?

i was trying to add the shadows to non-animated meshes, but ran into some wierd runtime errors when i tried to test it. i had been going to submit a patch for it once i got it working, but its still broken at current. perhaps i should post it someplace anyway?

Cg shader support (both directx and opengl) and freetype fonts

I don't think that any of these two will become an integral part of Irrlicht core. Maybe as an add-on that can be easier integrated into the core than the current TT extension.
Cg shaders might be nice to program, but the use of them in programs is rather inelegant. Better compile Cg shaders to assembler and use those shaders instead.
And TT library is just huge, so a working source file for the latest Irrlicht version could be provided, together with a short readme on how to integrate into the library. but other than that you're on your own.

Do you plan to get rid of DrawIndexedPrimitivesUP in d3d render? It is very slow and unadvisable metod.

Would be nice if you provide a patch for this so I can see if it really helps and how it would be done at all.

I would like to see a missing method added in IGUIContextMenu.

Something like:

virtual void setSelectedItem(s32 idx)=0

I would use this to navigate in a context menu via mouse scrolling wheel.

I think this should'nt be too hard to implement...