Korman 0.11 Released

[Tsar Hoikas]

The strings have vibrated, and a creature known has Korman 0.11a has emerged from waves. Korman 0.11 represents 64 commits with approximately, 1,600 lines of code changed since the previous version. This release primarily focuses on bugfixes and improving existing features. Please note that no progress has been made toward making Korman compatible with Blender 2.80. Therefore this release will only function on Blender 2.79b.

I am also very pleased in that this release is perhaps the one with the most contributions from other developers who classify themselves as "not Hoikas." As such, their contributions are explicitly called out:

• Added a help menu for Korman (Thanks to Deledrius for authoring this patch)
• Added support for exporting font/text objects (Thanks to JulyForToday for co-authoring this patch)
• Added support for tying object animations to SDL variables (Thanks to Doobes for co-uthoring this patch)
• Added the ability to animate the material diffuse color
• *Added the Blending modifier
• Added the option to specify a proxy object for triangle mesh colliders
• Added toolbox operators for toggling double-sided mode on meshes (Thanks to Doobes for authoring this patch)
• Added toolbox operators for toggling packaging of sounds (Thanks to Doobes for authoring this patch)
• Changed the exponential fog export option from `SetExp2` to `SetExp`. (Thanks to Doobes for authoring this patch)
• Changed the export of Myst Online: Uru Live files to not apply any form of encryption
• Fixed a crash in the exporter when baking vertex colors to objects that share a single mesh data block
• Fixed a serious issue in which exporting with a DECIMATE modifier on a Plasma Object would cause very bad problems (Thanks to TikiBear for authoring this patch)
• Fixed a serious issue in which the toolbox enable/disable Plasma Object operators would change the page of objects enabled outside of Korman
• Fixed a traceback in the Add Lamp Flare operator (Thanks to Deledrius for authoring this patch)
• Fixed an issue in which material animations would not export with the correct duration if the Blender FPS was not set to 30 FPS (Thanks to TikiBear for co-authoring this patch)
• Fixed an issue in which new sounds under 4 seconds in length might not play in Path of the Shell
• Fixed an issue in which objects with alpha vertex paint might not be sorted into a blending span (Thanks to Paradox for authoring this patch)
• Fixed an issue in which responders might get stuck due to the way Blender internally sorts the node links
• Fixed an issue in which sound volume animations did not function as expected
• **Fixed many issues preventing runtime lighting from affecting objects
• ***Fixed many issues with physicals (eg colliders and regions) parented to animated objects (eg subworlds)

* - This is pretty much a straight-up port of the Blend Onto Advanced component from Max. It lets you specify that an object needs to be rendered after specific objects. In that way, it can replace the dreaded pass index property on materials. You can also force the object into a whole new rendering pass, which is all kinds of evil fun.

** - A report from a certain prolific Age creator indicated that runtime lighting was not working at all in his day/night cycles. So, we spent several weeks working to get it to work correctly. Previously, Korman was mishandling a large number of things related to materials and lamps. This means you may notice some parts of your Age are lit differently now that lights are correctly being cast at run-time. One particular sticking point that we uncovered while testing the MOULa update from last week was that all objects appeared brighter in the Ages Chiso Preniv and GoMePubNew. The fix here was to make sure that any lamps that are marked "Plasma Object" are not casting specular light. Blender enables this by default, unfortunately. Interestingly, the lighting was wrong only on Minkata/MOULa, but not on Destiny/Gehn/H-uru type shards. Unfortunately, I don't know what this will look like on Path of the Shell, but the behavior change should be straightforward to fix if you see it

*** - More practically, this should fix every problem that existed with subworlds in Korman 0.10. The only exception being with scaling - due to the architecture of the engine, scaling will not work as you expect with colliders and subworlds. Colliders in Uru do not have a scaling component, so your results will be inconsistent at best, especially across different versions of the game. If you see any issues where objects need their position and rotation applied, this is a bug -- please report it!

Please remember that Korman is still in beta (that's why the first number in the version is a zero)--don't shoot if there are bugs!

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Normally, I don't like sharing my Korman roadmap because so often the releases wind up being completely different than my initial plans. This one was originally intended to be thin on major Korman features and instead be bundled with a custom build of Blender. As you can see, it's still thin on features but lacks that custom Blender build. Instead, you got a lot of lighting changes. I am going to have to produce that custom Blender build soon because it's getting increasingly harder to build Korman releases with how old Blender 2.79b is. (This release was supposed to come out yesterday, but I had to troubleshoot the build pipeline, which was annoying.) That being said, I do want to share a few brief roadmap points.

