Getting visible objects on screen

I have spent a few hours on this, and I haven’t really came up with a solution.

Say I have a chest with several objects inside, and I want to know if these objects can be interacted by the player. I want it to be easy for the player to interact with several objects in a small radius around the center of the screen, ordering from nearest to the center to furthest. That way I could have a player grab several items without having to directly look at each one. Sorting the objects is no problem since I can just transform all object to screen space and sort them that way.

So far, I’ve filtered potential candidates with the following:

Urho3D::PODVector<Urho3D::Node*> results; GetScene()->GetChildrenWithComponent<GameItem>(results, true); for(Urho3D::PODVector<Urho3D::Node*>::Iterator itr = results.Begin(); itr != results.End(); itr++) { float distance = (_cameraNode->GetPosition() - (*itr)->GetPosition()).Length(); Urho3D::BoundingBox box = (*itr)->GetComponent<Urho3D::StaticModel>()->GetBoundingBox(); box.Transform((*itr)->GetTransform()); if( Urho3D::INSIDE == camera->GetFrustum().IsInsideFast(box) && distance <= 3.0f) { debugRenderer->AddBoundingBox((*itr)->GetComponent<Urho3D::StaticModel>()->GetBoundingBox(), (*itr)->GetTransform(), Urho3D::Color::GREEN, false); } }

Any ideas?

That’s kind of how I have been doing a bunch of my distancy/radius maths. I havn’t tried using a physics based solution. Something like having a giant cylinder around the character and capturing all collisons per interaction. A mask could be used.

I don’t exactly know what kind of camera you are using. That may be helpful information.

One of my original ideas was a cone emitting from the cameraNode pointed out at 3 units length. It worked in grabbing all of the items close by, but again it would still detect items that are hidden away. Such that a player wouldn’t have to open a chest to be able to grab everything inside so long as the player was within 3 units of the content.

For the moment I’ve switched to using a physics-based ray query so that a convex hull at least gives better precision. I’m hoping though that I will be able to make it so that a player could grab items much like in oblivion or skyrim for example.

This looks promising:

Drawable

Methods:

• bool IsInView(Camera@) const

[quote=“friesencr”]This looks promising:

Drawable

Methods:

• bool IsInView(Camera@) const[/quote]

Promising indeed! As a note it only works with occluders and occludees. Here’s a little snippet to easily visualize the effect:

Urho3D::PODVector<Urho3D::Node*> results; _scene->GetChildrenWithComponent<Urho3D::StaticModel>(results, true); for(Urho3D::PODVector<Urho3D::Node*>::Iterator itr = results.Begin(); itr != results.End(); itr++) { float distance = (_cameraNode->GetPosition() - (*itr)->GetPosition()).Length(); Urho3D::BoundingBox box = (*itr)->GetComponent<Urho3D::StaticModel>()->GetBoundingBox(); box.Transform((*itr)->GetTransform()); if( !(*itr)->GetComponent<Urho3D::StaticModel>()->IsInView(camera)) { debugRenderer->AddBoundingBox((*itr)->GetComponent<Urho3D::StaticModel>()->GetBoundingBox(), (*itr)->GetTransform(), Urho3D::Color::GREEN, false); } }

This makes it so that only fully hidden objects are debug drawn. Works like a charm as long as I set my occluders correctly!

I wonder if there may be a better way in the future, though. I can’t complain with this approach, but it is based off frame occlusion information, which is dependent on this such as frame size and the likes. I doubt it’s a real problem though.

If your objects have Drawable components, you can use octree queries (box, sphere, frustum etc.) to get the objects within a geometrical volume. See Octree::GetDrawables(). This is the same what the rendering code is using.

For physics rigidbodies there’s similar but more limited functionality, you can query the physics world by a box or sphere volume. See PhysicsWorld::GetRigidBodies() overloads.