khasra
02-02-2007 00:33:35
Alright, I've been reading the forums, wiki, and playing around with using PLSM2 for a little while now. And for some reason, I can't seem to find a straight answer on this, so it's probably either right under my nose, or not possible (easily anyways).
I'd like to make my game have a very, very large map without loading between areas, and thus PLSM2 is perfect for terrain. However, on the map there are of course lots of trees, plants, bushes, buildings, cities, npcs/mobs, etc... basically objects with meshes attached to them. And I can't have all of those objects from the entire world loaded at once (I don't think anyways).
So would the best way to go about this be "Paging" the scene as well as the terrain? Does PLSM2 support this in anyway (including some work from my end -- like telling it to unload all objects not in that area? would I have to load all objects first?)? Or is it possible to attach custom objects with meshes associated with them to the terrain pages? Or would I have to go about making a big scene of my objects, and split it up somehow in coordination with the mapsplitter tool?
I have a feeling that this is what GOOF is for... but would it be easy enough to implement that on my own since GOOF is not yet finished?
And finally, is there a preferred map editor out there that people use for this sort of thing? GOOFed? Or would it be easiest, to say, use FreeWorld3d, export the terrain as a terrain and get it set up with PLSM2, then export everything else, and get it set up as a dotscene, then split that myself somehow? Or is that a LOT of work? I'm willing to work/code to do this, but I'm not a master of octrees or anything.
Thanks any/all who respond!
EDIT: I just thought of this, and maybe this is the way to go about it. I make a scene with all my custom objects, and load them all into the game at startup, but don't load their meshes/textures yet. When I load my pages with PLSM2, I'll load the appropriate meshes/textures that are located in that area, by keeping track of all objects with an STL map or something, and unload the meshes/textures as the page unloads.
And as for wandering NPCs, I'll just make sure I never have the AI make the NPC walk into a different tile/page/whatever. All I'll need then is some sort of global coordinate system (if one doesn't exist already), that I can correspond each page to. Is it obvious I'm a noob yet?
I'd like to make my game have a very, very large map without loading between areas, and thus PLSM2 is perfect for terrain. However, on the map there are of course lots of trees, plants, bushes, buildings, cities, npcs/mobs, etc... basically objects with meshes attached to them. And I can't have all of those objects from the entire world loaded at once (I don't think anyways).
So would the best way to go about this be "Paging" the scene as well as the terrain? Does PLSM2 support this in anyway (including some work from my end -- like telling it to unload all objects not in that area? would I have to load all objects first?)? Or is it possible to attach custom objects with meshes associated with them to the terrain pages? Or would I have to go about making a big scene of my objects, and split it up somehow in coordination with the mapsplitter tool?
I have a feeling that this is what GOOF is for... but would it be easy enough to implement that on my own since GOOF is not yet finished?
And finally, is there a preferred map editor out there that people use for this sort of thing? GOOFed? Or would it be easiest, to say, use FreeWorld3d, export the terrain as a terrain and get it set up with PLSM2, then export everything else, and get it set up as a dotscene, then split that myself somehow? Or is that a LOT of work? I'm willing to work/code to do this, but I'm not a master of octrees or anything.
Thanks any/all who respond!
EDIT: I just thought of this, and maybe this is the way to go about it. I make a scene with all my custom objects, and load them all into the game at startup, but don't load their meshes/textures yet. When I load my pages with PLSM2, I'll load the appropriate meshes/textures that are located in that area, by keeping track of all objects with an STL map or something, and unload the meshes/textures as the page unloads.
And as for wandering NPCs, I'll just make sure I never have the AI make the NPC walk into a different tile/page/whatever. All I'll need then is some sort of global coordinate system (if one doesn't exist already), that I can correspond each page to. Is it obvious I'm a noob yet?