Experimenting with TSE

Now that the TGE plugin is at least functional I've been working on exploring some other features of TGE/TSE to see how my project will be able to move forward. Yesterday I was informed that instead of creating DIF's for my task I might want to try creating a DTS with a polygon soup collision mesh. Everyone always says "It doesn't work, use DIF" which I know but I did some exploring anyways to see why people say that.

I was surprised to see that the MAX exporter will actually allow you to export a collision mesh which isn't convex. And I was even more surprised to see (After some people on IRC assured me) that the collision mesh would work.

I've tried to get one of my more complex meshes into TSE but it didn't work out so well. It was crashing not only TSE but 3DSMax as well so I decided to resort to the good old standby... the teapot.

I created an array of 10 teapots in max, then attached all of them together and gave them a Torque friendly name. Then I cloned the 10 pot mesh and made it a collision mesh and exported. After about 10 minutes it finally exported and I launched TSE. I tried to load it but TSE stopped painting the screen. I was getting the same results as when I tried my more complex model earlier (Which I let run for 2 hours just to see what would happen) so I was about to hit alt-f4 when to my surprise the model actually showed up.

At first the frame rate wasn't bad. But as soon as you walk into the bounding box that quickly changes. And the 3rd image is there just to prove that the collision against the player object works. (vehicles and crossbolts don't work).





So if you ever wondered, do I need to use DIF's, the answer is technically No, but realistically Yes. In case you're wondering these tests were done on a Radeon 9600 series on a P4 3GHz using the latest public TSE head (Milestone 3 I think).