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Firefly Object Descriptions

Firefly Object Descriptions

Here we give brief descriptions on what each firefly object is and does.

Firefly Engine Object


 - This Firefly Engine object does almost all the work within these set of extensions. First, you should add one to the frame and then resize it to cover the frame. The area covered by this extension dictates the resolution of your 3D scene.

Firefly Node Camera Object


 - The Firefly Node Camera object is necessary to draw anything to the frame. It works similarly to how the Engine object works, except the area covered by the Camera object dictates where to draw the scene to (through the camera). Through this system, split-screen effects can be achieved, but usually the Engine object and your singular Camera will both be at the same point on the frame and both be of the same size.

Firefly 2D Text Object


 - The Firefly 2D Text object puts 2d text inside your 3d world useful for things like names above heads and other User Interface information

Firefly Image Object


 - The Firefly Image object puts images inside your 3d world useful for backdrops for all that User Interface information you have.

Firefly Material Cache Object


 - The Firefly Material Cache object represents and acts as an array of Materials. A Material has an Index that it resides at within a Material Cache object, and it can also have a name. Most node objects require one or more materials to render something other than a grey mass in the scene.

Firefly Movement Object


 - The Firefly Movement object is one of the most important objects in the FireFly set as it helps you move all your other nodes around.

Firefly Node Animated Mesh Object


 - With the Firefly Node Animated Mesh node you can insert an animated mesh into the scene. An Animated Mesh is animated across a number of Frames by calculating the position, scale, and rotation of the mesh's Joints using each one's collection of Keyframes across those Frames.


So, an Animated Mesh might have many Joints, and each Joint can have many Key Frames of a Position and/or Scale and/or Rotation type. When the animation takes place, it calculates what Position, Scale, and Rotation each Joint should be set to at a given frame by working out each difference between the last and next Key Frame.

Firefly Billboard Object


 - The Firefly Node Billboard object is like a 3d sprite: A 2d element, which always looks to the camera. It is usually used for explosions, fire, lens flares, particles and things like that.

Firefly Node Dummy Object


 - The Firefly Node Dummy object isn't really an object at all, in fact it isn't anything and you will never see it in through the Node Camera but it's incredibly useful for holding data for example you could have players mark an area in your world and put a dummy node there and use its values in your calculations.

Firefly Node Light


 - The Firefly Node Light object places various light sources such as spot lights or directional lights in your scene, Lights are often needed to brighten up a scene. Any Material (from the Material Cache object) that has its 'Lighting' setting set to true/on (which it is by default) means that it requires light to be rendered in some colour other than black.

Firefly Node Particle System Object


 - With the Firefly Node Particle System you can insert a particle emitter into the scene. A Particle System node can be one of these types: Point, Box, Sphere, Animated Mesh Node, Cylinder, Mesh, Ring. These types describe the shape of the emitter. What is actually emitted is similar to a Billboard node object.


A Particle System Node also can one or more Effectors. An Affecter is something located at a X,Y,Z position within the scene and will affect particles generated by the node object in different ways. The different types of Effectors are 'Attraction', 'Fade-Out', 'Gravity', 'Rotation', 'Scale'.

Firefly Node Primitive Object


 - The Firefly Node Primitive object is capable of very quickly creating a mesh in the shape of standard objects such as cubes, spheres, arrows, tubes cones, cylinders and planes.

Firefly Node Static Mesh Object


 - The Firefly Node Static Mesh object isn't static as in not able to move its just static as in not containing any animations, most of your 3d objects will be static meshes.

Firefly Node Terrain Object


 - The Firefly Node Terrain object is capable of very quickly loading terrains and updating the indices at runtime to enable viewing very large terrains. It uses a CLOD (Continuous Level of Detail) algorithm which updates the indices for each patch based on a LOD (Level of Detail) which is determined based on a patch's distance from the camera.

Firefly Node Text Object


 - The Firefly Node Text object lets you insert 2D text within the 3D scene. It works similar to the Billboard object in that it will always face the camera and the size of the text as it appears is not dependant on how close the object is to the camera.

Firefly Node Water Object


 - This Firefly Node Water object for rendering an animated water surface mesh. Looks really good when a Material with Transparent Reflection is used.

Firefly Skybox Object


 - This Firefly Sky object object is not quite a node object in that you can only have one in the scene, and it cannot be moved around. you can however choose to have a skysphere or a skybox which will allow your players to feel that the world is massive around them.




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