Efficient use of picking?
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Efficient use of picking?
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| It would be great to find out a bit about whats going on when a pick is used. One thing I was curious about it will it only perform the picking if it's determined to be withing a pickable mesh's bounding box/volume of sorts, etc. |
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| I noticed the following: the shorter the Line to pick, the faster it is. the smaller the radius, the faster it is. A lot of long range picks can slow down a game massively. |
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| A pick involves a ray-cast, a notoriously processor intensive process. Keep them as short, narrow, and uncommon as possible if speed is going to be a problem for your program. Note the lack of a shotgun in Unreal Tournament... |
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| I always thought of the flak cannon as a shotgun substitute in UT :o |
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| Doesn't do ray-casts though. The projectiles move through the air at a finite speed. At least, not level-wide ray-casts. Probly does short-range ones at each interval... Same for the Minigun. Only the Enforcer and Sniper Rifle do a ray-cast until it hits a target. |
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| Thanks a ton. |
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| why not just do a move entity in the direction of a parent? move it say 1000 and that will give the same details? would this be faster??? |
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| How do you set the radius of a pick? |
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Slenkar: Example:LinePick(0,0,0, -50,50,50, 5) ;starting x,y,z, distance x,y,z, radius "why not just do a move entity in the direction of a parent? move it say 1000 and that will give the same details?" That's how I've been doing it, though I'm starting to wonder about the efficiency of such a method. |
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| You can use zero for the radius. One word about realism: While any Beam-Gun would probably shot its rays with the speed of light, a real projectile from a pistol or rifle will travel with about 250 to 800 Meters per second, depending on model and ammunition. Socalled subsonic ammo is used with silencers to prevent a "ballistic crack" sound, these projectiles are travelling with a speed slightly lower than the speed of sound (mach 1, around 330m/s), about 300 m/s. There is also supersonic ammo and hypersonic ammo. Personally I completely ignore this in my Indoor Levels and plot the impact sprite immediately after firing the gun - a distance of 10 Meters would take only the time of about 1 or two frames. |
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| oh o.k. what is the radius of an entitypick?? |
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| the radius of the Line used by Linepick. Well, it's more a pipe or a tube. At least that's what I thought :) |
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