First showing - the new Portal Connected Zone Scene Manager

Post by **sinbad** » Tue May 15, 2007 10:48 pm

Looking really good.

Bear in mind I have a personal interest in using this at some point in the future, so provided it turns out well (and it's looking that way) I'll make sure it survives the 2.0 transition, whenever that happens.

Chaster · Post by **Chaster** » Tue May 15, 2007 11:20 pm

You know, I've always kind of thought of myself as just a "lone ranger" type of guy who just did things to make myself happy, but I have to admit, a couple of "slaps on the back" for encouragement really does help. Thanks everyone.

Chaster

Evak · Post by **Evak** » Wed May 16, 2007 4:43 am

well the video shows awesome potential

. I too have been watching the thread for a couple of months, was surprised when I looked at the early posts and saw how old it was.

It's really nice that you have made so much progress and look well on the way to achieving your goals

Ajare · Post by **Ajare** » Wed May 16, 2007 8:33 am

Damn you, I'm going to have to scrap my current project and start a new one using this scene manager now!

Would you like an, ahem, better scene to show it off? This has got to be worthy of an official Ogre demo, and I still have to fulfil my promise to improve the demo art work.

edit: had a brainlapse and forgot I'm away fom my machine for some time, but the offer stands if you don't mind waiting a little.

Post by **Jabberwocky** » Wed May 16, 2007 8:50 pm

Hey Chaster,

I'm just adding my voice to the chorus of "WooHoos!"

This SceneManager patches up one of the most serious remaining issues facing Ogre game development. Sinbad made a great call using a plug-in scene manager scheme, and it's totally cool that you're building on that to make Ogre better for everyone.

Chaster · Post by **Chaster** » Wed May 16, 2007 10:25 pm

Ajare wrote:Damn you, I'm going to have to scrap my current project and start a new one using this scene manager now!

Would you like an, ahem, better scene to show it off? This has got to be worthy of an official Ogre demo, and I still have to fulfil my promise to improve the demo art work.

edit: had a brainlapse and forgot I'm away fom my machine for some time, but the offer stands if you don't mind waiting a little.

Seriously? I will take you up on that offer! The only artist I currently have available to me who will do "free" artwork isn't really available until sometime in September. If you are willing to produce some free artwork, I am more than happy to put it in the demo.

E-mail me direct (ericcATxenopiDOTcom).

Chaster

q2dm1 · Post by **q2dm1** » Sun May 27, 2007 12:05 am

Hey folks,

This is the first time I really take the step and try an engine I haven't written myself

- I have to admit tough that I wouldn't probably have given Ogre much tought if it weren't for this new scene manager you're writing. I considered coding one myself, but one of the reasons for me to look for a 3rd party engine was that I didn't really want to reinvent the wheel once again and reimplement "basic" stuff like that.

Anyways, there's one issue which IMO hasn't been discussed thoroughly yet - I hope I haven't overlooked that in the discussion thread - and this is the actual asset creation.

From my understanding your zones don't really have a geometrical representation, they just hold a list of references to objects contained in them.

Now, if you create a given map you set your portals to whatever locations you choose; I assume those are created in 3d max or Maya or whatever and then exported to whatever world format Ogre uses. Two questions:

1. How does one create a relation between world geometry and zones?
2. How do you assign a portal to a zone?

Now if one just relies on some hierarchical textual represantation, for example tagging every world object with the name of the zone it belongs to I can assure you this is VERY counterproductive. Having designed some (incomplete) maps myself, I'm used to just having a graphical representation of my zones and portals and leave the rest to the engine (or an exporter).

The best way (IMO) to do this is to use a subtractive CSG editor (much like Unreal's), I even imlpemented portal support in Q3Radiant so it's more intuitive for the artists I was working with back then.

I know this might sound a bit unrelated

(and there's a good chance I miss something), but I think you really should consider adding some convex bounds to your zones... The SM can then automatically assign any world geometry to the aproppriate zone.

Chaster · Post by **Chaster** » Sun May 27, 2007 9:52 am

Q2DM1 (nice nick by the way...) to answer your questions:

1) The creation of the scenes (zones, portals, geometry) is up to the application, not the scene manager. Consequently, there could be an infinite number of ways for an application to get data into the scene. I have my own ideas for my own application, but it's for my use.

2) Most of your questions have to do with art pipeline (in particular, level editing). That's kind of outside of the SM. The SM has very easy to use calls to create zones, define portals, and place geometry/entities/etc. in the proper zones. It's up to the app to decide how to get that information from the artists/level designers.

