Spiritus Astrum - Phoenix Game Development

January 4 2015

P-152: Virtual World Concept Update 27: Spherical Terrain: Polysoup Collision Update 3

PhoenixGames Astral Realms, Software and Games, Spiritus Astrum

I have made quite a lot of progress with the collision issues that I have been having, although player collision is still not working. I now believe that the issue lies in a particular variable not being updated on the server.

What I think is happening is that the collision is being detected on the client, and the list of collision polygons is being generated on the client. However, that list of polygons is not being sent properly over the server, and so the server doesn’t have anything to collide with, resulting in no collision.

The collision with objects of the item class probably works because it’s collision system is different, and simpler.

I am currently implementing a solution which I believe will fix this issue.

November 16 2014

P-152: Virtual World Concept Update 14: Spherical Terrain

PhoenixGames Software and Games, Spiritus Astrum

I seem to have reached something of an impasse with my plan to modify T3D’s terrain engine to create a quad cube. I can get the Z axes (The height) working ok, but I can’t modify the X and Y axes, they seem to be tied into the terrain system in a way which I cannot figure out how to modify.

I have spent a lot of time working with the vertex and primitive buffers within the terrain system, but I cannot seem to modify them to accept custom X and Y values. I believe the X and Y values are tied into to the rendering algorithm in some obscure way. I had believed that the system used a simple vertex list, and I could simple change the value of the X and Y points explicitly, but this seems to not be the case.

I was very close to solving this, but it seems that at this stage a rethink is necessary.

In the below images, the generally spherical shape can clearly be seen. The large gaps are where the X any Y axes should be deformed to line up with each other. This is as far as I got with T3D’s terrain system.

I posted a topic HERE on the GarageGames forums about this issue, and received many very informative replies, the information there may be useful to someone else.