Plan for Stefan Beffy Moises

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Steven Jackson   (May 15, 2004 at 14:53 GMT)   Resource Rating: 5

This is looking excellent, keep up the good work. My personal preference would be texture painting or using your blocker thing from the editor - heightmaps have always been a pain for me to make :)

John \"Johnny Action\" Aho   (May 15, 2004 at 18:00 GMT)

The texture painting sounds best to me.

Ben Garney   (May 15, 2004 at 18:33 GMT)

Perhaps you could do a raycast at the center of the path to see if it's crossing forbidden territory...

Justin Mette   (May 15, 2004 at 21:55 GMT)   Resource Rating: 5

This is sweet Stefan. As I was reading the post, I was thinking the same thing as Ben; bisect the vector between nodes and cast a ray from that mid-point down to the terrain. I believe you can get at the material information for the collision point (RayInfo struct) and check the texture (I'm pretty sure).

Extending that thought; maybe more than just the mid-point of that vector should be checked because those vectors are kind of long in more open areas of the terrain.

There is some commented out code at the end of AINavGraph::filterLink() which may be useful here. It's the last block of commented code in that function titled "check to see if there is enough room".

I was originally trying out an idea for filtering links based on slope changes between the nodes. That really didnt work out but I left the code in there because I thought it might be useful later down the line.

The code will break up a vector into one unit intervals; casting a ray from each interval location down to the terrian. In this case it checks the distance from that interval point to the terrain, which you won't really need. The code which walks a vector, casting rays to the ground however might be useful.

Anyway, cool stuff. I'm actually going to rate this plan - awe yeah.
Edited on May 15, 2004 21:57 GMT

Stefan Beffy Moises   (May 15, 2004 at 23:16 GMT)

Hehe, thats almost exactly what came to my mind when I was driving to my parent's home tonite for a jam session after I posted this plan... I thought: "I could just check which node is higher, then elevate its z-value even more, lower the other nodes z value and cast a ray from one to the other and check the terrain texture inbetween" :)
But your "walking a vector" and breaking it down to multiple checks is awesome, Justin, gonna try that tomorrow when I'm back home :)
And yeah, I like the terrain texturing best, too, since thats really easy to do :)
thx for your thoughts everyone!

Stefan Beffy Moises   (May 17, 2004 at 05:46 GMT)

Alright, did a few improvements (e.g. the terrain check was failing in some places cause I started the rayscans to near above it) and added a quick check from above the upper node to below the lower node as mentioned above (didnt get the "vector walking" in yet) and the results are really good now:







And of course, you dont have to exclude textures, you can also restrict the navmesh to a certain texture like this:



Sweet! Thanks a lot to Ken C. Finney for this nice tool! :)
Edited on May 17, 2004 05:48 GMT

Stefan Beffy Moises   (May 19, 2004 at 11:48 GMT)

Another update after struggling with some code for a while now...
since we are generating the navgraph on the server only and the process is taking place at the start of the mission loading, unfortumately we can't really use Ken's twSurfaceRef object (since that works entirely client-side and requires the objects being ghosted already etc.)... so I wrote a new object, a SurfaceMarker (based on Ken's stuff) ... you can now add up to 16 of those to each mission (and therefore distinguish between 16 surface types / texture blends) and configure in the navgraph if it should avoid the marked surfaces/textures OR generate Nodes on these surfaces exclusively... it's basically just an invisble marker object which stores the texture information at its position:



Works very well in Multiplayer it seems (gotta test it on a dedicated server still though, but I don't see a problem there either)
Edited on May 19, 2004 11:49 GMT

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