Hi Dave,
Nice to see you. Happy new year to you and everyone else.
Inporting Custom levels : Presumably you mean a very large entity? Reloaded is not specifically designed to import large world entity objects created in their entirity in external modelling programmes. That being said you can use entities and place into Reloaded in the native .x file format made in external modellers as has always been the case with TGC products past and using the standard Reloaded supporting files : e.g. .fpe files, texture files and so on much the same as previous versions of FPSC.
As Reloaded is now using Bullet physics and you can in theory use per polygon collision, there is as far as I am personally aware no reason why there would need to be any collision issues, though the product is as you know still under development and there are some glitches and will probably be more creep in from time to time that may cause collision issues.
Personally I have not found any in the main and in importing and using large models from external modelling software.
Currently I have three I am aware of :
1. The player can get stuck and cannot escape from tight spots in terrain crevasses for instance which seems to happen when the water plane is at the bottom of it. i.e. water in the base of a tight spot. This may be either a Terrain or water plane issue and I have no confirmation which is the offender here or that anything will be done to correct it? Presumably as said it should not be necessary to have to happen and should be fixed by the developers.
2. This current Beta 4 has a number of serious issues mainly affecting entities and their visual display whereby larger entities can display erratically and in a corrupted visual display on screen in level where polys can go haywire and display so. In level I avoid walking into such entities for obvious reasons so have no idea what would happen when they do this. Clearly I normally exit gracefully the level if these bad renderings show up and "Do not save the level" for fear of corrupting it permanently. Rolfy has supplied some code which fixes this potentially but even with that code inserted to all entities .fpe files corrupted display of entities sometimes still occurs.
3. I have a level where I have placed some telegraph poles (with adjoining wires above player level) in a line about 6 of them. Despite setting the collision mode to Poly collision on these telegraph poles the player cannot pass by /under them and has to walk the line of them to pass by. Go for restricting player movement but not what is wanted! I have not looked further into why that particular entity is a problem and there may be a fix I don't know. Thats not something I want to spend a lot of time worrying about as I have no serious use for Reloaded as it currently stands so just use it as with classic for testing to see how it performs until and if it becomes usable.
Either way none of the above should affect your question specifically relating to externally imported models. I as said I do have a large entity made externally inside Reloaded that I can walk into via doorways and so on and have no collision issues. Its a large building with numerous rooms, no roof as yet so don't know if that would be an issue. I see no reason why it should be.
As said no reason I would know that you should not be able to import any entity and expect absolute correct collision. That's what Reloaded is supposed to provide for amongst other things by giving solutions to major issues for users that were serious issues well known in previous versions of FPSC.
Bear in mind that the Bullet physics though presumably integrated now perhaps to the base engine - though I cant confirm that as being the case still has to have the support of that applied throughout everything else such as entities, static or dynamic and these things are as yet not fully coded for perhaps (certainly).
Reloaded was not intended originally to support legacy content prior to itself only content designed specifically for the new engine using the engines default requirements whatever they are exactly, but most model entities legacy or recent seem to work fine in it as far as I can see in the main.
If you want to say create a large complex entity externally like a whole city and place in inside Reloaded then the only way to test that would be for someone to try it and I don't know anyone has yet. No doubt it may pose some difficulty in any engine to get it right.
Presumably Bullet physics is good enough so that it should be possible depending upon how the Bullet physics has been integrated? As Reloaded is to have and is intended to have its own internal/plugin/module system - yet to design and integrate to allow users to build such entity world objects then I presume that will be the intended defacto method of large model creation and integration for the product and other methods will not be fully supported by default. Thus importing externally created such large complex world entities will not be guaranteed.
Sorry that's not much help but at this stage Reloaded is in a basic form and not yet fully supportive of many things with some basic core features like physics only partly supported where they have been hard coded to supply some basic working Beta versions for core engine testing. Its not at a stage of much more than that as far as I can see at this moment and an early WIP.
What it will contain and develop into and provide and how good or bad any of that will end up being eventually as a whole is anybodies guess as its developing into not seemingly being an obvious linear process now where one starts at the beginning completes what one has started and then moves in a linear design plan strategy to include the basic core things first in support of and to then move forward to add further development, but is kind of a bit of this and a bit of that and see how it all pans out and evolve something out of it all as it goes.
Anyway nice to see you around again.
