Night Time Zephyr Cove

[Erik]

I have an Intel Core 2 Quad 2.40 GHz processor and 2 GB memory and a GeForce 8800 GTS, so I didn't notice any performance issues, however, sometimes some odd things happened when I was standing somewhere with the camera at a certain angle. Sometimes some sort of yellow ray shot from the tiki torches, and also, a section of rocks turned white once at a certain angle. Also, I could no longer swim, but I walked underwater, which reminded me of Pirates of the Caribbean.

[Jojon]

Well, Andy is a navy man, after all. Those torches triples as tiny lighthouses and sentry guns. As long as they don't inform you that they can see you, there is little reason to worry.

[andylegate]

Don't tempt me......I could put in a light house like the one at St. Augustine, Florida......and a small fort with cannons.....

[Erik]

The next generation of Myst puzzles: finding a way to avoid the shooting cannons...

Destruction is coming, find a way, build a fort!

[Grogyan]

Thanks Andy, I had a look at the new Zephyr Cove, it looks great, though still has many bugs in it
eg sharp geometric edges and textures


I take it that you'll work on it more so that we can go even deeper.

Just one tiny question, how did you do those tunnels and their unevenness?

[andylegate]

first, the geometry on the cliffs is sharp because I decimated the faces many times.....just recently, due to performance problems, and the fact that visregions don't work.

Prior to this download, the cliffs were a lot smoother, so were the rocks, as they had a LOT more faces. But I had to choose between better performance for people with lower end computers, or keep it high res, and then loose a lot of people who have computers that can't handle it.

The tunnels are nothing more than cylinders with subdivided faces, that I then turned around a propotional edited.....then duplicated! Chambers are grids that were also edited and in some cases joined together.

[Grogyan]

There shouldn't be any excuse now not to put into your computer a fairly decent video card like mine, its both powerful and inexpensive (I don't have much money either), just need to make sure your motherboard has a PCI-e slot

I have an 8800GTS 512MB and a Q6600 cpu, cheap as chips

[D'Lanor]

There shouldn't be any excuse now not to put into your computer a fairly decent video card like mine, its both powerful and inexpensive (I don't have much money either), just need to make sure your motherboard has a PCI-e slot

I have an 8800GTS 512MB and a Q6600 cpu, cheap as chips

I have to disagree. There is a very good excuse. Cyan ages look better than ours and they run on low end systems. The system requirements on the Uru CC disc must be respected at all times. Nobody should have to upgrade their hardware just to play user ages.

[Aloys]

I agree. (although it sometimes makes Ages harder to optimize)

[Grogyan]

There shouldn't be any excuse now not to put into your computer a fairly decent video card like mine, its both powerful and inexpensive (I don't have much money either), just need to make sure your motherboard has a PCI-e slot

I have an 8800GTS 512MB and a Q6600 cpu, cheap as chips

I have to disagree. There is a very good excuse. Cyan ages look better than ours and they run on low end systems. The system requirements on the Uru CC disc must be respected at all times. Nobody should have to upgrade their hardware just to play user ages.

I disagree D'Lanor The system requirements for CC were unrealistic at the time, I know cause I had an old GeForce 2 32 MB card, and that struggled something appalling, and I reckon many of the effects that Cyan were aiming for were not available to GeForce 3 and below, including FX series I think.

Obviously we should be looking to the system requirements for Myst 5 or MOUL for our Ages on CC.

I think in part why Cyan's Ages look so good is that they probably use NURBS surfaces which can be made more efficient to render than regular meshes