P-152: Virtual World Concept Update 24: Spherical Terrain: Polysoup Collision

I have been working on implementing collision for the Spherical Terrain that I have created. My intention was to build on my previous success with the simple collision box by using a poly list instead. This poly list would be built from the polys that are within a certain radius of the player.

What I am doing, essentially, is creating a “polysoup” collision implementation. Polysoup is where the collision hull is created from the visible mesh of the model. It is essentially a greatly simplified version of the visible mesh. Using combinations of other shapes for collision (Cylinder, Sphere, Box, etc) would not be detailed enough for my purposed.

I have managed to get a list of the polys, although it is not optimal. I am now trying to return this list from the buildConvex Collision function in T3D. However, all of the existing code example that I can see for polysoup in T3D require information or resources that my spherical terrain doesn’t have. They require mesh or shape information that is present in their respective classes, but that my spherical terrain class does not have.

I can’t seem to find a way to return a list of polys or vertices for collision calculations. I am still researching this.