Guild of Writers

Could the normals have any influence? I had negative results when the normals of the plane were not pointing the same way. (pointing all upwards now)

Okay, as the one who pointed this issue out in the first place, and seeing that it still doesn't appear to have been accurately communicated, I'll clarify further. Plasma uses the bounding box of an object to determine whether it is within the field of view, and therefore, whether to render it. If the bounding box of an object is not within the view frustum, it will not be rendered.

This bounding box is written to the prp file by the plugin and is not calculated or modified by the engine at runtime. This means that if the bounding box were written incorrectly, the object in question would appear and disappear, at random. (while actually being based on whether whatever bounding box, as actually written, was visible or not)

The problem with wavesets is that the geometry affected by them is moved. In the case of a waveset which is flat, and therefore has no vertices at water level, the surface of the water is actually rendered outside of the object's bounding box. When this difference is pronounced, the waveset will appear to vanish at the edges of the view as the bounding box leaves the frustum.

There is another, slightly less obvious use for the bounding boxes. They are used in plasma's runtime z-sorting, when enabled, and if the bounding box does not accurately represent the rendered object, it may be sorted incorrectly. (causing the well known z sorting issues such as far objects appearing in front of near ones, and the "x-ray" effect, caused by incorrectly sorted transparent textures)

Okay, I understood quite a bit of that actually

However, I have some questions:

1) How does one keep the bounding box from being written incorrectly?

2) My waveset mesh is NOT flat, and in raises up at the beach by 12 blender units, and the top verticies there are where the water height is, and where the center for the waveset it (just like Ahnonay). However, I do experience the sudden or random disapperance of the waveset (or flickering) some times. What would be cause that? As in Blender the mesh is completely with in the Bounding box.

3) How would one put their mesh outside the bounding box.....is that even possible? I wouldn't think it would be desirable in any case.

4) Where is the darn coffee around here???? I've looked and looked....but no coffee!

Might also want to mention here that there are some weird issues with shores. Any waveset that has a shore attached will not render at all on my computer, and Hoikas and Tahgtahv have experienced the same thing.

andylegate wrote:However, I have some questions:

1) Generally this is not a problem. The bounding box is calculated automatically based on the min/max/x/y/z locations of the verts in the mesh. It only becomes an issue when a modifier is applied to the mesh by the game that physically changes it, such as a sprite (ViewFaceModifier) or waveset (Waveset7).

2) At least one of my ages has gotten large enough that objects will stop rendering when I face a particularly busy portion of the age. This is likely what is happening to you. Visregions will probably help. Still haven't set mine up to work yet.

3) Intentionally placing the mesh outside of the bounding box is not possible via blender/pyprp, though you can always post-hack your prp files after export.

4) It was taken by the natives of Zephyr and used as a sacrifice to their gods.

Nadnerb wrote:4) It was taken by the natives of Zephyr and used as a sacrifice to their gods.

The natives are sleepless.

The natives are sleepless.

I'm pounding my hand on the desk roaring with laughter here!!!

Oh man Chacal! If you had said it the other way, I would still be on the ground laughing even harder!!

"The natives are restless!"

Nadnerb wrote:

andylegate wrote:However, I have some questions:

1) Generally this is not a problem. The bounding box is calculated automatically based on the min/max/x/y/z locations of the verts in the mesh. It only becomes an issue when a modifier is applied to the mesh by the game that physically changes it, such as a sprite (ViewFaceModifier) or waveset (Waveset7).

So, in those cases I guess the bounding box calculations done by PyPRP should be done differently....
Or are the effects of sprite/waveset minimal?

Well for Zephyr, it was like this:

It would flicker or disappear for lenghs of time with my cliffs, rocks as high polys and I started adding more geometry in the cavern. It would get to where the ocean would start flickering badly: NOTE: it did NOT do this when I first made this, but only when I started adding things in the cavern, as though I had reached some sort of "critical mass" with the amount of poly faces in the Age.

It now only happens in a few places after I reduced the polys in all the cliffs and large rocks (which now look unreal...sigh), but now it's only does this a little here or there.

Oh! Also, there was NO flickering or disappearing at all until I added 2 more wavesets too. They are very small, flat, and in the cavern.