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SOOOOOO GOOOOOOOD!!!

good job

Hi. Sorry for reviving this old post, but i was wondering how far away this suggested feature was;

elk wrote:

I tested with a two floor setup and it seems to work fine, but with this method there would also need to be a limit to the raycast so you don’t “fall down” at the edge.

You already implemented so much of my FPS wishlist, and i really appreciate the great job you did listening to the feedback and implementing those. I am closing in on having a AchcViz demo ready to try and sell to some customers, hopefully within a couple of weeks. I don’t need this for the demo, but I may need it soon after that if I get an order for an ArchViz spanning two or more floors. If you have any timeframe for this I would love to know.

Hi Alexander. And thanks for quick reply

I know I could probably get it done with physics, but if possible i would really like to see this in the FPS camera. That would keep me from having to do a loot of tweaking of the physics parameters for one, and I would not have to add the extra overhead of doing “actual” physics computations (that would be important for mobile apps for instance), and i could keep my navigation meshes to a minimum. Introducing physics would also demand a bit of extra testing for every scene and scenario.

If I’m guessing your implementation on the FPS camera correctly, it might be as “simple” as exposing a value for how long the raycast is to check for the collision material. A checkbox for custom raylenght and a number for the lenght of the raycast might be a good solution for the interface. But ofcourse everything takes away a bit of time and resources to implement.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this.

Hi Alexander.

That would be amazing. Thanks for confirming this was still on the todo list, and for the tentative timeline.

Raycast is when you project a ray from a point in 3D space and giving it a direction vector from that point to see what objects it intersects with, for instance creating a ray from the center of your camera and towards the position of your mouse(recalculated in scene space) so you can trigger a highlighting for the hit object for instance. This can usually be set to return either the first or a list of object hit within a set distance from the originating point, along with some other information about the hit.

Nice sketchbook btw, you really got some drawing skills

Yeah, sort of. If you are “within” the collision mesh, the camera will be put back onto the last known good position that was still above the collision mesh/material, or something like that, if it does not find the collision mesh/material under the camera (on a frame by frame basis I would think). The problem is when your collision mesh/material is two layers “thick”, then it will find the first floor once you go of the edge of the second floor, bacause then it will not stop you at the edge, but “snap” you down to the first floor. That is why i suggested limiting the raycast to a customizable distance, that way the first floor would not me seen by the raycast from the extra distance down to the first floor, and problem should be resolved.

In some early 3D FPS games before physics engines and stuff, you can see this kind of limitations in map design, where you might be able to walk up and down slopes, but you would not have floors overlapping. If I’m not mistaken they used something similar to hightmaps to determine how high in 3D space a character walking on the floor would be at any point on the map, and they could only use one 2D image for that so no overlapping walkable areas. Thankfully those days are gone ;)

also i made this a couple of days ago for another question here, this demonstrates it if you go up the two small slopes her and try to go of the edge towards the first floor;

https://cdn.soft8soft.com/AROAJSY2GOEHMOFUVPIOE:53632680b5/applications/test_first_person/test_first_person.html

And maybe we should take this to another thread if you have further questions, I only mentioned it here becuse this is where I first suggested the “feature”