Shadows and Polysoup... A designer's rant
by Nicolai Dutka · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 08/03/2009 (6:40 pm) · 5 replies
I've been battling the classic issue of having shadows in my game and at the same time, trying to deal with impossible to create collisions...
Take, for instance, a single cave/cavern. Rough, uneven and rounded edges make for a collision mesh nightmare, so we wanna use polysoup. Ok, so we'll use a TSStatic. But oh wait... TSStatic cannot be set to receive shadows from the player...
So what am I supposed to do here? I feel like I am completely stuck choosing between easy to setup collisions via polysoup, or allowing the player to cast shadows on a static shape and spending hours on end setting up the collisions...
From a production standpoint, it would be MUCH faster to make a game without shadows and use the polysoup, but then I lose my player shadows which makes the game so much more pretty...
Bah humbug!
Take, for instance, a single cave/cavern. Rough, uneven and rounded edges make for a collision mesh nightmare, so we wanna use polysoup. Ok, so we'll use a TSStatic. But oh wait... TSStatic cannot be set to receive shadows from the player...
So what am I supposed to do here? I feel like I am completely stuck choosing between easy to setup collisions via polysoup, or allowing the player to cast shadows on a static shape and spending hours on end setting up the collisions...
From a production standpoint, it would be MUCH faster to make a game without shadows and use the polysoup, but then I lose my player shadows which makes the game so much more pretty...
Bah humbug!
#2
08/04/2009 (12:12 am)
polysoup receives the player shadow 
#3
Just a quick idea, but if it's an either-or, you could possibly get away with instantiating the same TSStatic twice. Once as a visible object for rendering and once as an invisible object for collision.
08/04/2009 (12:21 am)
Just a quick idea, but if it's an either-or, you could possibly get away with instantiating the same TSStatic twice. Once as a visible object for rendering and once as an invisible object for collision.
#4
08/04/2009 (4:03 am)
Polysoup receives the player shadow as Picasso mentioned 
#5
08/04/2009 (8:10 am)
Yep, polysoup gets the player's shadow - it's all the others that don't happen (cos they're baked in, and polysoup has no lightmaps). 
Torque 3D Owner Sean H.