I'm a bit new to game programming, and I was wondering if anyone had a good online resource to share that explains common approaches for dealing with avatar movement over a scene graph, particularly figuring out movement across the floor of a level. I understand that for terrain based on heightmaps, you can derive the players' vertical position based on the heightmap itself. The tutorials demonstrates this well. However, lets say that I'm not using terrain, but rather dealing with movement within the internals of a space ship, or maybe multiple floors inside of a building with stairs and elevator. Is there a good place to go to start figuring out how people generally solve that problem so that I'm not reinventing the wheel?
Thanks-
RJ
I would really like to help you, but I don't get the point of your problem.
If I get it right, you want ypur character (a 3d model) move around in a space ship. So the space ship is likely to be a model, too. This should have bouding volumes. So your player should be able walk around by collision detection which is done automatically.
I hope this could help a bit,
good luck
Shoot a ray straight down (or whatever direction your gravity has), get the closest collision point and place the character there. There's an example of it in jME but I don't remember what it is called.
Thanks for the reply. Using collision of bounding volumes makes sense, but I didnt want to start coding something until I was sure there was not another technique that is more commonly used.
there are many other techniques. i.e, you can use navigation meshes to describe the walkable areas of your space (including staircases and other levels). navigation meshes does not need collision detection (at least with static geometry) and also are great for implementing pahtfinding algoritms, the more common is A*