(Sorry :)
For the grass crossplane bit, it is simply an X shaped wall mesh, double sided with a texture on it. For testing, just use a cube for now.
Unfortunately, the following is out of my head and i am not on a windows machine at the moment, so cannot test it for you, but it should work, (may need a syntax correction or two :)
It would be loaded with something like:
Then using an array or custom type to store the data something like:
(assuming you use custom types rather than an array)
You obviously need to fill the above structure with some virtual 'grass' objects (each one will be a desired location). This structure could be filled in many ways, for example;
- by simply hard-coding them(yuck!),
- placement maps (a hidden image with different colors for different things)
- using a placement script from a level or terrain editor,
- by 'intelligent' mesh analysis of the terrain itself (ie. record pos. of 'random verticies that have the vertexcolor green').
Either way, object creation would be done by:
Then in your main loop add the dynamic placement code. I have used a reference pivot here for simplicity but using maths (*may*) be faster :/
Something like this in the main loop:
Hope this helps and works ok, as i say, i cant test it for you im afraid. However the 'theory' is there to give you some ideas.
ps: This same kind of system can be used for pretty much anything, monsters, items, buildings etc..
For the grass crossplane bit, it is simply an X shaped wall mesh, double sided with a texture on it. For testing, just use a cube for now.
Unfortunately, the following is out of my head and i am not on a windows machine at the moment, so cannot test it for you, but it should work, (may need a syntax correction or two :)
It would be loaded with something like:
;set color+alpha+mipmap on any texture with grass in name (must be 32bit PNG or TGA!) texturefilter ("grass",1+2+8) ;load the textured X mesh global sourcegrass=loadmesh("mygrass.png") ;enable backfaces so both sides of all 4 triangles of the crossplane are visible from both sides. entityfx (sourcegrass, 16)
Then using an array or custom type to store the data something like:
(assuming you use custom types rather than an array)
type Tgrass field handle% field X# field Y# field Z# end type(arrays are faster tho but not as 'pretty' :)
You obviously need to fill the above structure with some virtual 'grass' objects (each one will be a desired location). This structure could be filled in many ways, for example;
- by simply hard-coding them(yuck!),
- placement maps (a hidden image with different colors for different things)
- using a placement script from a level or terrain editor,
- by 'intelligent' mesh analysis of the terrain itself (ie. record pos. of 'random verticies that have the vertexcolor green').
Either way, object creation would be done by:
g.Tgrass=new Tgrass g\handle=0 ;(no need for a value here yet, this will store the copy's pointer or 'handle') g\x = 342 ;<--example coords g\y = 32 g\z = 100
Then in your main loop add the dynamic placement code. I have used a reference pivot here for simplicity but using maths (*may*) be faster :/
Something like this in the main loop:
;create our reference object refpoint=createpivot() ;iterate through all "grass" objects for g.Tgrass = each Tgrass; ;position reference at position stored in the object "g" of type Tgrass positionentity refpoint(g\x, g\y, g\z) ;work out how far away from camera the position of the reference is if entitydistance(camera,refpoint) < visiblerange then ;if it doesn't already exist make an "instance" and position it if not g\handle then g\handle=copyentity(sourcegrass) positionentity (g\handle, g\x, g\y, g\z) endif else ; if not in range and an instance exists then delete it, freeing precious resources!. if g\handle then freeentity g\handle : g\handle=0 ;<---important, freeentity does not delete the pointer's value endif endif next ;delete the refpoint (important!) freeentity refpoint : refpoint = 0
Hope this helps and works ok, as i say, i cant test it for you im afraid. However the 'theory' is there to give you some ideas.
ps: This same kind of system can be used for pretty much anything, monsters, items, buildings etc..