Make a hole in the ground?

[Yue]

Hi, I need to know if it is possible to make a hole in the ground. The idea is that you need to create a shelter beneath the surface of Mars, and I need to remove some of the ground to create an access inside the shelter.

Any suggestions?

Or in such a case when this inside hide the ground, is that possible?

[Crazycarpet]

Making an actual hole in the terrain would be getting pretty complicated. (if possible at all in Leadwerks.)

However if you simply want to hide the terrain while you're in a "hole" you could simply have another World and use World::SetCurrent to switch to a terrain-less world.

There was a thread a while back where people discussed the issues of trying to hide terrain via code, one issue being that if you disable collision on the terrain, all the entities in the world are going to fall! the other being that LE's renderer seems to forcefully draw the terrain regardless of whether or not it's hidden... now there are definitely ways to force it to not be rendered, but the world method is probably your best bet.

[Yue]

 

The idea of loading another world, is not that it is very flashy, loading times each time you out and enter the shelter.

[karmacomposer]

What you are asking for is called voxel terrain.  Leadwerks does not have voxel terrain.

You COULD create a ground plane and then programmatically perform a CSG substraction for the hole (not sure if you can perform editor function in code).

But what you are really looking for is voxel terrain - which allows you to add or subtract terrain through the use of blobs - not to be confused with minecraft, which is a blocky version of voxel editing.  There are engines and tools to create voxel terrain, but only an engine would allow you to terraform in realtime.

For Unity:

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/8131

VoxelFarm:

http://www.voxelfarm.com/index.html

We can ask Josh if he can implement VoxelFarm into Leadwerks - right now it's available for Unity and Unreal out of the box and it does have a SDK.

That's about it - there are a LOT of solutions for Unity, but none for Leadwerks.  I, for one, would LOVE to see voxels implemented in Leadwerks.

Mike

[Rick]

There is a shader around that let's you hide a section of the terrain. This was generally done at design time so I'm not 100% sure if you can do it at run-time. It would also create a circle patch and would look strange. You would probably fake this in various ways to make it look good but in general LE doesn't do this very well.

[Yue]

The idea was to create an elevator to go down to the shelter .... it seems that I will have to think of something else. It could be the best thing to enter the refuge when the player teleports below the section of the terrain. This would imply giving it a lower position in the same room that will be in two parts, one above the ground and one below the ground.
 

[gamecreator]

The elevator going down to the shelter is absolutely doable without a hole in the terrain.  Once the elevator doors close, you can teleport the player and elevator to any location and just visually make it look like it's going down or up inside.  This is assuming the camera is in the elevator while it's "moving" and that the elevator doesn't have glass to look outside.

[karmacomposer]

Actually, the elevator would be a level or you could use LE's excellent world builder to create a very large vertical shaft and then drop it very slowly to make it seem to go farther than it actually is.  You could use animated textures to also give the illusion of travelling down.  The shelter could be at the bottom.  If you want rocky walls, there are cave construction kits that have this in a modular fashion.

Look at www.arteria3d.com for excellent modular kits for Leadwerks.

Mike