Woobly walls

[svenskmand]

I think that one of the next visual breakthroughs for OD should be woobly walls, even though they look allot better with the current tiles than before, they would look even better if they where more woobly. We could just extend the wall tileset, then there should be no need for new code, right?

At one point we talked about using perlin noise to permute the vertices of the tiles, but as far as I recall Andrew said that it was hard to implement, so how about extending the tileset instead?

[andrewbuck]

Yes, adding the perlin noise would take some doing. Although it would not be terribly difficult it involves accessing the vertex coordinates in the Ogre meshes and I am not sure exactly how to do that. Also, there may be quite a lot of overhead involved since I think right now Ogre can use the same mesh over and over whereas if we distort the tiles they would all be unique meshes that it would need to manage.

As far as changing the tileset though that would be quite easy to do. There is a file called Layout.blend that Skorpio has, I think he could upload it to SVN so you have access to it. In there is just a mesh for each tile and they can be modified to look more interesting. If you want to add more tiles than what are currently there (instead of just changing how they look) that can be done as well, I will just need to know what the names are and when they should be used so I can add them to the code base. The way I have the code set up this would be fairly easy to do.

-Buck

[svenskmand]

I will try and see if I can figure out how to do that in Blender

[andrewbuck]

I see that it is already in the SVN directory. If you do change the models for the tiles, keep in mind that we need to keep the polycount as low as possible on the tiles since hundreds of them are onscreen at once. As a result of this we want to do as much as possible by using normal mapping for texture, etc. The meshes themselves should just be the rough shape of what we want them to look like.

That being said, the models that are currently in there are way too blocky, and are just placeholders for the final design. Feel free to make any changes you want to them just keep in mind the above points while you work.

-Buck

[svenskmand]

Yes I will do that I will start by changing the existing tiles and then I will try and make three versions of each to get variation.

[andrewbuck]

Modifying the existing tiles is fine, however I'm not sure I can properly implement your idea of the three versions of each. I don't fully understand what you mean by this, but if what I think you mean is correct then I will not be able too.

-Buck

[svenskmand]

If I make three versions of each tile, then the game should just choose one of the three with uniform probability, I will ensure that the corners are the same but the edges will be different. That should be easy to implement as every time you use one of the old tiles you just randomly pick one of the three versions for that tile.

[andrewbuck]

Ok, if you do that that will work fine, that's actually a pretty good way of doing it. I thought you were going to vary the whole tile but as long as the corners are the same the tiles will work fine.

-Buck

[svenskmand]

I will like a list over which tiles that is going to be put together tough, can make such a thing? This will make it easier to make the walls look nice when placed together.

[andrewbuck]

I don't have a list of tiles specifically. The main thing that the engine does right now pertains to the "corner" tiles that are just cut off on a 45 degree angle. Ultimately if you make a set of tiles which fit together properly in blender, I can make the game engine assemble them in the same way. This leaves you some freedom to experiment and be a bit more creative with your design.

-Buck

[svenskmand]

Ok