[OOC] Prin Pahts

[Aloys]

Ohh you've made lots of progress.

The new geode light in the center looks really good, especially when looking at it from bellow with the light halo.. Nice idea.

The detail texture also looks great. It's the first I see it working in an Age since the feature has been added earlier this month.
(all this makes me want to go all over the city and tweaks the textures but I lack time right now :/ )

About the staircases mapping: yes it is long and difficult and unfortunately there's no real way around this; you just have to keep tweaking by hand until it looks good. And I just walked them all and they look good.

One thing slightly bugs me though, I know I've already talked about it but: I think it still is a little too large. We will not have pedestal books everywhere, so it's no like we need all this space. I agree it gives the cave a nice impressive feeling, but the initial goal of the nexus is to save time. And reducing the walking distances is a good way to save time. (that something the cyan guys did quite well in the Uru Nexus ).


Also, I'll try to make the texture for the ground this week.

[Branan]

I think turning down the brightness on the cave walls might be a good idea - they seem unnaturally bright right now. Perhaps the area around the crystal-lights should be colored to match the light, and have the above-head area fade to black. It'll make the cavern seem larger, and at the same time save on trying to tweak the ceiling textures.

[T_S_Kimball]

[quote="Robert The Rebuilder"]
TODO:

• Incorporate T.S. Kimball's final D'ni numeral texture (when it becomes available) as decals applied to the floor. NOTE: need to do research on how Plasma does decals...

[Robert The Rebuilder]

My bad - I just needed to refresh the image. Thanks for the update, T.S.! I think I'll play with it a bit first: fill in the white parts, and do some antialiasing. But the spacing and order is exactly what I need.

J'anim: regarding the lighting. The trick is that I need to have these three omnidirectional lights illuminate the floor in the proper color for the district. So, I could just crank up the ambient settings of the ceiling material to reduce the amount that it is lit. But then that would affect the lighting of the wall/ceiling immediately surrounding the crystals. Ideally, the plugin/Plasma would let me taper off the lighting after a specified distance with a slow fall-off.

Aloys: regarding the size. You're right - the map room won't have a pedestal per shell; only one pedestal per courtyard. At its current size, the number of walking steps between courtyards is 8 steps. What is your desired distance between courtyards on the map floor?

[Aloys]

If I was the only one to decide I would reduce it to half its current size. But that's just me.
Maybe you could try reducing it by a fourth or a third?

About the lighting: you could slightly darken some specific parts by painting the vertices with a dark gray?

[Robert The Rebuilder]

Update:

Good news! I'm just about finished with Prin Pahts. Here's what I managed to accomplish during this hectic month and a half:

I took Aloys' suggestion and scaled the area to 66% of its original size (i.e. reduced it by a third). This was a little tricky, in that I didn't want to scale the steps - they need to keep their same size; otherwise, they would appear too small. After scaling the rest of the room, I trimmed off the steps that were too high up. The outer stairs were no problem - they were able to intersect when the room got smaller. But the dias steps were trickier; I had to make sure the corner vertices lined up with the shrunken hub. Now the pedestals are only 5 steps apart. This also resulted in a reduction of blackout time during links between the city and Prin Pahts, as I was able to move the entire room up 100 meters closer to the surface.

This next step took a lot of time, surprisingly. I textured Besharen's pedestals, reduced the polygon count by a factor of 10, and fixed the vertex normals. Maybe some of you know this already, but the vertex normals for lit objects are based on the average of the normals of all the polygons to which the vertex belongs, by default. For smooth, round surfaces and objects, this makes the lighting look great. However, for objects with 90 degree angles (such as the pedestals), these averaged normals make the lighting look like it is coming from the wrong direction. So, I selected adjacent faces in the pedestal and split the shared vertices (with the Y key). Now the lighting looks decent. I combined the stone texture and the patterned texture so that the pedestal can remain one object. I then used vertex lighting to set the color of the pattern, according to the district. I then placed the pedestal in each courtyard. I only have linking books in the center courtyard of each district. As the city gains more shells, I'll add more linking books.

Speaking of linking books, I added Python code to show a linking book. When you are in my fake city above, it shows a picture of Prin Pahts. When you are in the non-mini-hub portions of Prin Pahts, it shows a picture of Ahra Pahts (v0.. ANd when you are using a linking book on the mini-hub pedestals, it shows a picture of Janim's hub. The linking panel image appears to be too big. I believe the solution is to have an alpha border of 64 pixels or so around the main image (according to the linking image in Dustin's second age as a guide). But I'll tweak that once I get final images of the city and hub from Aloys and J'Anim, respectively.

I incorporated T. S. Kimball's D'ni numerals texture into the floor decals. I first colored in the outlined numerals and used anti-aliasing to smooth the edges of the curves. Then I added an underline in order to indicate the bottom of the numeral. [This is a liberty I took with D'ni numerology; it was difficult to tell which way a D'ni number was facing when you are looking at one on the floor from all directions.] I was unable to figure out how to make decals in Plasma, so I just raised the decal .1 meters off the ground, enough to eliminate Z-fighting with the floor. I made the whole texture 50% transparent, so that the tile pattern of the floor showed through, giving the impression that these are actually part of the floor tiles. I then placed a two-digit D'ni numeral over every number in the old map texture. *Whew!*

Side note: I am now an expert in Arabic-to-D'ni numeric conversions

I redid the floor geometry in anticipation of Aloys' new floor texture. I replaced the square grid with a triangular lattice. I added a granite skirt around the edge, to help offset the map from the stairs.

