Silverware wrote:It shouldn't be all that hard. Build an asteroid, then using subtractive brushes dig out a tunnel. Take each of these subtractive meshes and merge them. Instant 3D navimesh. If they get near a side that exits to space the they could follow through the internals.
But I doubt that Josh will bother with that, as I expect most of the combat in LT is going to be basically open space combat.
Oh how you make it sound so simple
Honestly, find me a robust way to do CSG (union / subtract / intersect meshes; most importantly subtract), and I'll pay you oodles of JoshBucks. I've been searching for a solution to that since almost day 1 of working on PCG mesh tech (i.e., 5+ years). It's an incredibly hard problem. I have never found a library or algorithm that can do it robustly and quickly enough to be viable (in fact, even if we drop the 'quick enough' constraint, I still have not found a solution that is robust enough to create well-formed meshes after many operations; failure due to FP precision is virtually inevitable).
With scalar fields, of course, I can do it easily; so I can still create, for example, an asteroid with a cave cut out of it or a hangar for an asteroid base. But taking a bunch of asteroids and digging a tunnel out of them? I can't possibly crank up the scalar field resolution high enough to get that to look decent (and if I could, the poly count would be astronomical). And again, robust triangle-based techniques just don't seem to be there (yes yes, BSP trees; CSG.js; blah blah...the BSP tree algorithm quickly becomes non-viable due to extremely poor split efficiency. Even with an improved algorithm that removes unnecessary splits, it's still not robust on complex meshes (like asteroids). I've implemented it all before and it's broken my heart many times).
Seriously, someone finds me a CSG library that is fast, robust, and written in C (hell, if it's C++ and open-source I'll port it); and I'll pay hard $$$ for it. CSG is the one painfully-powerful procedural tool that I'm missing in my tech.
(Sorry for the rant, I'm salty about CSG and probably always will be...she's the girl I could never get
)