DTS to DTS shadows?

#1 Hi Neil,

Player to DTS shadows can be enabled, but the shadows lay across the DTS object's collision boxes. If the collision boxes are tightly wrapped around the DTS object it looks ok, but interior objects provide much better lighting and shadowing.

-John

#2 So if my building is a DTS and its floor has a collision mesh which lines up perfectly with the visiblemesh, then the wall with a window (4 collision meshes to form a hole) will cast a shadow on it?

#3 Whoops, wrong account (That was me)

#4 That will work, but the problem you'll run into is that Torque's performance drops quickly when you add a lot of collision hulls to DTS objects. Normally it's not too much of a problem because Torque can ignore the object's hulls when the player is outside of the DTS's bounding box, but if you create a DTS room Torque will constantly try to collide the player with all of the collision hulls (the player is always inside the bounding box when in the room).

The handy part of interior objects (besides the light mapping) is that they use a bsp tree for collision, so the player collision is only being calculated against the closest surfaces and not the entire interior.

#5 Yeah, but you lose the polygon soup ability.

#6 That's true. :)

#7 (sorry for the necropost but...)

What about organizing the DTS collision hulls into a BSP tree, either during export or load? They're concaves after all. What would be so ugly about it?

#8 Hi Manoel,

The BSP process heavily carves up geometry even when using simple convex brushes, imagine using a poorly constructed mesh. Also it would require rewriting the DTS collision code and the exporters. For an example of how complicated the DTS collision code would become check out interiorCollision.cc and map2dif (creates the BSP tree).

-John