QuickStart Engine

I've decided on XNA from staring at a bunch of other APIs and such. I was going to make my own engine but I lack that much knowledge and time. I am hoping to use this engine to make a basic driving game with some multiplayer. Nothing too fancy for now. I have tried my luck with JigLibX but I never could get a car to drive properly. Is there any car support right now for QSE?

QSE uses JigLibX as its main physics engine at the moment (you can switch on another but i'm not sure how).

Physics integration itself in QSE is /very/ limited right now.

Physics support in QSE is very very (very very) preliminary. We only have setup support for boxes, spheres, and heightmaps.

Others have done their own spin-offs of the engine that include 3d model characters.

If we decided to support vehicle physics we'd still have to go through JigLibX and Ageia to do it.

The first goal of this engine was to easily support outdoor environments with an first/third person experience. When/if that goal is reached I think we wanted to support indoor environments next. After that, who knows.

Thanks for the quick reply guys. I'm fairly sure I can get in some kind of vehicle support. As long as there are rigid bodies, it shouldn't be too difficult to simulate a car even at it's most rudimentary levels (simulate wheels instead of actually creating them).

Heightmaps seem to be a big constrictor since the level of detail is minimal. I guess I could "place" things like railings for a race course or something.

I have yet to read too much literature (physically can't (long story)) but is there a level editor or is it literally just a height map?

Since making my own engine would take forever, maybe I'll just learn/join in on this one? I have some long long term goals but for right now I would settle for just cars in a reasonably detailed environment.

There is no editor at this point, one was planned, but the people working on it quit.

There is a 'scale' parameter where terrain is loaded (I believe in SampleScene.cs). Setting it to '1' if it isn't already will shrink the size of the terrain. Also, I believe the terrain is set to Medium LOD right now, setting it to High or Highest will result in at least 4 times as much detail/polys.

but the LOD just refers to the height map and detail of the texture right? you cant, say make a bridge spanning a river currently.

No, you could create the terrain basics.

But there is no water as of yet and a heightmap wouldn't contain the bridge data anyway, that would be placed as a model on top of the terrain.

LOD refers to the poly count of the terrain.

If you have a 512x512 heightmap image, with the highest LOD you'll end up with a 512x512 terrain. But at medium LOD you'll end up with a 256x256 terrain that takes up the same space. It will just have 1/4 the polys and 1/4 the detail.

The shaders are setup so that texture will never lose detail, no matter what the terrain LOD is set to.

And what BastardFeckinOtter just said, you cannot have a bridge, you cannot have any overlapping terrain. If you could, then how would the getHeight function work? Getting height at any X-Z point where there was a bridge would have two heights, one for the bridge, and one for the land below it.

If you truly want a bridge, you need the terrain, and then a model of a bridge, with physics.

lordikon wrote:There is no editor at this point, one was planned, but the people working on it quit.

There is a 'scale' parameter where terrain is loaded (I believe in SampleScene.cs). Setting it to '1' if it isn't already will shrink the size of the terrain. Also, I believe the terrain is set to Medium LOD right now, setting it to High or Highest will result in at least 4 times as much detail/polys.

Do you know how far they got with it and whether the code is still lying around somewhere?

yea a level editor would be bank for the engine.

They didn't get too far, and the people working on it never turned anything in, so we have nothing to work off of.

What would you guys expect from a level editor?
Just loading height maps + static models which could be positioned/rotated/scaled or ... something else?

Has there been any talk/ideas/roadmap about that?
What about loading such scenes in the engine (an editor ultimately creates a scene which can be loaded by the engine during runtime) ?
What format should be used for serializing the scene?
Actually Scene Serialization/deserialization should be implemented first in the QuickStart engine before an editor would work.

I was working the last couple of years on Irrlicht or more precisely on the Irrlicht.NET wrapper but since this project is more or less dead I am evaluating the QSE.
So the point is I do have some know how but never in my life worked with XNA before...and the things are indeed a bit different here.
Guess I have to do some reading first but an editor would be pretty high on my list and if I stay with QSE and my free time allows it I'd be happy to jump in.

The most important stuff would be editing heightmaps and their terrains, and placing of entities.

We also wanted the terrain to have its own content processor. Currently the heightmap is regenerated everytime you compile, which is a very long time on the Xbox. If it used a processor it would only take that long the first time it was compiled and after that only after changes were made to the heightmap.