Hi, I''ve read about BSP trees- there''s also a tutorial about using them in www.gametutorials.com with a quake level. Is it worth writing my own one from scratch - what I mean is that on www.gameinstitute.com there is a whole course for $125 about them. Is this money well spent in order to get up to speed on something that at a high level seems reasomnably understandable to me anyhow. cheers

hi,

I'd say its worth it from a 'learning' experience, although in terms of game production they are rapidly losing favor these days. Doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't use them though.

As to whether its worth paying out for the gameinstitue course thats a different matter. I saw much of the course tutorials before it got taken offline for use in it and felt it was proberbly the most well written and indepth article on the subject you'll likely to see. Obviously I can't comment on the actual course as i've not seen it, bu I would presume it expanded on the original tutorial. However there are plenty of other BSP sources online (google), just depends if you can get an implementation working from them.

There are two main uses of BSP trees (at least for me), one is to get an accurate draw order (avoiding things like the painters algorithm issues), the second is for simpler collision/line of site detection. Its biggest problem is long computational times and limited usefulness for destructable/deformable geometry.

On a personal note, I usually find the journey of learning some new method and its implementation often more useful than the method itself. Each new thing you learn becomes a building block for something else.


[edited by - noisecrime on June 3, 2004 7:17:54 AM]

Thanks,
You said they''re rapidly losing favour - what''s replacing them then ? Octrees ? (which again are simply recursive ways of splitting up the world).

Well Octree''s are pretty useful, I''ve used them myself for polygon soup levels. However I hear very good thing about ABT''s, but haven''t had the time to investigate them yet.

I think you''ll find a few threads about ABT here (or in graphics programming and theory forum).

Starting point
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=163240