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Another way?

by Jeff Raab · in Torque Game Engine · 08/20/2004 (1:39 pm) · 3 replies

Alrighty, ive been trying to convince the team lead to switch to torque and he wants to know a few things:

a) Are collisions managed through bsp, and can that be changed?

b) why does everyone use quark and not Max?

c) Can the buildings and such be cached to speed up processing?

d) is there a way to do collisions w/out having to make them manually?

im relatively new to torque, so i really dunno for sure my self, but im trying to tide him over to pick torque. answers?
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Associate Matt Fairfax
PopCap
#1
08/20/2004 (8:36 pm)
A) Collisions with interiors (dif's) are handled with a bsp tree filled with closed convex brushes. This allows for very fast and accurate collision. These brushes are generated automatically by a tool called map2dif. Collisions with shapes (dts's) are done against hand generated closed convex meshes in a list and are limied to 9 meshes per shape. This can be changed but finding better solutions is hard. For a shooter game that needs fast and accurate collision you are going to be hard pressed to find better systems. For games that don't have quite as strenous requirements there are more options. Replacing the collision in TGE isn't hard but it does require an indepth understanding of the areas of the engine that it touches upon.

b) Quark produces *only* closed convex brushes (aside from rounding errors) which are used to automatically generate the collision data for an interior. If you use max to create the geometry for an interior you are going to be limited to a very narrow selection of the tools and to closed convex shapes. There are a few tools that can help to export the geometry from max into something that map2dif can read but they aren't very good and most times you are going to have to move it through Quark to texture it or to resave it into a different format anyway.

c) The resource manager in TGE does cache the buildings however each building is going to have a unique set of external lightmaps which can't be instanced. These lightmaps are cached in Release mode in .ml files after you run the mission for the first time and after any changes to the mission.

d) Basically you have two options: have map2dif generate the collisions automatically for you by limiting yourself to closed convex brushes or do them manually yourself. Degenerating a concave mesh into a set of acceptable convex brushes is not trivial to accomplish.

Torque Owner Jeff Raab
[ghc]games
#2
08/21/2004 (4:03 pm)
Is there anyway to go from Max to torque directly?

cause having to go from max to quark(zones) to map2dif to torque would really be a burden.

Torque Owner Mz
#3
08/21/2004 (5:53 pm)
You can export .map files from MAX for use with map2dif.

As Matthew pointed out, it doesn't work all that well right now.

If you need to use MAX for building levels, I think you'd probably be better off sticking with whatever engine you're using.