Randomly altered DIF files
by Herald Richeson · in Torque Game Engine · 10/12/2006 (10:35 pm) · 2 replies
I hit the back button on accident just as I was finishing up my post so I may have explained things a little more compressed than before.
I just bought the torque game engine and I've been spending the last few hours reading the documentation that comes with it, but I figured I might as well get this question out there early since it's going to be a pretty important hurdle I'll be facing.
I want to do something like what Animal Crossing does when a player creates a new town. I'm not sure if the question I'm asking should be "randomly altered DIF files" or "procedurally generated DIF files." I want to make a small island town where the entire village can be viewed at once with whatever villagers are outside seen going about their business. Since this is mostly just me learning about game development, my system requirements don't have to be too low. I'd like it to look like Animal Crossing/Ooga Booga or slightly better and run on 7800GT or xbox 360 without slowdown. My question is what are the limitations of the DIF format? Can I have the location of models like trees and houses be put randomly upon the village's creation? Going a step farther, can I have any simple brush alterations randomly placed? I realize if I can place models randomly but not brush alterations, I could just make models to do the job that a brush change would, but I have the feeling that it would be too taxing. How taxing our models? I suppose tomorrow I can test for myself just how taxing models are. One last thought as I'm finishing this is that I perhaps I could make a basic DIF file and not have the models be a part of the DIF file at all and just save their position on creation of the village. I think that is probably the solution, but I'd like to get this idea out for scrutiny.
Thanks for any help in advance.
I just bought the torque game engine and I've been spending the last few hours reading the documentation that comes with it, but I figured I might as well get this question out there early since it's going to be a pretty important hurdle I'll be facing.
I want to do something like what Animal Crossing does when a player creates a new town. I'm not sure if the question I'm asking should be "randomly altered DIF files" or "procedurally generated DIF files." I want to make a small island town where the entire village can be viewed at once with whatever villagers are outside seen going about their business. Since this is mostly just me learning about game development, my system requirements don't have to be too low. I'd like it to look like Animal Crossing/Ooga Booga or slightly better and run on 7800GT or xbox 360 without slowdown. My question is what are the limitations of the DIF format? Can I have the location of models like trees and houses be put randomly upon the village's creation? Going a step farther, can I have any simple brush alterations randomly placed? I realize if I can place models randomly but not brush alterations, I could just make models to do the job that a brush change would, but I have the feeling that it would be too taxing. How taxing our models? I suppose tomorrow I can test for myself just how taxing models are. One last thought as I'm finishing this is that I perhaps I could make a basic DIF file and not have the models be a part of the DIF file at all and just save their position on creation of the village. I think that is probably the solution, but I'd like to get this idea out for scrutiny.
Thanks for any help in advance.
Torque Owner Amr Bekhit
-Yes, you can randomly place DIF files in your world using script so you should have no problem creating random cities.
-Simple Brush alterations: I'm not sure what you mean by that. The simple modifications you can do to a DIF in script are position, rotation and scale. I think other than that, you'd have to create a new DIF.
-How taxing are models? It depends on how you model them I guess. Just be neat with your modelling, try and optimise and use portals and levels of detail and I reckon you should be OK.
I didn't quite understand your last scentence. Can you rephrase?
Hope that's answered your questions.
--Amr