Tiles, Tiles, Tiles...

This is what I have been up to recently. The lack of updates the past couple of weeks is mostly due to my involvement in renovating my bathroom. It's been a lot of fun, but I think the romanticism of hard work is slowly wearing off and I'd like to do some coding for a change.

I have an apartment in an old building and none of the walls are straight, so I had to cut a lot of custom fit tiles around the walls. One interesting thing I noticed was that in order to optimize that repretitive work, I started to use fuzzy measures, such as "a little less than 5 cm" or "a bit more than 3 and a half cm" instead if 52 mm or 38mm.

In Finland we use metric system and everything construction related is always expressed in mm or cm (except two-by-fours and two-by-twos). But in places where imperial units are used you often see fractional units being used, for example something measuring 2"1/4 is not that uncommon. Even if I like that we have universal system of units, I think it is not very practical in many cases in every day life.

I want fractional measures back to metric system too. Humans do a lot of work using binary search when estimating measures. "Five centimeters and a half and a little less and nudge to the right" is more accurate than a millimeter!
__

Despite being engaged in that physical excersice, the work on Recast has not stopped. The area stuff has progressed pretty well. I have generation side working pretty OK. It needs quite a lot of clean up and API massaging to be released.

Quite a few people have also reported patches to make Recast compile and work under Linux and 64bit. I was silly to actually do those changes in the same codebase where I did my area work, so I cannot submit those changes quite yet. But for those who are waiting for it, those changes are coming.

Once I get all the hackery peeled off, I will release an intermediate release which includes some of the area progress as well as the Linux fixes.

Area Progress

I have got some pretty good progress on the areas. I have been concentrating on marking the areas. Volume based areas were pretty simple to do. So far I have only axis aligned box, but I do not expect the rest to be too complicated.

The height based areas were a bit more challenging. In above picture, the blue are is marked by the black box, the yellow area is where the character can stand, the red areas are where the character can crouch and on blue ares the character needs to go "prone". Those are dummy categories just to test that I can handle more than one height value.

That kind of sampling tends to generate a lot of small areas here and there. For example if a wall is slightly tilted, you may get one voxel worth of proning and three voxels worth of crouching. I tried several kinds of filtering methods to get rid of those artifacts.

First I tried median filter, but I either had to do too many passes or the filter ate away certain small bridge areas, which should have been left unaffected. After some fiddling, I tried similar filtering method I used for the region merging and it turned out much better. The filter checks adjacency, so it will not remove small areas which connects two neighbor regions (such as low doors), it does a bit smarter merging, so that tiny 'crouch' area can be merged to a 'prone' area but not to 'stand' area or else the character collision would fail.

Next up is to enable the partition system to understand the areas. I expect that to be the most challenging part of the this whole feature.