I am porting one of my “unfinished” games to LWJGL. The game is played on a platform that in java3d I made a shape3d out of a LineArray,thus creating a “grid” as the ground/platform. I need to test for collisions with this platform to see if you have fallen off and the grid has a finite width similar to a football field.
Would you guys recommend doing the same in a gl_lines or take a single quad, put a texture on it to look like the grid and then rotate it so it is flat?
M
Did you want to highlight square on the grid or anything like that?
Kev
I don’t think so (but might later). All it really needs to do is be there for detection to make sure player is still on it, if not he falls in the Y direction off of it.
Ah… uhm…
Collision detection and the graphical representation are two completely different things.
For example in a Mirco Machines alike game (top view) the cars could be highly detailed models whereas the logic is completely 2D and the cars are (internally) just rectangles, which you check against each other (collision).
You usually have several different representations of your game world. In a newer first person shooter you have for example something very detailed - the graphics part, something simpler for collision, even simpler for the AI and totally simplified for 3d audio (just some walls here and there).
If your game looks 3d but plays like 2d, your internal logic can also be just 2d.
I have a game called CubeWars that I got running in a multiplayer version with java3d. Player is a cube and sits on the grid. Player moves around on top of the grid like hockey players. If you go past the grid border (I guess I could use x and z coords for this as well and not collision detection) he “falls” off and falls out of site until he is re-spawned. May be some walls here and there, like bunkers and a safe spot for spawn.
Here is a snapshot of the java3d version:
You are the green cube, blue cubes are other players on other team and gray rectangle is a wall. Players cube is always positioned there as this is a 3rd person, high over shoulder, view. “bullets” shoot out from the cube forward and if you rotate the grid rotates. You can see the “border” in the distance.
http://www22.brinkster.com/mbowles/screenshot.htm
dang Brinkster won’t let me map to an image!!!
Looks like the beautiful LWJGL runs beautifully building many little 1*1 quads with textures and laying them side by side to build larger grid through a for loop