Irrlicht Engine

I have done some basic 3d programming, I've done all of the nehe tutorials.... but i've never ran into the term "node".

It wasnt in any of the docs, but im sure its an expremly simple term.

what doesn "node" mean?

node here refers to an element within a scene graph.

each scene-node can contain geometry, as well as children nodes.

whatever happens to the parent node, generally trickles down to the children nodes (such as translation for instance).

node, nexus, branch, leaf, etc-- same general ideas (though a leaf typically has no children, and a branch can denote only children and no personal information)

do some research on "Scene Graph" for a better idea.

all objects in irrlicht are attached to each other using nodes - nodes are set up in a graph hierarchy - so for instance for a character you could have a head, body, arms and legs as separate nodes all under a body node like this:

character node
|
---------------------
| | |
head torso lower
| | | |
arm arm leg leg

just as an example - each node can contain a mesh - irrlicht has all kinds of nodes built into it but the main one is one that contains one mesh - a mesh is a 3D shape - each node can point to the same mesh - for instance if you have a tree mesh you can make separate nodes for each tree in a forest where each one points to the same tree mesh - nodes allow you to rotate and scale meshes separately - so while you have one copy of the tree mesh you could have a forest of trees at all sizes!

hope that helps!