Vortex Engine v3.4.11 — Caves

Vortex Engine v3.4.11 — Caves

Caves you can walk into, under the terrain, with zones that know you are inside. The Open World template has one in the escarpment north of the oasis.

• A Mesh Collider on a model works. Put it on the model you placed (its root) and it collides with all the model's parts. An imported model keeps its meshes on child entities, so a collider on the root used to have no mesh, and you fell through the cave floor.
• Terrain skirts no longer cut through tunnels. The skirts that hide gaps between terrain detail levels hung down by a chunk's whole height range, 30 m and more under a hill. They showed as striped walls inside caves. Now they are only as deep as a real gap needs, and there is none next to a hole.
• Caves get dark inside. The world lighting cache treats a model with a non-convex Mesh Collider as a space you can walk into: its inside stays open and its walls block light. Imported models now block light at their real size; they were 1 m cubes in the cache before. Surfaces read only the probes on their open side, so a cave wall no longer picks up the sky above the hill.
• Deep in a cave it is dark. The screen-space bounce and the sky reflection now fade where the world cache sees no sky. The bounce used to light cave walls through the rock, as a checker pattern. In the open nothing changes.
• Shadows under the palms are complete. The sun's shadow cascades skip casters smaller than two shadow texels. Pebbles and grass used to fill the shared shadow budget, and up to 9,000 casters per frame were dropped, whole trees among them.
• tools/cave-gen.py generates cave tunnels: winding, with chambers, a flat floor with its own material, and a rock shell around the mouth that hides the terrain hole's edge. --points writes the tunnel's path for placing it and fitting Areas.
• Open World template: a 48 m cave with a rock arch, ferns and lianas at the mouth, and three Areas linked to Assets/Areas/Cave.varea (tags cave, no-fly, dark; flightAllowed=false).
• create_area and set_area apply a linked .varea file's values right away.