Guild of Writers

If any difficult decisions are to be made, it might be worth not delaying; better to swallow the bitter pill and get them set in stone while the city is still empty-ish. Some of us may need to change our page enumeration (..and I feel the pain of Aloys and any others working on the commons..), but fewer than than there will be in a few months time (unless there are actually dosens of finished, but unsubmitted shells out there). :7
The inclusion of a day cycle strikes me as a more intrusive change than a different page numbering scheme, actually and the sooner it's decided whether to have it, the fewer design choices have to be reworked and the fewer light/-shadowmaps and vertex paints are rendered in vain (even though age ambient light might still leave them viable).

Looks like there are going to be a whole lot of wavesets in the initial load... I've got three myself, in my shell and even though they are all visregion restricted, making only one show at a time and none outside the shell, do you think maybe I should consider getting rid of them?

Jojon wrote:Looks like there are going to be a whole lot of wavesets in the initial load... I've got three myself, in my shell and even though they are all visregion restricted, making only one show at a time and none outside the shell, do you think maybe I should consider getting rid of them?

Not at all, Jojon. I think they add quite a realistic touch to the shell - just see Marcello's excellent fountains for example. The trick would be in selecting a page number for your wavesets. You could be forward-thinking and select a page number between 11 and 50; assign it to your waveset objects, then add that entry to your Pahts.age file, and your wavesets should reflect their surroundings correctly. When we merge your shell with the age, we'll be sure to add that into the age file.

For now, keep your shell number the same. I think when (not if) we do a shell renumbering, we'll do it en masse. [Pardon my French. ]

Robert The Rebuilder wrote:Not at all, Jojon. I think they add quite a realistic touch to the shell - just see Marcello's excellent fountains for example.
--SNIP--

Hehe, not in this case, belive me. :D
I'll just keep them on shell_id+1000 for now, until I actually do something with the shell. Francais excused. :)
(Man, this forum is picky with squigglies and stuff... Hmm, no ISO8859-1.. maybe UTF-8..? ..but my olde steam engine doesn't do unicode.. oh well.. :)

Robert The Rebuilder wrote:The proposed renumbering scheme contains allocated blocks of numbers for shell contents like wavesets that cannot be paged dynamically.

Right; I had set up the numbering system long before paging and wavesets were possible; and now it's sort of obsolete..
I'm kind of attached to this system because I've been using it for a while and it makes it easy to know what pages correspond to what area of the Age. But if it has become troublesome it should definitely be changed.

As I mentionned earlier I'd like to get away from the integration; it's not my strongest point and Alcscript is just not my cup of tea -- especially for an Age of this size. And the less time I spend on integration the more time I can spend on content and assets. I can still integrate the easy stuff, but I'd rather stay away from Alcscript if I can. So if you and Dox agree with that, I'll now focus solely on the content for AP.
At the end of this month my current RL job will come to an end, as such I will have some free time and I plan to spend quite a bit of it doing all the Age work I haven't been able to do for the last year and a half.

I'm fine if you'd like to focus on just the content. Paradox and I can work out a plan for 'the great renumbering'; it'll probably involve some command shell scripts for renumbering the age files and some Blender Python scripts for each shell developer to use (for future exports).

Sorry to hear about your community manager job coming to a close, Aloys. I hope it was enjoyable.

UPDATE: A new version of Ahra Pahts is now available! It contains Andy Legate's shell (#315), the first shell created via the 3DS Max plugin! See it for yourself and get the city at the link below:

• AhraPahts08J.zip

Ahra Pahts and MAx plugin ? How can it be? Is it kosher?

Yes - no pork was involved in the production of the shell.

I'll leave the details to Andy, but he initially converted the shell geometry from Blender to Max After finishing the shell, he then used Drizzle to convert the PRP to POTS format after Max generated it in MOULa format.

Your link to newest version is definitely dead.

Congrats on the shell Andy!

Your link to newest version is definitely dead.

I'll second that, looks like the file is flagged '404' for now.
Can any of you upload a screenshot of the place so we can get a first taste?