I have a sea that uses moving vertices to create a wave effect. I have a ship that moves around in the ocean but not 'over' the waves. I have looked at using basic collision detection (already implemented on the ship) but think it will be too cpu consuming when there are 40+ ships. Do they need collision detection when they are always 'in' the sea anyway?
I was thinking a simple query using x,z of the ship to query the sea mesh so it returns the Y value of the triangle at that coord would work but I have no idea on any theory of how to do this. Can anybody help? Would using something based on the triangle selection work?


Thanks for any help

if the ocean is just an undulating heightmap then you can use a standard height map test no?

no it does not use hieghtmaps. it uses an fx file to directly alter heights.


taken from :


http://www.ziggyware.com/readarticle.php?article_id=253