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How to zone a non-cube area.

by penbit · in Torque 3D Professional · 11/05/2009 (7:44 am) · 6 replies

I want to zone a cylindrical shaped area. (a large tower in the middle of terrain) Using a large cube around it doesn't work since it doesn't render areas just outside the tower. Is there a way to have different shaped zones other than cubes?

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Torque 3D Owner penbit
#1
11/06/2009 (10:54 am)
Well, there is tons of difference in terms of performance if I zone it or not. But it looks like zones will be limited to rectangular shaped buildings. How would I zone off a T-shaped house that player can enter?


Torque Owner Ryan Mounts
CornerstoneViz
#2
11/06/2009 (1:29 pm)
This is something that has been frustrating me as well. The zoning system is just not very useful in its current state. I'd like to see the artist be able to define non-cube zone meshes and portals in the modelling app, perhaps by using a special naming convention. Like all zone object names are prepended with "zone_" and all portals with "portal_".

Associate Tom Spilman
Sickhead Games
#3
11/06/2009 (2:43 pm)
Non-convex single zone shapes are very hard to get performance from as you need to know if the camera/object is inside the volume.

The better bet is to support combining two zones into a single one.

As far as embedding zone shapes within a model, its also something on our task list for a upcoming release of T3D.


Torque Owner Ivan Mandzhukov
Liman3D
#4
11/06/2009 (2:57 pm)
I'll be very happy if we have occluders in the new release.
It will be far more useful instead of zoning the area.

Torque 3D Owner penbit
#5
11/06/2009 (2:58 pm)
Ryan, I like that "object names are prepended with "zone_" and all portals with "portal_". idea as well, that would be sweet.

Tom, I don't mind combined-zoning one by one, area by area if they would act like a single zone at the end. Well, I'll be looking forward for the upcoming release then. Thanks for the replies.

Picasso, that would even be better, hopefully. My ultimate dream to have some middleware like umbra being integrated to torque with a indie-friendly price. Maybe I'm asking for too much...


Torque 3D Owner Joshua Halls (Xerves)
#6
11/06/2009 (6:57 pm)
Kind of waiting to see what kind of occlusion objects they have. We have visual occlusion objects (it doesn't drop them out of scope) that you can place in just about anything to occlude them from rendering if they are behind it. Portals are just way to buggy right now for us to use as they seem to behave in a fashion that we simply cannot use them in more open areas.