City shells export issues

[J'anim Paedet]

Wonderful!

And so Ahra Pahts is begun!

[The Enlightened]

I have one major concern with this plan: Everyone models differently; everyone?s style is different. Also, more importantly, is the skill of the modeller. I think that if we have only one person doing an entire shell themselves that it will not look very good because the quality will change from one shell to another. Imagine walking through a beautiful area one minute, than turning the corner and entering an area with poor texturing and poor modelling. It would be very disorienting for the player.

Wow, That sounds exactly what it is like when one walks onto a run-down reservation.

[Aloys]

[quote="Robert The Rebuilder"]So, here's a proposed simplified process:

- The "city master" maintains the city blend file, which has just the streets and stubs for each page (one page per shell, and a page for the hub)
- A page artist gets a copy of the blend file from the city master and adds the art for the shell, assigning each object to that page.
- Using a modified PRP Blender Plugin, the page artist exports the age, which stores the textures in the _District_PageN.prp file
- The page artist sends the PRP file to the city master
- The city master adds the PRP file to the bundle containing the age files, making the age available for preview by all

[Robert The Rebuilder]

I am uncertain how that would work with exporting the age. If you send an artist a blend file that only had the page for their shell, and they export the age, then send you the resulting .PRP file for that page, I wonder how it will work when you place the PRP file in your DAT folder, then attempt to link to the age.

I've only tested it with modifying the city master .blend file (complete with all streets).

Have you tried exporting the shell and then linking to the city age?

[Aloys]

Last month I had done a bunch of tests in this area but nothing was really conclusive.. I'll give this some work before I'll add the streets.
But I guess you're right and in the end I'll have to add all the pages in the Book; and the .age file too. As for the the .age file I'll devise something with excel, but for the book I'll have to add 156 little cubes floating in layer 3 in the blender file That will be the biggest Uru book.. :ph34r:

[Aloys]

By the way, just making sure before I spend an hour that could go to waste, the pages we will have are: the ground, the shells, and maybe the nexus?

Nothing else? I don't see any need to divide the age in more pages, but not knowing more about the Uru engine , there might be optimization things I might miss. I think pages are loaded in memory when they come into view, but I'm not sure how well the blender plugin handles this kind of things.
Maybe dividing the streets among several pages would be a good idea. I'm not even sure it would have a real impact on performance.. Some tests are in order here..

I think I had read that the page numbers don't need to follow one after the other ie: there can be a page 1, a page 3, but no page 2. Which means we could have each shell can have its page number equal to its shell number. (I'm trying to find where I read that but I can't, does that ring a bell to anyone?)

Page 0 : 'ground' (or however we call it: streets, etc)
Page 1 : Nexus?
Page 101 to 136, 201 to 240, and 401 to 440: shells
(the central Hub could be shell 101?)

(I think someone had posted somewhere we could use letters for pages numbers.. Maybe I'm imagining it)

[Tsar Hoikas]

Hmmm the way your cxity is going, we should work on adding Occluders to the plugin so that all the unneeded crap is not rendered.

[Aloys]

Right now I don't think there's anything in terms of rendering optimizations in the plugin: occluders, LODs, vis regions etc.. That would indeed be great to add some. but I'm not sure how much work that would require though..

[Tsar Hoikas]

A lot more than likely, and you are correct there are a *few* rendering optimizations. After the "refactoring" is complete I will be looking into Rail Cameras and Occluders. But, don't hold your breath; things are moving at a crawl.

[Aloys]

I'm actually amazed you keep working on it, not knowing what cyan has in mind for future tools. Keep up the good work.