Ogre Forums

Hi,

As a few of you may know, I've been working on the Portal Connect Zone Scene Manager (PCZSM) for a little while now. I thought things had progressed enough where I felt like it was worthy of showing, so I made a little video using the test app I cobbled together. You can see the video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdjIFwCk4zw

Please forgive the poor quality - it uses entirely programmer art. However, I think knowledgeable viewers will be happy.

For those of you who don't know what the PCZSM is for, it's a new scene manager which allows seamless transitions between areas which are organized differently (flat, bsp, octree, quadtree, etc.). This allows the user to create scenes which are "mixed". For example, indoors & outdoors...

The scene shown consists of an outdoor terrain (using the same data as the Terrain Sample) and a building ('castle' lol) with several interior rooms. The video switches between regular & wireframe modes in several places to show how things are being rendered (or not). Sorry it's so short, but I was having difficulty with fraps (my first time doing any video capture using fraps).

I hope to release the source code (as an Ogre Addon?) "soon"...

Comments are welcome (but please keep in mind this is my first Ogre project and I am sensitve..

Chaster

Wow that is awesome!

All your hard work is paying off! Make sure to tell us when there is some code to play with.

KungFooMasta

Very interesting and promissing!

!!! it's just a Wwwwoooowwww!!!1
looks like it's completely ready for use! nice work!

Wow, really really nice work, keep on going!!

Yeah, this is most impressive! I've been following your progress in the discussion thread lately, and seems you've got something incredibly useful for everyone!

Crytek has now open-source competitors

Congrats, honestly

Nice work. I'm really excited about these new scene managers that people are making lately.

looking great!

what are the next features your planning to add?

Excellent.
I will definitively use it as this is exactly what I need!

Excellent! I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say we really appriciate your work. Ogre needs a new scene manager to replace the aging BSP one, and it looks like you stuff is perfect.

Assuming it goes well, is it intended for integration into Ogre at some point? Like 1.6 or 2.0?

Wow, that looks really good! I'm definitely going to use this in my game engine if possible (I was planning on writing my own portal system, but if this works out I won't have to )

This is great! Nice addition to the scene manager list. Hope you manage to release a stable version soon so we can all start tinkering with it. Good job!

Chris Jones wrote:looking great!

what are the next features your planning to add?

Well, mostly missing functionality..

Right now, I haven't even tested scene queries, so that's definitely on the "todo" list..

Also, I have not delved into the Ogre lighting system yet, so lights are currently another blank (they technically "work" but I have not done anything to account for portals & zones, so there is quite a bit of work there I'm sure..)

I also have a long list of optimizations which I will need to address eventually...

And of course, the code is a horrible mass of non-annotated, copy-pasted, hacks-in-several-places mush, which I really should clean up, annotate, and generally make presentable..

Technically, it's "usable" right now, but I need to get it a bit more fleshed out before I let you knuckleheads beat it into submission...

Chaster

esuvs wrote:Excellent! I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say we really appriciate your work. Ogre needs a new scene manager to replace the aging BSP one, and it looks like you stuff is perfect.

Assuming it goes well, is it intended for integration into Ogre at some point? Like 1.6 or 2.0?

I hope to get it to a state where it is acceptable for Sinbad to include it in version 1.6.

Then, Tindalos (Ogre 2.0) will probably render it obsolete... Boohoohoo, hooray!

Chaster

If it is obsolete in Ogre 2.0, then I will probably stick to 1.6

Very nice!

Wowie! Fantastic work Chaster. I think this is going to be quite handy for a lot of people.

Amazing keep up the great work Chaster !

woah!

Chaster wrote: Then, Tindalos (Ogre 2.0) will probably render it obsolete... Boohoohoo, hooray!
Chaster

In what way will it become obselete? I don't know much about Tindalos but I'm aware that one of the aims is to allow multple SceneManagers to handle a single scene - which I guess is to connect things like indoor environments and terrain. I know this overlaps slightly with your aims - but Ogre will always need a decent indoor SceneManager. And portal systems seem to have stood the test of time (the original 'Unreal' used them?).

There will probably be quite a bit of work to make this meld with Tindalos, but what you are doing right now is great work. It will certainly make a springboard for creating awesome managers for Tindalos.

I'm not counting on Tindalos coming out any time soon so I'll probably run with this as soon as it's ready.

Wow! That looks really good.

Falagard wrote:I'll probably run with this as soon as it's ready.

And so will I!

While it's fascinating following your progress in the PCZSM development topic, seeing this in action really kicks serious ass!

Hah! Torque and others: We just stole your buzzword! Seemless transitions between indoors and outdoors! Yay!

Thats really cool! Great work!