Development Blog

So if the skinning is done in the CPU... Will a raycast be able to hit the mesh in its animated location/orientation? Rather than just hitting the original non skinned mesh like it currently does in LE2

So if the skinning is done in the CPU... Will a raycast be able to hit the mesh in its animated location/orientation? Rather than just hitting the original non skinned mesh like it currently does in LE2

Raycasts are performed on a BSP structure that is generated from a triangle mesh, to make them fast. Dynamically recreating the BSP structure would make performance very slow. I could step through testing triangles one at a time, which would be faster but still slow, but I anticipate using GPU skinning in the high-end renderer, so I think that would be a bad idea.

 

However, you can attach hit boxes in the editor pretty easily in the editor, save the model as a prefab, and then reuse it.

at least in LE3 it sounds like the characters wont have this annoying phy body of the character following it around since we will now have control over when/if the phy body gets created...

I see that makes sense.

 

My problem currently is that I have an automatic door/gate class and my gates are actually animated instead of hard coded moving of sliding doors. I did this so that I could have multiple different types of doors/gates running off.the same class without harcoding each type of door. However, because the BSP structure doesn't update with animation my camera object avoidance always screws up when I go through a gate. Maybe if I just change the entity type of.the gate when it is opened so the camera raycasts aren't affected by it... Sounds like a good possibility

at least in LE3 it sounds like the characters wont have this annoying phy body of the character following it around since we will now have control over when/if the phy body gets created...

 

Yes this is good. I hate how I have a character controller with a mesh parented to it and then another physics box parented to that when you use LoadModel.

Animation and skinning don't have to go together. You should only use skinning for organic shapes that need it.

I got animation working and now I am optimizing. The weighting uses a single mat4 * vec3 operation. I'm optimizing now, and I've got an 8400 poly mesh weighting 10 times in 9 milliseconds, which is faster than I expected.

Lol, I got it down to 4-5 msecs. C++ is fun to optimize.

Okay, so with 8400 polys and four bones per vertex, the crawler model skins in 0-1 milliseconds. That's plenty fast.

1000 FPS now in my test.