I added footstep regions and fixed some collision issues. Finally, I darkened the walls and the stalactite-geode structure to make the area darker (taking suggestions from Aloys and PaladinOfKaos). I tried using vertex lighting on the walls around the lit crystals, but I could not get it to look right.

I decided to skip adding carved images under the linking pedestals in the mini-hub because it should be obvious that you will be linking to the top/bottom of the actual hub.

So, the only major item left is to replace the floor map texture. Other minor items include detail textures and perhaps an environment map on the crystals to make them seem shiny, and fixing some seams.

Pictures:

• View of Prin Pahts
• Close-up of Besharen's pedestal and D'ni numerals
• So many pedestals!

Thanks to all of you for your help and your suggestions.


NOTE: You are more than welcome to download and explore Prin Pahts; see the initial post in this topic. I have not yet updated the instructions for Trylon's new Uru age tool; I have to learn how to use it myself first.

[Aloys]

Oooh lots of progress! B)
I'm downloading this and can't wait to try it..
(I think you did well to reduce the size of the room)

[Aloys]

I got it and visited it.
It looks really good. All the new pedestals and Dni numbers make it feel much more 'alive'.
Reducing the size was really worth it IMHO. It still looks impressive while being much easier to use.
About the Dni numbers: I know I'll be critised for this but, I'm not too fond of those. Many people don't read D'ni numbers well, and we have lots of those numbers which might be problematic. I understand the Age was build by Dni people so we need to have these numbers be Dni; but I think a way to make navigation easier would be good.. Maybe we could stick a Post-it note with regular numbers next to each Dni plate? Ok maybe not, but I think we should tackle the issue.
About the pedestals: having one for each courtyard will be enough I think.
I've said it before but I'll say it again: the hexagonal tiles detail texture on the ground is a very nice touch.

[edit]
BTW: I haven't forgotten the texture, but I took a good look at the room and I think we can get away with a single large texture. The nexus doesn't use too many textures so we have some memory available. As a comparison I remembered that the GreatZero uses four 1024*1024 textures for its map on the ground, which is huge, and the performance is still good. So I'm working on a single large texture which in terms of mapping is like this. (I'm not sure yet at which resolution the final texture will be.. I'd like to do it at 2048*1024, but I'm not sure we can. I don't think I have seen a texture that large in Uru, we might be limited to 1024.. we'll see. I'll complete the texture first)

[Robert The Rebuilder]

Thanks for the wonderful comments, Aloys! I agree - smaller is better.

Regarding the D'ni numerals: I was thinking of adding an easel with a variation of this texture on it. That should help.

Your suggested layout of the floor texture is fine with me. The tile detail textures help hide the large pixels of the previous floor texture, and that was only 512x512. Go ahead and give me a 2048x1024 texture; if it doesn't work, I can always reduce it.

[Robert The Rebuilder]

UPDATE:

(Yes - it's been a while...)

I replaced the floor texture with a snapshot of Ahra Pahts taken from within Blender. I rearranged/split the district triangles so that they all fall within a 1024x512 texture, to minimize space.

I threw out the "box" book and made a new book model based on a 100-year old book of Wordsworth poems.

I added pedestals to all the courtyards in the city. And, for all pedestals (in the city and in Prin Pahts) I installed the corresponding books, click regions, linking panels and link-in points.

The linking panels now have an alpha border so that when the pop-up linking book appears, the panel has the correct size.

Around each crystal mounted on the wall I placed a "glow". Makes the crystals seem more like a light source.

I added an optimization to the linking logic to the script so that, when you're in first person, the black-out time only lasts a few seconds. The problem is when using the third-person viewpoint while linking. It takes up to 20 seconds for the third-person camera to catch-up with you in your new location. While there are script commands for forcing third-person viewpoints, there are no commands for forcing a first person view. To fix this problem, I installed camera regions around each link-in point in the City. In Prin Pahts, I have one large camera region around all the link-in points.

I wanted to incorporate the Ahra Pahts logo that D'eux had devised (see this thread). Since the top part of the mini-hub was pretty barren, I decided to "engrave" the logo there. I cut out a triangle from the main hub mesh and placed it in a separate object. After subdividing the triangle, I then used the bevel command, specifying a recursion level of 2 and a width of .1; this placed a border of polygons around each triangle. I then lowered the triangles that corresponded to the black parts of the logo. One neat side effect of this is the three lights illuminate the corners of these triangles, producing a rainbow effect.

This update is available in the latest version of Ahra Pahts.

Here are some screenshots from the latest Prin Pahts:

• View from floor (this is also the linking panel image for Prin Pahts)
• Close-up of new floor texture
• View of logo and new book

In the spirit of RAWA's Myst V Timelapses, I've composed a timeline of Prin Pahts images throughout its evolution, taken from roughly the same viewpoint.

• 26/May/2006
• 29/May/2006
• 15/Aug/2006
• 29/Aug/2006
• 3/Sep/2006
• 11/Sep/2006
• 25/Sep/2006
• 21/Oct/2006
• 5/Dec/2006
• 25/Oct/2007