Currently the next release (Korman 0.12) is slated to be a larger feature release. The core big feature is not set in stone yet, but there are two options that I have floating in mind: 1) particles or 2) in game GUIs. Each one has its own benefits that I'm sure you can imagine. They both have some major implementation costs. Particles are going to need some serious work to represent them well in Blender - not all of Blender's particle effects work in Uru, and not all of Uru's effects work in Blender. I would also like to produce either a stand-alone program or GUI in the MOUL engine itself that lets you create and customize particle effects in real time. OTOH, GUIs very severely need for objects and materials to be able to export multiple animations, which means a large overhaul of the animation system. That same animation system overhaul will be needed for bone animations (armatures) and avatar animations. Right now, I'm not interested in working on either of those, but the animation overhaul is a definite need. Apparently, Korman only exports one of the three different kinds of rotation keyframes. (Why does Blender need three different kinds of rotation keyframes? Ugh.)

I'd appreciate feedback on which of those larger features you'd like to see. That doesn't mean other features won't appear -- some features can be knocked out in a few hours. It also doesn't mean either of those two that I mentioned will make it. I have to split my time pretty severely between maintaining the MOUL engine, rolling out Gehn Shard updates, curating/developing Korman, and, most recently, triaging all the issues that occur when OU tries to use deploy fan content.. So, I guess be patient with me .

[Aloys]

A. Applause.

B. "other developers who classify themselves as "not Hoikas.". Big thanks and props to everyone involved in this and carrying the torch!

C. "Blending modifier" -- Thank heavens! I've only been struggling with surface sorting since.. 2006? (yah, I never really bothered to understand the whole pass index black magic) Maybe I'll finally be able to get some of my transparent objects rights.

D. "Particles or GUIs?" -- That's a hard one. I'm heavily looking forward to both.. But as it stands I don't see how Blender could decently handle Plasma particles without a lot of work.. ("stand-alone program or GUI in the MOUL engine itself" sounds scary from a development standpoint..) Also an overhaul of the animation system would problably be a bigger net benefit in the long run (GUI or nots). So... GUIs?

E. "Custom build of Blender" -- This! This right here. I've always said that what we trully need is a customized Uru Blender. A streamlined version that gets rid of all the many Blender features we don't need for Uru, by hacking around the Blender GUI code and removing all the buttons and panels and widgets we do'nt need (and just leave a bunch of useless uncalled functions behind,)-- and yes I know just doing that would be a ton of work and compile and not explode. But that's my dream. And that's the single best thing that could be done to bring new people to the community (assuming that's possible at all)

[Tsar Hoikas]

A streamlined version that gets rid of all the many Blender features we don't need for Uru, by hacking around the Blender GUI code and removing all the buttons and panels and widgets we do'nt need (and just leave a bunch of useless uncalled functions behind,)-- and yes I know just doing that would be a ton of work and compile and not explode. But that's my dream. And that's the single best thing that could be done to bring new people to the community (assuming that's possible at all)

Heh, the goal is more to move the compiler from Visual Studio 2013 to something a little more modern. Our tools barely build on it anymore, and I'd really like to use f-strings from Python 3.6 . We could replace a lot of the GUI elements with Python because it does the majority of the UI work there. Expect for the stuff that inexplicably only works in C. (Ugh, Blender's C.)

[Tsar Hoikas]

Note that hotfix Korman 0.11a is now available.

Changes in this release:

• Fixed a crash related to empty animations being exported in Path of the Shell
• Fixed an issue preventing material opacity animations from exporting

[dendwaler]

Is there a way to copy a plasma modifier stack from one object to multiple selected objects in one cycle?

[Sirius]

Next to the "Add Modifier" button is an arrow. Click it, then "Copy Modifiers to Selection". This will copy modifiers from the active object to selected objects.

[dendwaler]

Thx Sirius!
That does the job!
i completely overlooked that one, but its very much needed!

[dendwaler]

I am trying to trigger a soundfile by entering a region using Korman Nodes.
what ever i do returns an errormessage during the export of the nodes

Volume expected type float.

I assume i ran into a bug?

[Tsar Hoikas]

It looks like it. I think to work around it, you can set "Volume" drop-down to "(Don't Change)".

[dendwaler]

Ok , i have done that and the errormessage is gone.Thx Hoikas

Unfortunately , i don't succeed in making any working node chain.
Maybe i don't get something , i am new to nodes and can easily be overlooking things or may be its an 11a issue.
I made a small testage and uploaded it to my google drive.

one sound should be triggered when walking through the port
and the other is supposed to be triggered by clicking the pedestral.

Can someone have a look what is wrong with it? and report it?
Here is the link to the blendfile named KorTest
the sounds are not included but are present in any original Game.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QoCURnx5oUE2_MjyWWFK4IBuFpR8fStP/view?usp=sharing