posted 11-29- 04:31 PM               

Another question: wire's are strung from one object to another - this does not fit in with the parent/child relationship. Is there anyway for me to make the wire disapear when either of the objects it is attached to "Detaches" or is destroyed?

Any other creative solutions? This might be a problem

Thanks!

posted 11-29- 05:00 PM               

i would think that could do it

parent takes some much damage hide wire

posted 11-29- 05:15 PM               

Right now, there's no way for one object to hide or destroy another.

posted 11-30- 06:18 AM               

It did billboard, and depending on what axis I used it changed the way the wire rotated - but I can not think of a way to get the wire to rotate around an axis parallel to the wire's direction - but I'm not sure how this billboard works really.

I made the LOD consist of 1 polygon along the y axis. I then positioned the LOD in OpenPlane Studio to fit between the wing struts - I had to rotate it in both axis to acomplish this.

The wire appears to rotate around an origin that is at the center of the wire LOD as you pan around looking at it.

Right now each wire is a sub-object of some parent - so I'm covered if that parent object gets shot off. The problem comes when the object on the other side if the wire detaches - then the wire floats in space

I might try making all of the wing struts and wires one big LOD - but still if I lose the top or bottom wing you will see the supports stay intact.

It looks like DM for WW1 planes will be hard because of the way planes are built - maybe I need to get more creative.

How about this: I set the wing objects up so that they are children of the struts. Now I set the wings to never detach - just show a damaged texture if they are hit. Now I set the struts to detach if hit. So if the struts get hit, they will break of and the wings will go with them.

Does a wing object have to be a child directly of the main plane object? Or can the main plane object have a child object that holds teh main airfoils? Any other pitfals with this idea? Hmmmm...

If worse comes to worse, I can just model the wires teh way I am now, and set a very close switchin distance. This way you will not usually see the wires hanging in mid-air - but in the cockpit view we will still see them

Also it seems that rendering the wires using a transparent texture looks much better than a long thin LOD. Here is my question then: Would it be better to render the wires as one bog square transparent LOD with the wire painted on it, or a thin skinny lod just bigger than the wire with the wire painted on it?

Because we have so much less going on with WW1 planes, I think we may be able to afford the FPS hit - afterall, we have no complex landing gear, not nearly as many cockpit guages, no canopy, no multiple enginess - and with some better effort, very low poly counts on our LODS (more square shapes)

Thanks for any insight on these issues!

posted 11-30- 09:53 AM               

Just model them as part of the wing. Don't give them their own LOD. Just put them in the same LOD as the wing. That way if the wing detaches, they go with it. Ofcourse, that means you can't use billboarding, but no big deal there.... Billboarding that many wires seems kind of dicey to me.

>Also it seems that rendering the wires using a transparent texture looks much better than a long thin LOD. Here is my question then: Would it be better to render the wires as one bog square transparent LOD with the wire painted on it

Well, like MH said, using all that alpha will impact the frame rate... probably more so for D3D users. I think that is why the canopy reflections on the Zero caused such a slow down in frame rates for some people. The amount of surface area that had to be covered with transparent polygons was very large. The surface area you need to cover-- length and width between the two wings of your plane-- will be even larger, and you'll have to use double sided polys to make the wires visible from front and back. Even then, they won't be visible on edge.

I really think the most elegant solution here is to just carefully model the wires using extruded triangles. SDOE is a very fast engine and can handle surprisingly high poly counts. LODs help even more.

[This message has been edited by JT (edited 11-30-1999).]

posted 11-30- 10:58 AM               

The reason the texture approach looks so much better is anti-aliasing; if I just use a triangle it you see stair steps - especialy because these wires are diagnal.

I think I heard that the next generation video card will do full anti-aliasing. Hmmm...

posted 12-04- 02:49 AM               

1. Sv first off that billboardin aint worth a flip! Allt that does is make the object always point toward the viewer, you gotta make your own cables, or I could make em for ya!

2. Make each cable it's own lod and model.

3. Now make it to where if the bottom wing detaches then detach the wing, but the cable stays connected to the top wing, or vice versa.

4. Make a damage model to where it haves the struts damaged and missing piece and then of course just replace the strut model with the damaged strut model when the wing goes bye bye.

Then of course since the struts are going to be their own models. Then if they take a hit themselves then you can kiss part of the wing goodbye! Not the whole thing. Sounds good don't it? Let me know what you think bubby!

take'd easy now
FarmerJoe

posted 12-04- 04:04 PM               

------------------
-Sv =FC=

WWI in SDOE!

posted 12-07- 02:53 PM               

Or, if you know that one wing is much more likely to come off than another, like if the top wing tended to snap off from structural damage before the bottom one did, then just attach wires to the top wing. This way you will rarely end up with the wires attached to nothing at one end and still a problem.

posted 12-07- 03:42 PM               

I think I can make it so that when the struts recieve max damage they disapear and then send more damage to the wing as well - this will weaken the wing and cause it to reach max damage earlier.

Since the wing ripping off at high speed is casued by the spring of the wing DOF I think I need to weaken the spring -I'm not sure you can do this - I will look into it!

------------------
-Sv =FC=

WWI in SDOE!