[Verse-dev] Verse in a live environment

[eskil at obsession.se]

Hi!

>>From Eskil's presentations it seems it's possible to edit a game
> (Love) while it's running. I'm interested in hearing how the Verse and
> the game world interact with each other. For example, editing a
> geometry should influence various physics properties, bounding boxes
> etc. Is all the game related data stored separately from the Verse
> representation of the world or are they unified?

For the world the game has three different representations, first the
"hight map" that gives you the layout of the world, this is what the
players and the world gen code edits. Then there are the verse meshes that
makes up the trees tokens and other geometric detail of the world. Then
finally these two are merged in to a polygonized buffer of the world that
the engine renders. This buffer can be derived form the two first buffers.
If you polygonize the entire world it becomes huge (well over a gig of
ram) so i only polygonize the area around the player.

if i change something in the verse meshes, i need to repolygonize the
world buffer to see the change this is a bit slow...

> Also, is Verse being used as the networking code of Love? I'm assuming
> that a separate protocol had to be implemented for all the game
> related stuff (e.g. player movement, interactions). But I imagine it's
> possible to actually use Verse for that purpose, too. But is it
> practical?

Verse is not used for the game, but that would be possible. The problem is
that verse would let you edit the world on a polygon for polygon basis and
that would make it very hard for players to deal with.

I'm building a new asset management system using verse that i will use in
the future. I hope to release it as open source in the not too distant
future.

Cheers

E