Workfiles & insights - Gamedev in TD second release

Dear Friends, I've been messing around quite a lot lately with the updated collision system, and even it's not watertight (yet), I think it's ready for a v1.1 update of the first release. 

I went for a more mathematical approach instead of the combination with an extra renderpass for the 'normal to camera'. It all felt a bit to hacky and the collision didn't 'glide' very nicely, it was very bumpy. Also cleaned up the network, made some (non)cooking optimizations, so overall, I'm pretty happy about the current status of the development!

I'm having a bit of trouble with calculating the collision in combination with the height position of the character. For instance on the top of the stairs, it just doesn't work as it suppose to be. That's due to the fact the collision system reads from the heightmap, if it encounters a different color other than it's own position, it flags it as a collision. The difference in color will tell if it's a wall, a stair step or slanted walkway. So there are different thresholds to be set.

And yes, place yourself in a corner, mess around a bit and eventually you'll fall through, but I must say, it's less worse than I expected it to be. It can be fixed, but there is so much involved at the same time. I have to take a break and come back at it on and off, just for the sake of getting new insights. Personally, Touchdesigner proved over and over that things can be done, of course, it's the discipline and time you invest that eventually will pay off, but I'm a long way from thinking 'yes, this is the maximum that it's capable of'. 

When the bugs in the corners and height is fixed, I'm heading for a more TOX approach. Dropping the character in your network and just run! So no hard coded heightmaps anymore. The way to tackle this will probably be by putting a depth camera somewhere above the character, orthographic, pointing down. It's basically how I've rendered the depthmap in the first place, but then real-time. Shouldn't be that hard. Also trying to work with different levels without making the file extremely large with al sorts of geo assets. So I might have to think about some kind of load on/off system. I did some experimenting with the grass shader regarding LOD (level of detail), might borrow something from that. 

Thank you massive! Off we go!