Well I crashed it by putting the all the radius' to 0 but works very fine and looks very awesome.
Great Job!

Pretty cool and well done, I like the idea of using a simple plane and pixel clipping.

However, see the following:



When you try to create a full torus (or even before that) there are small lighting differences (huge black circles) and you can see where both ends of the ring connect (esp. in motion).

Btw. I suggest to deliver the next demo with a png/ tga screenshot function, not the default jpg format with bad compression.

EDIT: Oh and as mentioned by the previous poster it crashed when I made the torus infinitely small.

Thanks to you; I never tested the zero/zero radius case - fixed that. It actually caused a division by zero.

@Superku: Indeed, there are visible artifacts when the ring is closed; but this will never be the case in the game, so that is acceptable for me. I don't see the 'lighting differences' you are talking about, the top surface is always clean to me. I'll add a PNG screenshot function for the next POC, that is a good idea

Here is by the way the list for the second POC, which is called "buttercream". It is called that way because I plan a rich set of tasty features / experiments:

• (beveled) ground plate, sizable in width and length
• advanced ring geometry: beveled ring; bevel size dynamically changeable
• XML puzzle instantiation, stored in file or as .pak in WRS
• multiple rings with self rotation
• improved surface shaders (glossy rendering, simple reflections)
• raytraced shadows
• variable width text rendering
• distance field font rendering
• beginning a FMOD Ex DLL with support for looped OGG music playback from WRS
• PNG screenshot function

I tried the version poc-01. Very nice to play with the different values.

The only complaint is, I get only 35-40 fps.

A better approach for rendering might be a depth field with ray marching? Should be quite simple, produce better results and may even be faster.

Edit: the better term to search for is actually distance field rendering: Link

What? That is very suprising. The lighting term I use is a reduced version of the lighting of the Sponza demo. The rest is just pixel clipping for the quad (top surface of the torus) and some matrix calculations per vertex. What specs do you have?

I doubt that. In the demo I just use a model with 274 faces and a model 3.0 shader; all I do is vertex manipulation (for inner- & outer radius + mesh billboarding for the outer side). The whole raymarching thing sounds too complicated to me. I don't generate the geometry on the fly, I modify existing geometry for that.

I didn´t know what I was doing at first, its quite crappy and everything, but after far too much time here you go: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4sBGDh
I have no idea if this would actually be usable for your plans but from my experiments today, I´d say it might really be. But I have to admit that at least when procedurally generating the levels, its kinda strange to get started with those distance functions

Thank you very much! But I still don't know how this can be done in Gamestudio and how it works in general. Where do you generate the geometry?

Here are my system specs