Hey guys, I'm new, been lurking, yada yada yada... Anyways, I'm a convert from OpenGL to Direct3D, and am in the process of learning how to port over several methods I used to use. One of them was a method of rendering out a 'Pick Buffer' of sorts. The basic way it worked was that whenever the scene was changed (Or, for efficiency reasons, stopped changing), the scene was rendered again into an off-screen buffer with textures and lights disabled, with each object possessing an individual color. Whenever the mouse was clicked, the pixel at the mouse location would be retreived from the buffer and linked to an object in an indexed table to retrieve the object that was clicked on. It had some flaws I'll admit, like the limited number of objects (Although at roughly 16.7 million possible colors/objects that's somewhat ignorable) and the neccesity of re-rendering the scene into a 32-bit render buffer which is constantly read from, but for the purposes of an editor it works fine and provides superior flexibility of how the pick objects work (Z-correct, pixel accurate and the ability to artificially expand small objects like verticies and lines for easy clickin'). Now, the thing is I have no idea how to handle this in Direct3D, due to its mesh-oriented structure (As far as I understand it). I'm having trouble getting my head around how to draw an object {That already has seperate vertex colors) as one big, flat, solid colored shape without having to lock the vertex buffers, alter them, then switch them back to their original settings. Is this even possible, or will I have to use the more time-honored technique of picking with rays? If possible, I'd like to avoid using hardware pixel/vertex shaders, mainly for compatibility reasons. Thanks for your time, guys. -Nick London

Fantastic, that's exactly what I was looking for. :)

A D3D8 version isn't really needed, but it might be nice to know in case I ever decide to make a DX8 version of the renderer. Dont want to put you to too much trouble though, so just a point in the right direction would be great.

Thanks!

-Nick