Atlas Terrain : Removing faces
by Dale Best · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 09/22/2008 (3:36 am) · 1 replies
The atlas terrain is interesting and faster and nicer it seems yes. After wrestling for a long time the awesome people over at quadsoftware have intergrated exporting atlas from grome. This is a great functional system, one thing that seems so limiting :
In legacy terrain, we had terrain using emptySquares and had faces missing from the terrain in order to have the ground disappear, so that there can be interiors and what not going through the mountain (imagine a racing game).
With atlas, is this functionality completely gone? As in, not able to remove faces anymore? Then there would be a crippling lack in the engine... Especially for people upgrading in the hopes of porting their existing games.
Perhaps there is a way?
FuzzY
In legacy terrain, we had terrain using emptySquares and had faces missing from the terrain in order to have the ground disappear, so that there can be interiors and what not going through the mountain (imagine a racing game).
With atlas, is this functionality completely gone? As in, not able to remove faces anymore? Then there would be a crippling lack in the engine... Especially for people upgrading in the hopes of porting their existing games.
Perhaps there is a way?
FuzzY
Torque Owner Stefan Lundmark
Depends how you ask it. It's not completely gone, but the design behind Chunked LOD makes it quite cumbersome to implement this while still keeping the things that make this implementation so strong and performant.
Remember, you're working with chunks. If you delete a chunk in the topmost LOD, how will that look like in the other layers? Perhaps you'll get a larger hole, and you'll end up with visible seams and holes where you don't want them when watching the scenery from far away, like you usually do with Atlas since it's so large. This might sound trivial, but it's not.
I'm sure someone else can give you a better description, or correct where I'm wrong, but that's (hopefully) the gist of it.