Plan for Mike Nelson

GravRally tech thus far (DTS objects)

I've been coding on GravRally since the very beginning of the project for 21-6.

It's been a cool learning experience. It's fun to start doing some wild tech stuff after getting solid TGE experience on Orbz.

I've been coding physics for the bikes, and doing some updates to the DTS objects, along with some other things. In order to support having the bikes ride directly on the surface of them and to fog correctly for very large DTS's.

I'll talk about the bike physics more in another .plan but I'd like to talk about the DTS stuff that I've been doing since I think it is timely for the soon to be released Torque Shader Engine (TSE).

Getting the bikes to ride directly on the surface of DTS's was done by updating their collision to support convex rather than concave collision to get more detailed collision info in the engine. Note this is very slow for DTS's with a lot of triangles in the collision mesh but it works fairly well. As far as I can tell this is a basic limitation of convex collision meshes. There may be a way to get a convex hull system going that may speed it up for some types of objects that have triangle faces that have parallel planes on the same surface, but I'm not sure how much speed that would get for this application.

Fogging a large DTS was interesting because normally TGE assumes that DTS's will be pretty small so it fogs the entire object with the same fog level (the fog level that the .getPosition() of the object is). So when you have a long DTS object like a road that spans out ahead of you into the distance the entire object is fogged for the amount that you'd expect the middle of the road to be fogged at. This can look odd for sure because this is not the way that DTS's where meant to be used. You'll have a scene with it getting more foggy in the distance while the entire surface of the road is all looking like a flat grey tone over the texture.

Clark at BraveTree gave us some much needed advice on this. I think the story goes -- correct me if I'm wrong -- is that support proper for fogging of DTS's for large objects was almost there when DTS's for TGE was built it just didn't get into the engine because it wasn't required at the time. He said to look at the way that interiors are fogged because they handle this better and apply that to the DTS's. The short story is that I got it working but it took a bit of reworking in DTS object classes to get it working without breaking it engine and trying not to break it for some video cards.

It will be cool to see the new rendering structure of TSE and how it may affect this rendering issue with DTS objects. If we're super lucky this issue will just go away with TSE. Or maybe we can just shade around the issue for the newer cards.