Scars of War Dev Blog Update

Updating the Scars of War Dev Blog, Gareth is showing off third party models for buildings, and explaining the work he still had to do on them.
Which is what I have been doing this last week. I have a whole pack of nice house models I bought a while back, very high quality. In fact I thought they would be too high quality, ie that they had too many polygons, but testing I found that torque handled them well, surprisingly well, considering the average model was 4000 polygons, about 4 times more than I aim for when making my own models. But they look really good and even with quite a few in a stage my frame rate stayed above 100 fps. Hell, most of the time it was above 200 fps, only dipping down to about 100 when I had that shiny shader water and bunches of trees in the scene. And this is without adding any LOD to the models, which would decrease the rendering load even further.

So I think I will be using them.problem is they are missing collision meshes. Which means you can walk right through them. Darn.

Now I could fix that by using polysoup collision, a new addition to Torque Game Engine Advanced which uses the model's visible mesh as it's collision mesh. But collision is an expensive calculation and we are talking models that, like I said, average 4k polys. So 4k intersection calculations. Ouch. I'm already increasing the load by using the prettier models, I don't want to go overboard. Older machines still need to be able to play this game.