Interiors

#1 You mean that you want an entire level inside a mansion, but not outside? you can do that. Put the playerspawn inside, delete the terrain and sun so it wont slow the rendering down, and outside the mansion that the player doesn't see, texture those faces a solid color. This should improve speed.

#2 BTW welcome to the forums

#3 Thanx for the welcome. And what i'm looking to do is like Silent Hill's hotel, school, or hospital levels. Where you as the player enter the building, and have to complete certain things in the building and then exiting to go to the next place?

#4 Ummm... sure? That's all a matter of how much coding and art you can make, doesn't have much specific to do with any engine. Though Torque's interior renderer is probably too crummy to make a game based around interiors without an upgrade like the Lighting Pack or some other modifications.

#5 Well, what are the modifications you recommend to pull this off?

#6 Marvin not only is this kind of game possible, but a game without terrain will also get a considerable speed boost. understand you have two general choices for filetypes for doing interiors: dif or dts. if you require very detailed and complex collision with your game environment(things like staircases), youll benefit from using dif. the tradeoff is youll have to use an awkward bsp map editor like quark for creating your environment. if you dont require pinpoint accurate collision with all the walls and floors, you could use dts for your environment. you can create a dts environment in a standard 3d modeling app like max or milkshape which makes environment building a bit easier. the tradeoff here is that dts collision is not optimized and is somewhat slow. the optimal solution would be a mixture of the two; using dts to easily create the "look" of your environment, and using invisible dif objects for player collision.

#7 Oh okay that makes perfect sense. thanks a million!

#8 @Sean: Be warned that I've run into various odd behavior on missions without terrains. I've been using the Invisible Terrain modifications instead, and that was the answer to my problems.

Invisible DIF objects? I hadn't even considered that option! Time to do a little experimenting. =)

#9 I would be interested in hearing about any problems with not using a terrain, as this has been an integral part of our game since V12 and to now with TSE, and I've yet to see a problem with it.

#10 Oh okay that makes perfect sense. thanks a million!

#11 Wow it posted my post twice without me being in the room for the seond one lol. So has anyone else considered the interior option or has most just shoved their games outside cause its easier to get on with the gaming? Just curious now that i've been informed it can be done lol.

#12 @Stefan: I'm using TLK 1.4. When the terrain was removed, I wound up with bizarre collision problems; the players would sink partway through DIF floors and the framerate went to hell. It happened under TLK and the virgin TGE 1.4 build, but not under the latest CVS. The original thread I posted is here. I still haven't isolated the cause, but restoring the terrain -- invisible or otherwise -- was the cure.

@Marvin: My original design was solely indoors: it's set inside a space station. However, when I realized that you can't nest portalled interiors (buildings inside of buildings), I changed tactics and made the hull of the station into a transparent DTS. With the space skybox showing through the glassy walls of the station, I'm very pleased with the results.

There's no reason you can't create a level that's 100% indoors, however. It has the added bonus of portals to speed up your framerate.