When navigating a scene, a plug-in reference will often be retrieved without knowing the concrete type of the plug-in. There are two mechanisms used for querying run-time type information from a plug-in. Each mechanism uses a function named GetInterface(). The first one is InterfaceServer::GetInterface() and the second one is Animatable:: GetInterface(). These functions both return an abstract base class (interface) using an interface identifier.
InterfaceServer::GetInterface()
The function InterfaceServer::GetInterface()uses the type Interface_ID to identify interfaces. An Interface_ID for a given interface can usually be found as a macro in the same file as the interface definition. For example, IDX8PixelShader has its interface ID defined in the same header file d3dx8.h.
Plug-ins should correctly handle the requests for interfaces in their implementation of InterfaceServer::GetInterface(), or they may not be displayed correctly in the Nitrous viewport. Developers are encouraged to read the Handling Requests for Interfaces best practices to find more information on this issue.
The function Animatable::GetInterface() uses integers to identify the interface IDs. A list of pre-defined constants for identifying interfaces can be found in this list of interface IDs . To determine if an animatable can be used as the type a certain interface is representing, it is recommended to see if that animatable implements that interface or not, rather than to perform casts using dynamic_cast or static_cast.
