Subject: Splitting headache

From: [email-masked] (Hannes Hogni Vilhjalmsson)
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 93 11:32:29 GMT

Hi,

   After spending several hours creating the perfect DRAX100 guardian
robot from Andromeda as a PLG object (without the help of CAD progs),
it really annoyed me how the "painter's algorithm" hacked up my 
beastie when I finally loaded into into my space station WLD file.

   HOW can one create a PLG file WITHOUT the visibility errors?  I guess
the answer is "you can't", because one can't place splits into PLG files,
and moving splits are not available anyway.  I want to know what you 
(the other users of Rend386) do when creating complex PLG objects.  Do 
you simply live with the visibility errors, or are there any methods
avoiding them?  

   BTW, I'm very interested in using sounds in my world.  Is there
a MIDI interface available?  

Thanks,

Hannes Hogni Vilhjalmsson
[email-masked]
Computer Science
The University of Iceland

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 1993 01:06:55 -0500

>>>>> "Hannes" == Hannes Hogni Vilhjalmsson <[email-masked]> writes:
Hannes>    HOW can one create a PLG file WITHOUT the visibility
Hannes> errors? 

Well, if by "visibility errors" you mean that polygons are not being
drawn, because they aren't in the same plane, 
then...
	The most carefull way of creating a .PLG w/o any vis. errors,
	is by using triangles as one's base polygon.  Of course this
	greatly increases the complexity and therefore will slow rend
	down... 

else...
	could you explain a bit more of what the vis. errors are?

-bob mason
[email-masked]
'rend developer et al.

---

From: Chris Hand <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 93 0:52:17 GMT

Hannes Hogni Vilhjalmsson said:
> the answer is "you can't", because one can't place splits into PLG files

One way is to take the polygons from the PLG and put them directly
into a .WLD file (as polyobj statements for example) and then build the
splits around that.  Not an ideal solution though.

I seem to remember that better hiden-surface removal was being
promised for version 6.0, although things have been rather quiet
on development news lately...

> a MIDI interface available?  

I had a go at implementing MIDI support a couple of months ago.  I have
some code that works (sort of), but I think there's a problem with
the interrupts, since it tends to crash randomly...  Perhaps a better
way to go would be to start with the serial interface code that's
knocking around and modify that, since a MIDI card can be viewed
as a UART (MPU-401 compatibles can, anyway).

I'm not saying it can't be done (far from it), it's just that I don't
have time to debug what I've already started... :-(

Chris
[email-masked]