Mesh Loading

JP · Post by JP » Wed Oct 01, 2008 3:41 pm

I would advise making all your necessary things seperate files and then using IrrEdit to bring them together and loading the resulting .irr file into your game. It's the whole point of IrrEdit and it's a very common practice and saves a lot of time and effort.

It looks like you've got a stack of tyres there on the course. If you then wanted two stacks of types with your approach that would make your .b3d file larger and more complicated with the added tyres but if you used IrrEdit you'd just have one .b3d for one stack of tyres and then place multiple copies of it (multiple nodes) and it would just save on disc space and performance too probably...

If all the polys are in one scene node then they may all have to be rendered every single frame (unless you use something like and oct tree node but they're probably not perfect...). If you've got the tyres as a seperate node to the ground then when the tyres can't be seen by the camera they won't be rendered and you'll get a better frame rate. I'm sure it's find with your current setup of the ground and one stack of tyres but i'm sure you'll add more things around the edges of the track and then that'll just be more stuff that has to be rendered every frame rather than only those bits that are actually visible.

Feel free to do what you want, continue down the difficult path of trying to get the group information out of the single .b3d file, this is just advice that might help you out.

My final comment will be that you seem to be thinking as a modeller rather than a games programmer.

xray · Post by **xray** » Wed Oct 01, 2008 6:17 pm

Ok thanks JP for your comment, I will try the .irr solution!

JP wrote: My final comment will be that you seem to be thinking as a modeller rather than a games programmer.

When you are working alone on a games project than you have to think as a modeller and a programmer... and sometimes you are more to one side than the other.

Acki · Post by **Acki** » Wed Oct 01, 2008 7:10 pm

this reminds me on an idea I have, but not done yet...
the idea is to get all the mesh buffers from a mesh, check what texture is applied to them and create the collision materials (for Newton) depending on the texture the mesh buffer has...
I had this idea when I created my own maps for "Tactical Ops"...
the editor (basically the UT editor) does it the same way, you assign materials to the textures...

Halifax · Post by **Halifax** » Wed Oct 01, 2008 10:40 pm

Acki wrote:this reminds me on an idea I have, but not done yet...
the idea is to get all the mesh buffers from a mesh, check what texture is applied to them and create the collision materials (for Newton) depending on the texture the mesh buffer has...

Yeah, that would be beneficial. It's like a unified material system. I did this as well, but also included sounds with the materials.

Acki · Post by **Acki** » Wed Oct 01, 2008 10:59 pm

Halifax wrote:but also included sounds with the materials.

right, I forgot to mention this, I also thought about this...

(the UT editor does this as well)

dlangdev · Post by **dlangdev** » Wed Oct 01, 2008 11:39 pm

Acki wrote:
Halifax wrote:but also included sounds with the materials.
right, I forgot to mention this, I also thought about this...
(the UT editor does this as well)

Acki: Do you use the UT editor (UnrealEd) T3D or UTM file format? Just wondering. I'm looking for the spec, maybe you can send it to me. I want to play around with UnrealEd sometime later.

Thanks.

Acki · Post by **Acki** » Thu Oct 02, 2008 1:06 am

dlangdev wrote:Do you use the UT editor (UnrealEd) T3D or UTM file format? Just wondering. I'm looking for the spec, maybe you can send it to me. I want to play around with UnrealEd sometime later.

I used "TO:AoT Ed 2.0" (year 2002), it's UnrealEd with modifications for "Tactical Ops - Assault on Terror"...
The map format (extension) is "UNR"...
Unfortunately I have no spec for it, but I know how to create everything that's possible, I just need to dig it out from the deep of my head !!!

but remember I know this all for "TO:AoT", so if you want to create maps for another game, then for sure there are other actors that I don't know...
but the basics should be the same, anyways...

so if you need help with it then feel free to ask me via eMail !!!

xray · Post by **xray** » Thu Oct 02, 2008 3:24 pm

JP wrote: I would advise making all your necessary things seperate files and then using IrrEdit to bring them together and loading the resulting .irr file into your game. It's the whole point of IrrEdit and it's a very common practice and saves a lot of time and effort.

I tried this but without success. First I saved all meshes out of giles to seperate b3d files and loaded them into irrEdit. But first thing ist that they dont appear at the right position as I exported them out of giles. I rechecked them seperately in giles to make sure the position was exported right, and they did. Second problem is that when I want to load the exported .irr scene into irrlicht, it crashes with the error "file format seems to be unsupported"

By the way to my actual question, if the mesh buffer is limited to an amount of vertices?

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Thu Oct 02, 2008 4:00 pm

Yes, the current stable SDK is limited to 65535 vertices per buffer.
You have to load the .irr file via loadScene, check tutorial 15.

JP · Post by JP » Thu Oct 02, 2008 4:16 pm

yeah smgr->loadScene to load the .irr file.

when you load things into irredit it often chooses seemingly arbitrary positions to place them rather than at the origin but each model can then be positions by moving it around with the mouse (grab the axes arrows on it and move) or by setting its position in the properties tab. If you've exported them from giles in specific locations then i guess you can just set all their positions to 0,0,0 and they'll all line up nicely, if not then just rearrange them as necessary!

xray · Post by **xray** » Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:28 pm

Ok thanks, I will try this. But one more question: when I loaded the .irr file over loadScene, how can I access to a specific node ? for example the asphalt street or something else...

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Thu Oct 02, 2008 10:13 pm

Give the separate nodes a distinct name in the .irr file, then you can access the nodes via the name. If you want to enumerate all nodes loaded and do somethign with kinds of nodes check tutorial 15 (in SVN/trunk) which shows how to do stuff with .irr files. Also in SVN/trunk we have a new callback method which is called after a new node is loaded, so you can check each node for certain properties already on load.