The ability to add caves in the map editor, might not be the easiest thing, but it would be pretty cool.

while I'd like this too, it's certainly not the easiest thing to do.
For it to be fully integrated into the engine, terrain would need to be changed for a voxel engine. certainly not easy.
on the other hand, creating caves right now isn't too hard: create your caves on your favorite 3d modelling program, create a hole on the terrain and place the meshes in there, then cover up the seams with rocks. easy!

I must have overlooked the ability to create a whole in the terrain.

you just need to paint NULL material on the terrain, this will make holes automatically

But (optional) voxel based mesh terrain (as seen in CryEngine) would be cool.

I have tried this a couple of times but it's not working for me. It leaves a hole in the terrain that leads to emptiness where the player will fall off into a bottomless ocean. Am I doing something wrong?

Here are screenshots:
http://hedrononline.com/cave1.jpg

http://hedrononline.com/cave2.jpg

I might be wrong as I am the resident newb here but;

Dragon, I think you would need to build the internal parts of the cave (Maya, blender, etc) then import it and line it up with the hole you made in the world editor.

Again, I'm the new guy so I could be wrong

aaah, ok, that makes sense then. I kept reading that to make a cave all you needed to do was paint a null material so I thought that meant it would contort the terrain to create an actual hole punched into the terrain, sorta of like when you use "down" on the terrain. This would be a nice feature though-a sort of "down" for sides of terrain to create punches in the sides for caves.

I have an awesome large cave model but the mesh editor can't handle it. It is too large to view and when I scale it down and try to add the phys it crashes the mesh editor. I'm finding that very large models have this problem with the mesh editor which makes it hard to implement entire modeled scenes.

Oh wow. Streaming engines need small chunks so they can load seamlessly. If you were to run outside the range and re-enter the engine would appear to hang while it loads a model scene. I order to take advantage of this engine capability you really need to break the model into small chunks. Make a left wall, right wall and so on. Then put the chunks together in the world editor. If the poly count is above 30K per piece you're really going to have problems with game stutter.

Quote:I have an awesome large cave model but the mesh editor can't handle it. It is too large to view and when I scale it down and try to add the phys it crashes the mesh editor. I'm finding that very large models have this problem with the mesh editor which makes it hard to implement entire modeled scenes.

you can send me the sample model that causes program fault, I will test where's the problem

Quote:Oh wow. Streaming engines need small chunks so they can load seamlessly. If you were to run outside the range and re-enter the engine would appear to hang while it loads a model scene. I order to take advantage of this engine capability you really need to break the model into small chunks. Make a left wall, right wall and so on. Then put the chunks together in the world editor. If the poly count is above 30K you're really going to have problems with game stutter.

not necesserily, EE World Editor can automatically break up the big Embedded Object Models into smaller pieces and split them into multiple areas.

(12-11-2010 05:47 PM)Esenthel Wrote:  not necesserily, EE World Editor can automatically break up the big Embedded Object Models into smaller pieces and split them into multiple areas.

Even more WOW even epic. Built in model streaming! You should stress this as a great selling point.

I was going to attempt to break the model down into several pieces today but I'll send it to you first to see if you can help me with it. If it's too big and detailed then I'll just break it down into sections. Thanks!

Edit: How do I send it to you?

You can send me a link to it via PM, or use email from "ask a question" here http://www.esenthel.com/?id=buy

I sent you a PM with a link to the file

750k tris is a bit too much, and PhysX fails to create the mesh.

You should simplify the main tunnel mesh (remove tris).

And instead of putting all the repetetive objects in the ceiling as separate Mesh Parts.
Make 1 mesh from 1 object, and put many objects in the World Editor. It will be much more efficient.