Tunnels through terrain!

#41 You could make some DTS objects (rocks and stuff) to plug the gaps, or even make some pseudo-terrain DTS's?

EDIT: typos

#42 The terrain block is always square.

You have to make some sort of border around your hole if you want a smaller tunnel.

May I suggest you create a dif or dts object, texture it with a screen shot of the terrain before you dig the hole so it looks like it's part of the terrain.

It would be nice if it was possible to subdivide specific terrain tiles so you could set portions of it to empty, but that would add a lot more complications to collision detection.

#43 Torque levels can feel huge when using the method Lyle describes.
A level with many, many, many interiors using portals and zones can render incredibly fast on a client machine.
At first it just feels like a fairly large terrain with a city on it, but there are these little tunnels everywhere... ;)

Ari

#44 This is a screenshot of some funtionality testing I did awhile back.
You might recognize the content packs used to demonstrate this. :)
Notice that the tower is mostly underground.
In the top portion of the tower there are slots in the floor that can see into the bottom.
The bottom was able to see up into the top of the tower (under the terrain), but you couldn't see down into the bottom because of the terrain.
This is where the showTerrainInside property helped me, I could then see down into the bottom.
The only trouble was, shooting down into the bottom of the tower was impossible because the collision was still there.
That is why I think set clear is better.
Using DTSs, scaling your interior, or designing the interior for a square hole and use set clear and adjust height on the terrain is the best method I think.


Ari

#45 Oh yea that's what im talkin about.

Btw how come we can't add in some brush size below 1? Is it a fixed unit of something? Can't we do .5 .1
and get something besides just a square?

#46 I know the current limit is 1 unit. What I am saying is that I think this could be modified in the source
to give a smaller brush or "mini brush" for hole making. Remember that the Torque in game tools are
not fixed in stone somewhere. They can be improved. Do I have the skill to do it? Nope.
But I know it can be done.

#47 Actually Randy, I think the whole 1 thing refers to the number of Polys the brush is effecting.
So to do 0.5 you would have to modify the terrain renderer.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong here please.

#48 That makes sense. You don't have to use my full title. That's too formal.

Still may be a way. Maybe with Atlas. Have you seen the Cave thread in the TSE private forum?

Edit: Ok about the legacy terrain. Then can we reduce the poly size? What if you just wanted a smaller zone
with lot of caves instead of something big?

#49 I have used the set empty to make a cave and I'm having difficulties with a few things.

I used contructor to build my cave and retextured everything and added rocks on the dif (actually in constructor) to fill in the gap. Fits fine; looks good. When I enter my "cave" under the terrain, it has its own fog. Also, it seems to make Torque run really slow. Like its doing some heavy duty processing. If I relight the scene, it might crash, or it might just act like it locked up for a while. Also, my fxLights inside the cave don't work. None of these issues effect my other difs, only the cave.

Another problem I've just started having is with constructor. Maybe a good subject for a different thread, but I noticed it when I added my rocks to the dif so I could fill in the gap on the terrain from the set empty. The rocks have no collision detection. Maybe my whole problem is from exporting my dif wrong (a setting or something I missed).

Has any one else ran into these issues pertaining to "caves", or have any suggestions to solve my little problem?

Any advice is greatly appreciated.
J.

#50 I had a similar problem, after re-adding a Constructor-changed interior (that acted like a cave), it would add fine. I could even force it to relight the scene When I left TGE, and reentered, it would crash.

When I went back in with a debug version of the TGE.exe (recompiling it from Visual Studio), same thing would happen, but I'd get a popup saying there were some memory out of bounds errors. I could hit 'Ignore' a hundred times, and it would eventually just run through the entire scene relight and be perfectly fine after that on all future reloads.

I started trying to identify what the engine bug was, but eventually gave up for now as I had a workaround that got the job done.

Hope it helps someone.

#51 Digging through this now too, got a basement to work fine, but if i try to do caves crashing out as well

#52 The torque game demo ARCTIC STUD uses underground Railroad Tunnels to allow players to quickly traverse from one side of the world map to the other. The Tunnels appear to be straightforward quark objects, the interior lighting is realistc, and it looks like they made the entrances oversized (i.e., big concrete structures) to mask the holes made by the "set clear" (...just Guessing, tho).

However, now that I'm thinking about it, it probably uses the older terrain format (Torque1.4?)