Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Status Update

I decided to put the area stuff on hold for a while. The update was becoming too heavy, and I need to revise my plan of attack, and probably just simplify few things too.

I'm thinking about dropping the statNavMesh and just keeping the tileNavMesh and add helper functions to make the use similar as using the statmesh. It is already quite tedious to keep different generation processes as well as runtimes up to date when a new feature is added. In the same vain, I was thinking about to only use the monotone area partitioning. As it is way simpler than the watershed partitioning code, it is much easier to add new features to it, such as making it aware of the areas.

The current SVN version has several fixes which should make Recast to compile on Linux and 64bit systems. There's a couple of good bug fixes there too, which were kindly pointed to me by August Gustavsson. One was in the tile navmesh path finder and another was crash in the border vertex remove process.

The detail mesh has raised its hairy head again. The Delaunay triangulation algorithm I used to generate the triangles for the detail mesh does not always create a mesh which includes the convex hull of the points. Some of the Delaunay triangulators I have used in the past do that, though. I have tried a couple of alternative methods, but the ones which create the necessary convex hull usually create extra vertices along the tesselated edges or they crash in some sliver triangles. Do I just hate triangulations.

I will try to see if I can hack some sort of constraining code for the outer edges by flipping few triangles around after the triangulation so that removing the super triangle will not eat the useful triangles away.

I will fix the detail mesh edge vertex explosion on radius zero, too.

1 comment:

  1. I think pulling back to a single generation mechanism and simplifying the partitioning is a good idea. Put all the effort into making 1 great system rather than trying to support several significantly different systems. I would hope however that there might be some helper functions added to ease the tiled generation, like building tiles out of 1 larger heightmap. :)

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