Ahra Pahts v0.8

[Aloys]

"Haha!"
I just got one of those great "haha!" moment you have when you solve a puzzle and you see the reward unfold before you. Except it wasn't a puzzle it was a bug I finally understood, and to fix it I'll have to change most of the collisions in the city... -_-

There's a collision bug somewhere, not sure if it's in Uru or the plugin or both and that's not really important anyway. Anyhow Uru doesn't like collisions on long planes. If you look at Cyan Ages you'll see they use specific separate models for the collision instead of stapling the collisions tags on the existing models. This is both for performance reasons and gameplay reasons, and most of all it never leads to strictly flat models. (not that I've seen anyway).

Stranger: some planes works some won't. Specifically those I'm having trouble with are the streets and some of the canals: long narrow planes. You fall in the middle of some streets meshes for absolutely no visible reason. You fall right there in the middle of a face. :blink: I've done a bunch of test and in fact a number of plane works, square planes (even very large squares), some arbitrary shaped planes work some won't. But long rectangular ones never work in my experience.. I tried subdividing the faces to no avail. That doesn't make sense to me.. But then again a number of other don't. Weirder and weider: if you extrude the edges of the plane upward (to turn it a box) it fixes the issue... The 'flat' part of it that didn't work now works even though itself hasn't been touched.. Go figure. I still have a number of things to learn about collisions.

Anyhow, simple problems, simple solutions: don't make the mesh flat. I'll create an actual separate (non plane) collision mesh that'll include streets and sideways and call it a day... (More like 4 in fact, one for each district) I hoped to avoid doing that as long as possible as is long to do; but hey, that way it'll be done. At least there'll be no more collision issues.

Couple hours of fun in sight for me tonight.. :ph34r:

[Jehrid]

Not sure if this will help or not with the disappearing texture problem:

When I looked at Pahts in the PrpExplorer, I saw a double of pretty much everything. Under the Advanced section of every PRP there are two DrawableSpans groups, two SceneNodes groups, two SimulationInterface groups, etc.

And in every shell (except for #101, for whatever reason) there are two Pahts_District_Shell### groups that have identical SceneObjects entries beneath them.

Hope this helps in finding out what the problem is.

EDIT: Well, never mind. I reloaded it and when I looked it was normal again. False alarm, sorry!

[zib_redlektab]

[quote="Jehrid"] (except for #101, for whatever reason)

[Aloys]

I had problems with the shell 404 too. When I opened the book in blender to edit it, I couldn't find the page.

[zib_redlektab]

Pff, that's nothing. I couldn't get into Shell 403...

[Aloys]

Seriously though, I've fixed the collision issue with the streets (was less work than I expected); and while doing this I uncovered a mistake I made in the shells. There's a set of objects I have uncorrectly named. (The lights on the outside of the shells and the collision mesh for the stairs). That causes the lights not to appear in the Age and the stairs collide poorly (you might have noticed the avatar is 'jumpy' while entering the shells).
When you have several objects with the same name property some of them may not appear and will not collide. That's the 'may not appear' part that I still don't understand, sometimes they appear sometimes not (but they never collide)..

Objects in blender cannot have the same name: if you duplicate an object Blender will add a number '.001' to the object's name. But that doesn't affect the name property. So this has to be changed by hand. And when you have over 1500 objects in the Age it's easy to overlook a set of objects. :unsure:
Luckily shells that have been sent aren't affected because all objects are renamed when a shell is extracted.

[Robert The Rebuilder]

[quote="Aloys"] I had problems with the shell 404 too. When I opened the book in blender to edit it, I couldn't find the page.

[Aloys]

Indeed, I didn't. <_< I would have loved to hear about it earlier though. Like before I spend several dozens of hours setting their name properties and not carring about the object name..
Ha well. Hopefully that should prove usefull for the future.

But you've found the solution: nice fat triangles! Good work!

Heh, "simple problem, simple solutions. "

[Aloys]

Quick report about the bugfix version. (I should post this in my journal but I am preparing a long (hopefully interesting) entry for today that I'll post in a bit)
The new version is coming along nicely. As I said previously it's only a bugfix version. But the fact that I had to totally redo the collisions for most of the city took me a bit of time and set me back on my schedule. Ha, well. That said I learned a thing or two in the process and I did something that would have been necessary sooner or later (the new collision mesh). I'll only need to fix one minor issue I have with the bridges collision mesh and it'll be done. It should be ready tuesday.

[Marein]

If I would have two shells that were far apart from each other, would it be possible to connect them by a deep tunnel?

Or even a transport system?