2 ideas

[rrheuts]

Hi all,

Print-outs are nice, but it would be even nicer to 'render' your bridge. For those people who are not into 3d moddeling, rendering is the process of creating an image of the 3d scene created, but with the textures and lighting etc applied.
In pontifex you have the ability to move around your bridge, you can take a screenshot if you want, but a button with 'render' on it looks nicer. In the process of rendering, a sky can be created, reflection of the water is added, bumbmapping is aplied, all the nice effects
And you really don't need a super computer, it justs takes a while on slow ones, and you can choose not to render  

My second idea was someting like 'global collisions'. In the current versions when your bridge collapses it just breaks and falls down (wich is really good, don't get me wrong ;) ). But when for insance 2 towers collide they just fall down not colliding with eachother. But with the global collisions plugin (:)) they would crash into eachtoher and then fall down. Or when a part of the bridge way up brakes and comes down, it crashes into the deck (or onto the train).

These are just some ideas, pontifex is great as it is, but this is the section for ideas so..

I love the rendering idea. It'd be a good way to preserve game speed and at the same time give us 'eyecandy lobbyists' something to cheer about :-D I'd love to see some of my bridges complete with material textures, rippled water, shadows etc.

The global collision detection idea has been discussed elsewhere in this forum (I can't find it, can anyone post a link?). It has two main problems:

1: It'd take a LOT of computing power and slow the game right down. There are nearly a hundred links in just a single beam, that adds up to thousands even for fairly simple bridges. Constantly testing each one for collisions would be a computational nightmare.

2: Every beam is created with crossed links that go 'through' each other, so you'd have hundreds of collisions already in place as soon as you hit the test button :-(

(Edited by Chillum at 7:45 pm on Oct. 27, 2001)

[beaujob]

Refer to the thread discussing alternatives to "Structured beams" in General area