.dts Vs. .dif
by Ben Rowland · in Artist Corner · 04/01/2005 (2:35 am) · 7 replies
If I am creating a racing game, where movement is confined to the track, what is the best thing to use to make the scenery around the track. It will only be exteriors, and does not need complicated collision stuff or anything, but I am hoping to use a lot of buildings and I want to know what the most efficient way of doing this. Is it better to create a few really big models, or can I use one per building etc. and is .dts or .dif faster for something like this.
Thanks
Thanks
#2
04/01/2005 (10:46 pm)
Though you said collision isn't that important, in a racing game, if you use DTS as barriers and stuff, you will have a lot of...well...collision problems. You will get stuck on DTS objects much more easily than you would DIFs. I would recommend DTS for anything "pretty" but don't use them to guide the track. Just my opinion.
#3
@Blake, I am planning on having the track as a river, so the only collisions I should have to deal with are with the banks and other boats. Are they likely to cause collision problems as well.
04/02/2005 (1:15 am)
Thanks everybody for a really prompt response.@Blake, I am planning on having the track as a river, so the only collisions I should have to deal with are with the banks and other boats. Are they likely to cause collision problems as well.
#4
04/02/2005 (7:05 pm)
I guess you would just have to try it out. Should be okay I suppose. I just had a small problem recently with another little project I am working on with a car constantly getting stuck in a rock DTS shape.
#5
something else that worked pretty well that I tried this weekend was to split the collisions into 10 chunks for the ground and track each of 100 polys, and 4 for the wall collision and only have the sections underneath the cars calculated.
The game runs well with 8 ODE physics vehicles online so long as you all have broadband which is kind of cool.
Maybe you can try combining DTS with DIF, and use dif for collision and DTS for detailed geometry. Which I think would be the closest method to do what were doing but in torque.
04/02/2005 (8:45 pm)
I'm not using torque, but in my current racing game with lots of corners on slopes etc, you can actually get away with relatively few collision polys. the entire track has about 30,000 polys, your not restricted to a tunnel and there is some softshoulder before you hit the barriers and buildings and yet less than 2000 colision polys for a pretty detailed terrain. something else that worked pretty well that I tried this weekend was to split the collisions into 10 chunks for the ground and track each of 100 polys, and 4 for the wall collision and only have the sections underneath the cars calculated.
The game runs well with 8 ODE physics vehicles online so long as you all have broadband which is kind of cool.
Maybe you can try combining DTS with DIF, and use dif for collision and DTS for detailed geometry. Which I think would be the closest method to do what were doing but in torque.
#6
04/02/2005 (8:55 pm)
An issue for some... For items added dynamically... difs show up black and require relighting the scene.
#7
04/28/2005 (7:45 am)
I've been thinking about doing the same thing, using dts instead of dif for structures to cut down on lag. Has any1 tried to work this out yet? 
Torque Owner Alex Swanson
For extremely large objects you may need to make minor changes to the way DTS is culled (right now things sometimes pop out of existance if their centerpoint is too far off screen.) As far as I know, this is a fairly trivial change.