bieh.net

In the last few days I’ve been writing the beginnings of the Universe server. I’ve run into a few issues along the way, mostly to do with the physics engine I’m using. Typically when I’m setting up physics for a terrain, I simply make one big triangle mesh that covers the entire terrain - nice and simple, and it works fairly well. However, the internet informed me that ‘very large terrains’ took ~20 seconds to pre-calculate physics information, and used 100mb of RAM.

Their definition of ‘very large’ was 1024×1024. Assuming I use my standard resolution of 1unit == 1meter, I would have a terrain of about 500000×500000. While I didn’t try it, I predict it would end badly.

My idea currently is to create a small trimesh under every physics-enabled object, and move it around as needed, syncing to the heights of the various bits of ground. I haven’t got that far yet, but I am making a triangle mesh that I can drop things on and have them kinda work (hey, it’s harder than it sounds!).

I also tweaked the noise parameters a bit more. The terrain is a bit more interesting looking now.

Finally I added ‘cool-cam’. This is from an article I read a while back on TheDailyWTF, and I think it’s quite a neat idea. Basically it’s just an automated camera that hunts down interesting things and looks at them for a while. With any luck I can get it to run on the big display wall