very large worlds and dynamic content generation with Torque 3D
by David Calkins · in General Discussion · 07/22/2010 (9:22 pm) · 1 replies
1) Its been awhile since I looked into using Torque. IIRC, at the time it was oriented towards putting everything being in "levels". If I want to, for example, have a sci-fi game with a very large universe, can Torque 3D handle this? Or am I forced to partition the universe into small "levels"?
2) I see there's a world editor included, however, I'm considering dynamically generating my world. Is that feasible? Or am I forced into using a world editor to make a static world in which to experience my game? Any tools to recommend for dynamic world generation? Note that by dynamic I mean on the end-user's system when they're running the game.
2) I see there's a world editor included, however, I'm considering dynamically generating my world. Is that feasible? Or am I forced into using a world editor to make a static world in which to experience my game? Any tools to recommend for dynamic world generation? Note that by dynamic I mean on the end-user's system when they're running the game.
About the author
Torque Owner J.P. Berry
To add a little info on to your questions:
1. You could do either.. However there are limitations in both using multiple, zoned 'missions' (what torque calls 'levels') and just using one, very large mission.
- for very large missions, you run into the problem of 'jitters'. Players, for example, will have jittery movement once they get very far away from the mission, due to the floating point restrictions built into the engine. You could either increase these values, or what would probably be better (imo), is to just scale all of your objects down to make use of the data that's already there. Now, I did this a long time ago for a 3d space shooter, and it's not as easy as it sounds. It just takes a lot of initial tweaking to get things to feel right.
Also keep in mind that Torque does not support paging terrain or any sort of 'streaming' information, at least that I'm aware of.
2. Dynamically generating your world/mission wouldn't be very hard at all, at least assuming that you mean procedurally generating the world objects through code. Such as the random generated levels in Nethack, for example. But maybe I don't quite get what you're after.
The level/mission editor is really just a graphical interface that builds .mis files for you. The .mis files are basically text files that contains coordinates, properties, etc. of the world. So, instead of using the world editor to build your .mis file, you could just write some code that builds that file for you.
Lastly, keep in mind that Torque has some pretty badass tools that have really evolved over the years. Shape / image replicators could really come in handy for what you're looking for, and are much more efficient than 'hand-placing' a bunch of objects .