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Vortex Engine v3.4.9 — Areas (zones) and terrain holes

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@github-actions github-actions released this 12 Oct 17:23
· 171 commits to main since this release
v3.4.9
d201d9f

Vortex Engine v3.4.9 — Areas (zones)

Regions of the world with tags, properties and events — a cave, a no-fly zone, a village, a safe zone — as big as a level, nothing hard-coded.

  • Area component: a box, a sphere or a vertical cylinder around its entity, moved, turned and scaled like any other (Create ▸ Area (Zone), Add Component ▸ World ▸ Area, create_area). Tags ("cave", "no-fly") and free properties ("flightAllowed=false", "ambient=cave_drips") carry the meaning; the engine only tracks who is inside, every tick.
  • Events: every behaviour of an entity that enters, stays in or leaves an area gets OnAreaEnter(AreaInfo), OnAreaStay(AreaInfo, dt) and OnAreaExit(AreaInfo); a manager subscribes to Areas.Entered / Areas.Exited. AreaInfo has the name, the tags, HasTag, Get / GetBool / GetFloat for the properties, the priority and the position.
  • Queries: Areas.IsInside(id, "cave"), Areas.Of(id) (highest priority first), Areas.Current(id), Areas.At(point), Areas.IsPointInside(point, tag), Areas.Find(nameOrTag), Areas.Track(id) for entities without scripts.
  • .varea files: a reusable definition (shape, size, tags, properties, colour, priority) in plain JSON. The inspector's Save as… writes one into Assets/Areas and links it; Load reads a linked file; many areas can share one. Tools: set_area, list_areas, areas_at, save_area_file.
  • The viewport draws every area's outline in its colour, the selected one bright; Draw in game shows it in play mode too.
  • The Open World template ships a "Grove" box (tags grove, no-fly; flightAllowed=false) over the jungle corner, a "Lake dome" sphere, Assets/Areas/Grove.varea and ZoneManager.cs, which logs every entry and exit and shows where a no-fly rule goes.
  • Holes in the terrain (the first half of caves): the Terrain Editor's new Hole tool (Sculpt tab; Shift fills a hole back) cuts the cells under the brush out of the terrain — the mesh at every LOD, the collision and the navmesh leave them out, the height query and the terrain raycast look through them, so a cave mesh placed under the terrain becomes the ground there. Saved in the .vterrain (a flag bit, one byte per sample; older editors ignore it). sculpt_terrain takes op: "hole" and "fill".
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