A new Door class for Torque3D

While I was testing/playing the soon to release demo of my game The Master's Eye, I got stuck in a door. I thought I had overcome these kind of problems by using triggers, but apparently not. Now The Master's Eye is a game in a medieval fantasy setting, so most of the doors are of the swinging kind. Only not this time, the player was trapped in a collision mesh of the open door and did not move in any direction. After analyzing the problem I decided that I needed a good working door object that lacked all these kind of problems. And preferably has all the necessary logic to respond to most of the actions you might want to perform on a door. Now, less then 2 weeks later, there it is: the new DoorClass object for Torque3D. And it is available to all of you and for free!! The DoorClass pack is released under the MIT license and contains all the source files to add this nifty class to the engine. And it is for all kind of doors: swinging, sliding, single and double doors.

So how does it work?

The Door class is a ShapeBase derived class, so there is a datablock called DoorData which holds the shapefile and some other stuff about the door and there is the Door object which represents the door in our game world.

There are however, a few demands for the door shape:

1. it must contain an open and a close animation, named open and close,
2. These animations must have triggers set on certain frames, to control the state of the door,
3. A collision mesh for the closed door position, in case of a double door this must be just 1 single mesh,
4. A collision mesh for the open door position, in case of a double door this will be 2 meshes,
5. A collision mesh covering the whole area of the door animation, but simplified. In case of a swinging door this can be a low poly quarter of a cylinder. Also this mesh must be axis aligned to be certain of a correct doorblock check. You can, however, rotate the door in the world-editor, the blocked door check will calculate with it.
6. The collision meshes must follow a naming rule.

Features:

1. The datablock can hold sounds which will be played when opening/closing a door and when a player tries to open a locked door,
2. The object can hold an ItemData that must be used to open the door. This ItemData will be passed to TS through callbacks,
3. Depending on how you build the engine (this is explained in the installation guide which is included in the pack) the datablock or the object can hold messages for a locked or a blocked door situation and will be passed to script through callbacks. When the engine is build to have these messages be part of the object, you can give every single door in your game a different message, otherwise it is on a per datablock base.
4. You can operate the door object without the need to know if it is locked, blocked, open or close, all is handled by the methods.
5. The blocked door test can be enabled/disabled on an object base.
6. onOpen, onClose, onLocked, onDoorblocked and an onLock callback give maximum control of the door.

The next video shows how easy it is adding a door to your mission with the world editor (as always the videos are best viewed in HD).



Now the next video shows the use of this door in a game.



Curious on how it looks in a real game? The following video shows the Door class in my game The Master's Eye in different situations.



How do I get this DoorClass pack?

You can download the zipped pack from my website here. As mentioned before it is for free, but if you find it useful and you are feeling generous, feel free to donate, it is much appreciated.

I hope you like it, thanks for reading.

Richard