Periodic boundary (rendering the whole scene multiple times)

Hello all. I’m trying to create a world with a periodic boundary, that is, you go off one side and come back on the other.

To do this (in 3D) I need to draw the whole scene 8 times and put them next to each other, to form a larger scene “cube”. I’m hoping it’s just the rendered portion that needs cloning, not the physics objects.

I’ve tried Node::Clone() but I don’t see any cloned node in the scene, and it looks like Clone is just for replicating across a network anyway?

Perhaps there is a way to do it with the Renderer or Viewport?

Any hints much appreciated!

The engine doesn’t support rendering the same node in multiple positions, so unless you make engine changes for this, you need to have an actual copy of the “world tile” in your scene, at least with the drawable components.

Node::Clone() should work, it’s not intended for net replication. After cloning, call SetPosition() on the clone node and you should see it in a different position.

Thanks for the hint. I found out why nothing was showing up when I did a Clone.

The basic problem is that Clone expects the cloned Component's Model to have come from the ResourceCache (see StaticModel::SetMaterialsAttr). However, my Models are custom and created at run time, so are not in the ResourceCache. Hence the cloned Component has no Model and doesn’t render (and I get an error log “Material index out of bounds”, since it’s trying to clone a Material onto a non-existent Model).

Adding my models to the ResourceCache via AddManualResource gets me something on screen to play with. It doesn’t get me all the way to a periodic environment, but at least I’m making progress .

Yes, the resources are indeed necessary to be named and in cache as the cloning doesn’t operate with pointers, but through the generic attribute serialization. Cool that you figured it out!