Re: [Algorithms] portal engines in outdoor environments

[jason w. <jas...@po...>]

Yeah, it's interesting..

Spheres are particularly nice because the sphere radius is the same as the
circles radius after projection (heh.. Ron can tell us what that exact
property is properly called... I know it's not invarient). But of course,
the disadvantage is that they're a poor fit.

Did you ever think of using a sphere tree, somewhat like the qspat systems
structures?

I think there's some real hope for very organic complexe outdoor
environments to be based around a system.. basicly you'd have individual
objects represented as in qsplat, and some sort of scene clustering
collecting them into a tree. Then, each frame, start at the top of the tree,
and check if any of the nodes occlude any of the others.. descend down the
tree in similar way until you decide each node must be visable. Obviously,
you'd need more smarts than that, since it could potencially be very slow to
clip one highly concave object to another, like one tree against another,
for example. You also need some form of fusion... storing a coverage ratio
for each node in the sphere tree, much like HOM's image pyramid, would at
least let you break out at a specific tolerence. The checks would have to be
brutally fast tho to get to any really detailed environment.