Vertex Manipulation [Compound objects]

Just a short update on what I've been working on this time. It started when I was playing CoD:WaW this afternoon and I noticed a lot of debris and broken walls which got me thinking about how they managed these kinds of assets. This intrigued me, so I started drawing up some ideas on how I could potentially add this to the toolset, with little knowledge on mathmatical geometry or destruction calculations I tried to start things simple and look for existing online resources.

I will go into much more detail on this topic at a later time, for now I'd just like to share a few images and give notes on what you see.

ray vs. triangle collision. white lines visualize an array of lines from the camera eye colliding with the geometry.

The box-mesh on the left was used to cut 4 holes into the plane-shape.

The wireframe of the same scene, visualizing the triangles of the triangulated plane.

A hole cut by defining 5 vertices by colliding a ray with the plane, these were defined at runtime from the camera-eye.

I'm also looking into 'bridging' (users of 3D Studio Max may know what I'm talking about) to fill the gap between two planes of a wall (its back and front) after cutting a hole with the triangulator. Some basic box uv-mapping and a noisy texture to simulate broken concrete (or any other material) and you should have the basics to quickly create holes in walls or break chunks of the scene's meshes. The resources I used are listed below. Much more on this at a later time, there is still a lot to do and even more to talk about :)

Resources

App Hub - Triangle Picking Sample

Nick Gravelyn's Triangulator (2D)

Triangulation By Ear Clipping - by David Eberly

Input & Hotkey Management

Input management is one of those things I never really paid a lot of attention to, using simple if-statements inside an Update() or HandleInput() function worked fine is most cases, until recently. Recently I started to notice my input handling got scattered throughout my code-base and a lot of coupling was required to make sure it was handled properly.

To prevent hotkey-clutter (especially when modifiers (ctrl, shift, alt) get involved) I started working on a HotkeyManager that handles groups of Hotkeys in an easily maintanable way. Initially it was supposed to assign a HotkeyGroup to one or more 'editor-states', like 'only-use-this-hotkey-while-in-editmeshmode', I soon realized this wasn't going to be very helpful and I would have to continuously add new states to keep it up to date...so this was scrapped and replaced by a simpler, but more powerful feature - Predicate<T>. Using predicates enables the manager/hotkey to activate only if a predefined condition is met (i.e. if gizmo.IsActive == true -> execute the hotkey-function) it can contain more than one statement such as gizmo.IsActive == true && Camera.IsMoving == false for example...if both conditions are met, the hotkey may execute with the associated Action (the method assigned to the hotkey) The code-snippet below should be able to illustrate its use.

You may have noticed the above code refers to the GizmoComponent class. SetSelectionPool(IEnumerable<ISelectable> selectables) is a new function I've added to more easily support custom collections and to assign new collections at runtime, in my case this is used to switch between vertex- and object-selection more easily. I will add this along with many other improvements to the open-source gizmocomponent at codeplex at some point.

Back to the hotkeys...within InitializeHotkeys() there is a HotkeyGroup class, this class holds a collection of hotkeys that belong to the same component or share similar functionality. These groups are passed to the manager and will be updated automatically.  The Hotkey class is the main class and has several parameters including key (supports all Keys, MouseButtons and GamepadButtons) a KeyPressState (press, release, hold) a KeyModifier (control, shift, alt or a combination - not illustrated in img), the parent  (used by the Predicate to verify the conditions) and the Action to execute after the key is pressed and all conditions are met.

A quick search revealed there are no suitable Input/Hotkey managers (I didn't like any of the libraries available on Codeplex) so I might turn this into an open-source component/library if enough people are interested in such a library.


Actions and Vertex manipulations are also still WIP, I made some progress on both these tasks and should have some something new to blog about soon enough.