Something is missing

Hi,

i'm working on creating all of the examples in vb.net. At the moment i'm trying BezierPatch, but the following


MeshManager.Singleton.createBezierPatch(...)


is not working, because createBezierPatch is missing.

Roland

Actually it's not missing, the problem is that the method accepts a void* pointer and VB.NET doesn't support pointers.

I can make it IntPtr to make it accessible but isn't it difficult to handle pointers through VB ? How are you creating and passing the control points (patchCtlPoints in the Ogre demo) ?

I tried to make a "PatchVertex" class (like the structure in the c++ example) with all required fields. Then I want to make an array of this class with the data (this is the patchCtlPoints data) and pass it to the createBezierPatch like


patch = MeshManager.Singleton.createBezierPatch("Bezier1", ResourceGroupManager.DEFAULT_RESOURCE_GROUP_NAME, patchCtlPoints, patchDecl, 3, 3, 5, 5, PatchSurface.VS_BOTH)


BTW the PatchSurface.VS_BOTH isn't recognized.

It looks like


Public Class PatchVertex
Public x As Double
Public y As Double
Public z As Double
Public nx As Double
Public ny As Double
Public nz As Double
Public u As Double
Public v As Double
End Class

' Make a 3x3 patch for test
patchCtlPoints(9) = New PatchVertex

' Patch data
patchCtlPoints(0).x = -500.0
patchCtlPoints(0).y = 200.0
patchCtlPoints(0).z = -500.0
patchCtlPoints(0).nx = -0.5
patchCtlPoints(0).ny = 0.5
patchCtlPoints(0).nz = 0.0
patchCtlPoints(0).u = 0.0
patchCtlPoints(0).v = 0.0

.
.
.


BTW the PatchSurface.VS_BOTH isn't recognized.
It's PatchSurface.VisibleSide.VS_BOTH (the enum class name is required in .NET)

PatchVertex should be a Structure, not a class; the array should not contain references but the actual values so that they can be passed to unmanaged code.

I'm considering adding a custom overload method CreateBezierPatch<T> that will accept an array (instead of a pointer), the type T of which will be provided using generics:

PatchVertex[] controlPoints = new PatchVertex[10];
MeshManager.Singleton.CreateBezierPatch<PatchVertex>(name, groupName, controlPoints, decl, 0, 0);


T will also be restricted only to structs.

Does this seem "intuitive"? Has anyone any other idea?

That's ok...