[Alephmodular-devel] Re: [M-dev]Sloping floors and ceilings

[Joe A. <av...@fm...>]

On Friday, January 3, 2003, at 09:34  AM, Quartz wrote:
> hey- putting map creation options aside for the moment, how would the
> physics engine handle this? is that already sorted out?

I suppose the simplest thing would be to have the game engine treat it 
like a lot of small, discrete, flat polys - or actually a poly with a 
floor/ceiling divided into a lot of small, discrete, flat segments. 
This would probably require that any time we make reference to a poly's 
floor or ceiling height, we actually call a function to get it, and the 
function either returns the poly's floor or ceiling height (if it's a 
normal poly) or figures out what the floor/ceiling is right here based 
on the location in the poly (which would have to be passed to the 
function). This will require major code renovation. However, 
AlephModular could handle it pretty easily I suppose, since we're 
renovating the code _anyway_... ;)

This is a bit of a kludgey method, but I think it would be far, far 
easier than actually having the engine deal with real sloping floors 
and ceilings...

My 2cents on the adjacent-polys-vs-Dietrich's-suggestions issue:
I'm a map maker. I want to make a ramp on the floor. The easiest, most 
straightforward method from *my* perspective would probably be facing 
looking either low-to-high or high-to-low (which one isn't important), 
min height, and max height. This allows the most flexibility without me 
doing lots of geometry. (I'm assuming there is no editor for this yet 
and I have to create the ramp information by hand).

Also, this might be painfully obvious, but ramps that don't lie flush 
with surrounding polys (the sides of the ramp are visible) should use 
the standard primary/secondary texture used for every other type of 
opening, and treated like a normal opening as much as possible. I mean, 
the engine should just treat it like a normal poly with a different 
floor/ceiling height.

Joe Auricchio ~ av...@fm...