Building a large forest and tree village???
by John Eric Miller · in Torque Game Engine · 04/05/2004 (12:41 pm) · 4 replies
I would like to build a mission that has a large forest with large trees to use for a elf tree village. I am trying to determine how to go about doing this in the mission editor. I am thinking I am going to need to make my trees in a modelling program and build the platforms and bridges in Quark.
How would I go about getting a canopy look? The trees are going to be extremely large and extremely tall. Greater Fayadark in Everquest is an example of this.
How would you go about building the leaves on such large trees?
How do I handle collision of the tree trucks where the platforms intersect?
How do I make it to where the player can't walk off the edge of a platform? I guess I could add rails:)
I am going to wall off the zone just like Everquest. Also my game will not have a 1st person view so the camera will always look down on the player.
I would appreciate any pointers or ideas on doing this.
If anyone would like to help me develop the concept of this as a learning exercise I would greatly appreciate the help.
How would I go about getting a canopy look? The trees are going to be extremely large and extremely tall. Greater Fayadark in Everquest is an example of this.
How would you go about building the leaves on such large trees?
How do I handle collision of the tree trucks where the platforms intersect?
How do I make it to where the player can't walk off the edge of a platform? I guess I could add rails:)
I am going to wall off the zone just like Everquest. Also my game will not have a 1st person view so the camera will always look down on the player.
I would appreciate any pointers or ideas on doing this.
If anyone would like to help me develop the concept of this as a learning exercise I would greatly appreciate the help.
#2
04/05/2004 (1:12 pm)
Is there some reason you started a new thread on this? Did you lose your original thread on the same subject?
#3
04/05/2004 (2:58 pm)
I wanted to see if I could get new ideas in another forum which I did plus I had more information and new questions to ask and thought it better to post it in this forum. Consider the thread moved to a more approriate forum.
#4
04/05/2004 (3:26 pm)
Ahh I see. 
Torque Owner Paul /*Wedge*/ DElia
Why do you care about a canopy? You said you won't have 1st person view and the camera is always looking down. If you want to do it anyway, see below.
Alpha Channel. You make some low poly quad-plane extensions as branches, and get an image of a branch with leaves and alpha out the area you don't want to see. Larger branch sections could be manually modeled out, with branch extensions on it.
I don't see why you would have any problems here... the platforms just need to be far enough away so there are no gaps, and it won't care if the platforms overlap the trunk collision. The collision for the trunk won't be poly based, you'll need to use an aproximation with a rectangle or maybe 6-sided cylinder. Alternately you could create large tree sections in QuArK that will automatically do collision, and have the benefit of giving you an approximate lightmap, and then cover these with a more detailed tree area made in whatever .dts modeler you are using.
Yes rails would be a good idea, I wouldn't like to walk around up there without them.