Recently had a few outside-the-box thoughts on this subject. BSPs are currently extremely powerful (and popular for 3D FPSs and things) because they are precompiled, pre-raytraced, VISed, the whole works. Is there any real reason you can''t do that with a regular, Blender-style polygon structure, as long as it''s sealed and has no holes? Nobody seems to be exploring this possibility. It''s as if when BSPs came along, polys stopped in their tracks for gaming. Yet you can do so much more with straight polygon modelling than with the crude cubes and carving stuff in a BSP editor. BSPs are great for nice angular buildings, but not much else. Outdoor scenes, caves, islands, mountains, forests, no good. Everything looks square and boring. Any thoughts on this, anyone? "If you go into enough detail, everything becomes circular reasoning." - Captain Insanity

Bsps have nothing to do how the level was created. You can take a "polygon soup" (i.e. what''s produced by Blender, etc) and process it into a BSP.

Also, all the other pre-processing, lighting, etc can be done on non-BSP levels as well, the BSP just makes it happen faster. Again, there''s no reason why you can''t just generate a BSP of the level, light it and then discard the BSP for other processing.

BSPs are nothing special, they''re just a simple data structure which some pretty neat properties.

If I had my way, I''d have all of you shot!

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codeka.com - Just click it.

In which case, why isn''t there a level editor for FPSs that lets you do that? They all just use carved primitives, which really limits the stuff you can do.

"If you go into enough detail, everything becomes circular reasoning." - Captain Insanity

quote:

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In which case, why isn''t there a level editor for FPSs that lets you do that? They all just use carved primitives, which really limits the stuff you can do.

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There is, it''s called 3ds max

Seriously there are many programs out there that do poly modelling, writing a whole editor just to allow the placing of entities and scripts into levels is a massive undertaking and may well not be worth it considering most big packages scripting and plugin abilities. I think I heard of a couple of teams doing poly-soup editors because max couldn''t handle the several million polys that were being created, but I can''t remember what they were called and how well it worked out.

try gmax.

it takes it most models and makes game files out of them. dungeon siege, never winter nights.

you need 3dsmax to run gmax.

Its my duty, to please that booty ! - John Shaft

I think what Captain Insanity is asking isn''t whether or not a poly soup can be made into a bsp, but why they use brushes to make the levels. From other discussions what I''ve gathered is collision detection. They use the brushes from the bsp to do faster CD than poly-to-poly CD. When you do a full poly-soup to bsp you will end up having to do a poly to poly CD which will take a lot of time. I believe in one of the other groups there is a discussion about this... (sorry, don''t have a link handy...)

Always remember, you''''re unique. Just like everyone else.

Ah, yes, that''s what I meant. Sorry if my original post didn''t make this clear, but it was late when I posted it.



"If you go into enough detail, everything becomes circular reasoning." - Captain Insanity