Merry Christmas, Community - Poly Soup

Wow - almost three months since my last .plan. I guess I should write these things more often. What have I been up to? Nothing that's quite ready to be talked about in depth, but in brief: developing ways for us to do more releases at a higher quality and with bigger feature sets.

And probably some smaller stuff that I'll be posting about in coming months, too. :)

Speaking of smaller stuff, I took a few days about a month ago and extended 3space and TSStatic in TSE to support more flexible collision scenarios. Or to speak more directly, polysoup collision. I've collaborated on this with Tom Spilman, who spent some time debugging it, integrating it into a project, and cleaning it up a bit, and the end result is a polysoup implementation that seems fairly usable.

So, here's a screenshot of an orc on a concave donut:



Now, some caveats: this is just the result of a few day's hacking, not an official announcement of GG support for polysoup in Torque. So while it's pretty easy to integrate, you do have to have some coding knowledge to use it.

It's also not bullet proof. We use OpCode, so it's pretty fast & efficient, but if you expect to drop ten orc models into a level and not have a performance hit when you run a buggy into them, you'll have to think again. But if you want to build a building in DTS, and don't go overboard in your model complexity, you should do just fine.

Finally, it collides against ALL the meshes in your model, including invisible ones. So if you want a model to work for polysoup you probably want to kill all your Col-1 meshes & so forth for proper results. Adding some sort of filtering rule wouldn't be hard but it was unclear the best way to do that so we left it a bit braindead.

You can get this at its page on TDN, if you're a TSE owner. Remember, you're on your own using it!

I figure I can't very well give you hearty Christmas cheer this holiday, so I may as well post up something nice and useful. :)