Does anyone know how mouse cursors and other environmental overlays are done in games? I have a j3d simulation that includes terrain. I want to overlay some data onto the terrain but do it in such a way that if can be efficiently moved with objects in the world. Originally I was creating a giant texture, alpha'ed everywhere except where the data was. This worked ok but couldn't be recalculated fast enough to move with the objects in the world, it had to be redrawn when the objects stopped moving.
I have also tried setting up a DecalGroup for my terrain that contains the whole terrain as its first child, and portions of the terrain for each additional child, dependent on where they are on the map. I haven't implemented the movement functionality yet but have already hit a snag. Because the depth buffer is disabled for a DecalGroup, if you fly down to ground level and look across at the data, you can see it through mountains, etc.
Every game out there does stuff like this, at least with the mouse cursor so I'm wondering how I might accomplish it in 3d in general and Java3D specifically. Any help is appreciated.
Ben
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