Some questions on Irrlicht (GUI, meshes, camera)

crackingod · Post by **crackingod** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 11:54 am

Hi everybody
I'm new to Irrlicht and this is my first post on this forum!
I'm looking for an engine to build a very simple city builder (nothing commercial or huge, just for fun).
I experimented a bit with Irrlicht and found it quite surprising how easily you can do things compared to raw OpenGL or DX.
However I felt the API reference is a bit poorly documented and it's difficult to really find what functions you need to use, anyway that isn't a major problem I believe as the forum here looks quite active!

I started fiddling with the camera and mesh loading and I'm trying to do a simcity like camera style (from above, with movement at the edge of the screen), that was amazingly easy to produce. However I got stuck in something which I thought would be easier. I'd like to rotate the camera in the way you can in some rts games, any interesting ideas on how to do that?
Another thing is the GUI, again is very easy to use but I have a few questions:
1) Can you make a window non movable?
2) Is it possible to modify the aspect of a window (remove cross on top right,background image, etc...)
3)also, I need to use the bottom 1/5th of the screen for my gui, a window covering that. How can I not render the covered part to speed up things. Basically my question is, can you not render what is behind the gui?

One last thing is about meshed. I created a terrain on 3ds max and exported it as .3DS, it loads beautifully when I only apply one material but crashes miserably when I load a .3ds file with more than one material applied to it. Any idea?
Also, I checked the terrain rendering system, but it doesn't really suit my needs.

Well that was a long first post

Thank You!

Halan · Post by **Halan** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 1:57 pm

i think a scene node can only handle one material. but a material up to 4 textures (irrlicth 1.1, irrlicht 1.0 can only handle 2 textures i think)

if you want the scene behind the gui not rendered at all i would render irrlicht in a win32 window and either make a second device that draws the gui or a winform...

greets.
Halan

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 2:59 pm

A scene node can handle an arbitrary number of materials, a mesh buffer holds exactly one material.
You can change the viewport to reduce the drawing area, however also 2d drawing would be prohibited in this area. But if you set up two scene managers with different viewports this would be possible. 3d games are usually mixing 3d scene and gui, though.

crackingod · Post by **crackingod** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 3:17 pm

Yup I tried doing 2 viewports, but doesnt quite fit my camera style, i'll work on that (not an issue for the moment).
So what should I do to load more than one material?

crackingod · Post by **crackingod** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 8:21 pm

I'm especially interested in the GUI stuff, Is it possible to make a window non movable and change it's style? Or should I go for CEGUI?

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 8:30 pm

First thing to do is use the 3ds patch from my webpage or the Irrlicht SVN version to check if the new 3ds loader will do what you want. Otherwise check why it is failing and propose a patch or provide the 3ds file for the developers to check what's wrong.