Hey Everyone!
Seriva, Micron, ParaMike and I got together this friday/saturday for a little Piko3D development LAN! We worked together on various subsystems and made good progress! Micron started on support for bone animation and ragdolls, Seriva did some more prep-work for the OpenGL 3.x renderer and ParaMike and me worked on some minor fixes and a cool scene graph video!
I actually spend some time in blender again and created a little space ship to use in our tests and demos. We call him pete, and you can see a whole bunch of him flying by in the video as our dynamic octree tries to keep up 😉 The video is devided in two parts. The top part shows you the action, while the bottom part shows the scene graph and objects as they move by 🙂
Piko3D uses space partitioning (in this case an Octree) to be able to quickly determine different things, like what objects are in view right now, and which objects are getting so close together that physics should start worrying about collisions!
The Octree you see in the video is fully dynamic. There is no need to tell the system ANYTHING about how many objects there are in the world, how big they are and how they move around. Each node in the octree is autonomous and together they determine where a new root, new nodes or leaves need to be created, and who gets to be the root! This means that the entire octree can move around as it is needed. This is demonstrated in the video which shows a couple of hundred of space ships all moving right at the same time. Note that only the nodes that contain objects are drawn in the video, to keep things clear 😉
Till next time!
Regards, Wracky.