DeleD Community Edition

[Koobazaur]

Greetings,

I've been working with Deled for a while creating levels for my little DirectX project. I want to implementa Portal Engine so, needless to say, I need to "bend" Deled to work with that. I am going for the "hand-made" portals approach.

Now, placing a portal is easy (just do a rectangle with a name (or class name) "portal" and have my engine deal with that). However, portal polygons by themselves don't do much, they need to be tied to specific sectors... and so the question arises, how can I divide my world into sectors?

The most obvious answer is - use the grouping! Problem is, the feature is buggy, and thus I cannot use it.
Another idea would be to simply give my shared polygon's the same name or a tag... but the problem is, there is no easy way to distinguish in Deled which polygons have what names (thus what belongs to what sector) short of clicking on every single object to find out. I can't "group-select" a sector this way either.

Merging is a no-no either, as it will prevent me from modifying the geometry afterwards (or make it very annoyingly painful).

Another idea is to have each sector be a separate file, but that is rather annoying (especially in my level with lots of rooms, all of which I want to make a separate sector) and makes it difficult to align everything correctly (and ensure matching proportions).

I would really hope the grouping bug I posted gets resolved as that would be an amazing way to divide my world into sectors (and make it easy editable via select -> freeze all but selection), but alas, it doesn't work...

[Daaark]

Just keep all the sector polygons inside the sector box itself. Than do a check to see which sector it belongs to when you load your file. Any polygon inside a sector box is part of that sector.
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[Koobazaur]

I was thinking about it, using some sort of portal-bounds, but realized that they are too limiting. That is, there are certain shapes that cannot be approximated by a simple box or sphere.

That, and placing a huge box over half my map wouldn't be very convinient for editing said map (especially since I can't group the sector boxes and hide them because of screwy grouping)...

[Daaark]

[jwatte]

You need shapes other than just rectangular blocks for your sectors. You might want to look into using, say, extruded polylines to support this.

[Koobazaur]

[jwatte]

As I said: use a polyline.

However, most zone/portal systems want the zones to be convex, and non-overlapping. Convex, because of certain geometric properties (any line from within two points will not exit the zone), and non-overlapping because you can't do point-to-zone tests otherwise.

The zig-zag corridor would likely be a lot of zones; one per zig (and one per zag :-)

[Koobazaur]

[Paul-Jan]

But that's a problem your engine needs to tackle, right? Are you saying it supports non-convex zones?

[jwatte]

Convex sectors is different from convex geometry.

You can do concave sectors with polylines, if you want -- you just have to be more careful in how you construct the engine.

[Koobazaur]