Hope that clarifies things a bit.

Chaster

q2dm1 · Post by **q2dm1** » Sun May 27, 2007 12:32 pm

Yeah, I kinda suspected this... Thinking about it, it seems logical to have a clean nice interface and have the application feed it with whatever it decides.

I guess when your SM matures a bit and the Ogre people decide to integrate it as an inherent part of the engine time will be right to think about a standardized map format.

I don't want to push you, but I'm wondering if there's any chance of "pre-releasing" the source, so people who are merely interested in the provided API (like me) and don't really need a clean, well commented

codebase can start thinking about ways of integrating it into existing toolchains... It doesn't matter if the light code (or whatever) is broken as long as it correctly computes the zone visibility.

Paulov · Post by **Paulov** » Sun May 27, 2007 12:49 pm

Hey!!

I liked a lot! very nice!

rojaro · Post by **rojaro** » Sun May 27, 2007 5:30 pm

I want it

Chaster · Post by **Chaster** » Tue May 29, 2007 7:08 pm

q2dm1 wrote: I don't want to push you, but I'm wondering if there's any chance of "pre-releasing" the source, so people who are merely interested in the provided API (like me) and don't really need a clean, well commented codebase can start thinking about ways of integrating it into existing toolchains... It doesn't matter if the light code (or whatever) is broken as long as it correctly computes the zone visibility.

Soon. I will most likely post a ZIP file instead of sourceforging it. Once it reaches a *relatively* stable point, I will switch it over to Ogre addons hosting/source control...

Chaster · Post by **Chaster** » Fri Jun 01, 2007 12:56 am

Announcement : I will be releasing the "Pre-alpha" version of this scene manager (along with simple demo) within 24 hours.

Watch this thread (http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6658) for more information.

Chaster

Post by **Falagard** » Fri Jun 01, 2007 1:23 am

Nice!

Xypher · Post by **Xypher** » Fri Jun 01, 2007 6:19 am

*squeals like a schoolgirl* this is fantastic!

*applauds*

Walley · Post by **Walley** » Fri Jun 01, 2007 4:26 pm

Nice to see good progress in this area, great work

.

Zeal · Post by **Zeal** » Sat Jun 02, 2007 5:00 am

Nice work my friend. People like you make me proud to be an Ogre user.

Chaster · Post by **Chaster** » Sat Jun 02, 2007 6:08 am

It just occurred to me, after reading my last post, that it could be misinterpreted to say "watch THIS thread (the Showcase thread) for announcement".

What I meant was, watch the thread in the Developer's forum for more announcements.

I released the pre-alpha of the PCZSM today. Go to the other thread for details.

Chaster

tau · Post by **tau** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 4:29 am

Awesome job, Chaster! It already looks quite "feature rich".

I have a question, I'm not very gfx savvy, so plz bear with me

When the manager switches between scenes (terrain, room), what kind of algorithm is used to render the room, is it BSP, or octree?

deficite · Post by **deficite** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 7:16 am

Is anybody planning on making this available to python users (via swig or whatever)?

Chaster · Post by **Chaster** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 3:53 pm

tau wrote:Awesome job, Chaster! It already looks quite "feature rich".

I have a question, I'm not very gfx savvy, so plz bear with me
When the manager switches between scenes (terrain, room), what kind of algorithm is used to render the room, is it BSP, or octree?

Well, in the test scene, the interior rooms are just rendered using the "default" method which is brute force. The rooms are quite small, so it makes sense in this scene. Of course, you can make a room using octree, but that would probably actually slow down the rendering of this scene since the rooms are just single meshes with but a few dozen polys.

There are currently 3 types of zone available:

Default (flat hierarchy)
Octree
Terrain (same algorithm as TerrainSM).

I have not implemented BSP since I believe that the Default zone implementation for multiple rooms connected by portals will actually be faster than a BSP on modern GPU's.

Chaster

Post by **jacmoe** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 5:22 pm

Did you test against the DotSceneOctree scene manager?

Chaster · Post by **Chaster** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 7:25 pm

jacmoe wrote:Did you test against the DotSceneOctree scene manager?

Nope. I don't have an artist on hand to help me so I had to make all the data by myself (and I don't know any of the major 3d packages) so I used ManualObject (gah!)... Please, feel free to test & compare with the other scene managers (and report the results!)

Chaster