Mixing interior and exterior scenes

#1 Torque is very good at using indoor/outdoor environments.

From the info page:

Quote:Interiors define large objects, such as buildings, and spaces that players and entities can move around in. These interiors are stored in a format called DIF, which utilizes a Binary Space Partition (BSP) collision scheme, similar to that found in any Quake-based game engine. DIFs can be created using QuArK or any other Valve 220 format .map editing program. At this time there is no native .map editor available for the Macintosh platform, though QuArK will run under Virtual PC 6 and it goes without saying that you're home free with an Intel based mac and bootcamp

Torque Game Engine uses Portal-based interiors to seamlessly integrate your interiors with the terrain engine. Torque also features animated lightmaps so you can add color cycling, fading, flickering, among other effects designed to help you achieve a desired environmental mood or style. Detail brushes reduce the number of portals generated. Surfaces won't be split during the BSP creation process, so you can save on polygons and collision complexity through proper use of detail brushes.

EDIT:
Your main difficulty will not be with a seamless transition, but the mission size for the terrain, I think. That is usually the problem with a scenario like you suggest.

#2 @Matthew

TGE proper has vast, yet limited terrain areas. Yeah, that sounds like a contradiction. Basically, one patch of TGE terrain can be set to tile infinitely, so your players need not run out of places to drive or fly. However, those places start looking the same after a while (because, geometrically, they are). With a whole lot of creativity, it might be possible to minimize that effect to some extent but not eliminate it entirely. TGE only supports one terrain object per 'mission'. Extending the TGE source code to handle multiple or streaming terrains would probably be an un-fun proposition.

TGEA, on the other hand, is an up-gunned version of Torque with paging terrains (among other nifty features) giving you virtually unlimited land mass options. It's pretty cool. While TGEA is currently still in progress, some teams have already started developing games/simulations with it under an early adopter licensing plan.

#3 Thanks for the info. It sounds really good so far. The paging terrain sounds very interesting.

How large an area does the terrain object cover before it wraps? What I'm looking for is a decent size midfield and side field areas of play. The bsp size restrictions for open areas is annoying. Valve has a limit of 4096 game units before it pukes (about 340 feet in scale). I was trying to model a city block using Source and it wasn't possible to make a street that looked right due to the short sight distance limitations.

Also, can you have more than one BSP object?

#4 I think the default maximum area a terrain object can cover is about 2km x 2km. You can have many BSP objects, although the more of them you have, the more important it is for you to have sensible LOD versions of all of them.

#5 A 2km square is plenty big. I really wasn't looking to a battlefield Europe or anything like that. I just wanted some room to move around in (on the scope of UT2K3 for example).

I downloaded the interactive torque demo and it looks like just what I need. But I am curious about the interior lighting. As I understand, the lighting is solved when the mission is first run. This is very different from having to run a radiosity program to generate a light mask. This difference is rather apparent when comparing the final result of the torque lighting method versus traditional light masks. The torque method looks somewhat unnatural. Of course, the interior model in the demo was rather simple, so maybe I'm jumping to conclusions. It's not a big deal, but I'm curious if more precise lighting methods (at least for interiors) can be applied. The exterior simplified shadows look fine.

#6

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As I understand, the lighting is solved when the mission is first run.

Correct.

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This is very different from having to run a radiosity program to generate a light mask.

Not really. You can generate radiosity information on level load as well. Didn't Quake 3 do this, anyway?

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The torque method looks somewhat unnatural.

If you look at the demo, then I agree. I don't think it was meant to look realistic, though.

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but I'm curious if more precise lighting methods (at least for interiors) can be applied.

Spend some time configuring the lights and it can look really pretty. I'm not sure what version of Torque you're discussing, but TGE 1.42 vs TGE 1.5 is a huge difference. The latter has a content pack (Torque Lighting Kit) integrated to it which you previously had to purchase as an additional addon pack, but has now been integrated into Torque.

Also, if you're into pretty visuals then perhaps TGEA would be better suited for you. It's latest gen tech.

#7 The demo I ran was this one: http://www.garagegames.com/pg/demo.php?id=111 which is the 1.5 engine I believe. I also ran the TGEA demo (I think), but it didn't show any interior scenes other than the ogre standing on a reflective floor with some dynamic shadows. It looked nice.

The Quake3 engine uses pre-compiled light maps as part of the map build process (CSG, vis, and rad).

#8 In any case, the key to getting good realistic lights is placing quite a few of them and twinking the datablocks for them, alternatively twinking the lighting schemes as well, which is a bit more advanced but definatly worth it.