Pellet Water Color!

[Nytician]

Hi I don't know if this is possible but is there anyway to make the pellets actually change the water color like they are meant to?

Would be an awesome addition, but love the effort on the Gehn Shard anyhow! xD

[Tsar Hoikas]

Hi Nytician, thanks for the words of encouragement! We're very glad you're enjoying the shard.

We've been discussing content additions over the last few days, and pellets actually did come up. We would like to implement some sort of gradual light cycle at some point--a community member even contributed some code for this several months ago. We've yet to port it to the online environment from the offline but trying it out is definitely in our future plans. I emphasize the word gradual because if we make the cavern too bright, you'll start to see some of the rougher edges of Ae'gura

[Wamduskasapa]

Speaking of Water and Its colour.

In the early days of URU during the Beta there was some discussion and rumor that if we could raise the lakes light level, that there was the possibilities of raising and sailing some of the ships in Ae'gura's Harbour. AND, Also of finishing the repair of the tunnel under Ae'gura so that it would be possible to sail through and around Ae'gura. Was this just a Pipedream from Cyan or would it be possible to actually see all of the truly wondrous City from the water, after the lake has been returned to its former glory???

I know that Cyan will never do any more work to URU, But what about on the Gehn Shard???

[Sirius]

Someone already asked about the lake tour, actually, but I'm not sure who and how far it has gone. I found back a thread in which ZURI created a replica of the boat, though.

There are several problems with it, though they are not major:
- since most of the city is displayed in the harbor, the lags are quite horrible on low PCs
- because of the visregions stuff, parts of the city are hidden from the harbor (the whole buildings in which Chacal made his amazing challenge).
Someone would need to re-make a low-poly version with a new visregion for it to look good
- since you are not supposed to go there, the visual quality is... well, quite low. Kerath's Arch, for instance, looks good from a distance but is totally fake once you get close.
And there is no water outside the island, which means the boat would be floating in the air... humm...

The tunnel also needs to be re-detailed (it's just a very flat, ugly tunnel). And the docks behind the locked door on the ferry terminal leads to nowhere. And the back of the island is ugly and has huge holes in it...
Ok, now I'll stop listing the problems

Just one more thing: if someone raises a boat from the lake, he'll need to turn on the lighthouse. 'Cause when night falls upon D'ni, boats can't ride far .

Anyway, even with these bugs, a small tour on the boat would be quite nice !

[janaba]

Most if not all of you might know that the boat wouldn't be a problem at all as it is already possible to take that absolutely smooth and wonderful tour on the TOC Shard and the lag problem of the initial stages of its raising seems to be solved as well as far as I can tell, esp. by my own experience ...

Sirius has described everything aleady that would 'stand in the way' of an opening of the tunnel to actually pass through it by boat, not the opening per se, which happened already in the Drizzle offline version of Uru, but the backside of those mountains and the waters would very intensively needed to be elaborated on, in many places they are actually not there, you see them only from the front side ... I don't want to curb anyone's dreams, but there is no glory or anything like that to admire ... also the city is that already known blurry, indistinct 'wall/panorama' in the distance, and as Adam expressed it already so nicely, but accurately:

I emphasize the word gradual because if we make the cavern too bright, you'll start to see some of the rougher edges of Ae'gura

In the Drizzle version you can 'fly' through that canyon towards the city mall and Tokotah, which is nice, but I believe that passageway would be too small to pass through by boat ...

[Tweek]

I have an updated city backdrop texture I made to lighten the cavern in my offline build if you ever need it Hoikas.

Here is an example of it in use;

[Sirius]

This backdrop feels a lot better than the current one, IMHO. It makes the cavern smaller, which fits better with the original concept (I'm referring to pictures of D'ni on Chiso, such as this one).

From your picture, however, it seems the main city (located on a wall of the cavern) is southwest of Ae'Gura (the Arch being south). I think originally it was designed to be southeast of it. But aside this detail, it's really nice.

Is there any place to download it ?

[Tweek]

Well I didn't tweak the backdrop to be canon specific it was just an exercise in brightening the cavern to make it look more like DIRT era D'ni.

I don't remember where I put the backdrop let me check I'll upload it if I can find it.

[Ehren]

Storywise, the lake shouldn't be brighter all the time, but have a "day/night" cycle of getting brighter and dimmer. A cycle that repeats about every 30 hours I think.

My theory is that originally Cyan had intended to at some point add an algae light cycle to Ae'gura (and probably Bevin). So at some points of the day the cavern wall would've been more clear then at other times. Maybe then the maximum brightness of the cycle would have vary by the amount of pellets dropped or something like that... I think that would have been the coolest way for it to work.


Making a cycle able to calculate brightness from the time of day and the total global pellet score would, I assume, be pretty hard. But probably possible.

[Sirius]

...And that's what I did in the script I released

Cyan already set the day length of every D'ni location to 30 hours (it doesn't do anything in game, but is a placeholder for later additions. Example: most Ages have a day length of 24 hours, the Pods of ~15 hours, Gira of 10 hours...)

I copied the script from Negilahn, which simulated daylight by simply changing the mist color and density (Gira changes the object's colors as well, and modern game engines have fully dynamic lighting, but changing the mist works really nice on old game engines). It's working by getting the Age's day length and current hour, and finding smooth transitions between fixed values (for instance, full black and high density for night). In the end I just had to find settings that feel right in D'ni, and add the pellet factor thing.

The backdrop should be more or less visible depending of the time of day, since at night the mist density is higher.



About this pellet factor: I was testing it on Complete Chronicles, and I ran in an instancing error with the pellet score. To make it short, CC doesn't have any proper place to store these points (unlike MOUL), and because the city is a shared instance, when trying to retrieve it, it took the score from another instance of the Ashemen... A "copy" of the Age you couldn't link to, and in which the pellet score was always 0.
There were other ways of doing this, but it would be too hacky to work properly online.
So the script I released simply ignores pellets, and runs like the lake was fully restored.

I added code which might work on MOUL though, it just needs to be tested.


On a side note, I'm glad this subject is being brought back. Due to the lack of response on the other topic, I was wondering whether anyone cared at all.