Opening the cavern

[Chacal]

Not ready yet to start building an Age, I'm taking my time learning Blender, learning all I can about Plasma objects, analyzing Cyan Ages and giving Trylon and his team time to come up with a new stable version of the plug-in.

One way of doing all that was trying to modify Cyan Ages. I already made a tutorial about unlocking part of relto. That was an easy one, only involving deleting a collider.

There's also something I've wanted to do since I took my first step in the City 4 years ago: unlock every part of it. Get past those annoying barriers and gates, walk on those ghostly surfaces I could only glimpse, or visit on fly mode but never actually land onto.

Now that's more complicated than Relto. The whole City is immaterial, drawable objects that have no physical properties, except those few invisible colliders that make up the floor and the walls of the paths Cyan lets you thread on.

How to change those paths? How to add new ones? The otherwise excellent PyPRP plug-in can't export functional Cyan Ages again. Hours and hours I spent, but I found a way, using it and other tools.

And I have walked everywhere! Ah, the sweet sounds of foosteps when I run around the...



...but wait, why spoil what could be an interesting game, something to do while waiting out the hiatus, a short quest for when you can't spend hours building an Age?

What if I published a few files and an easy procedure to bring those changes into your own City, and then see how many of these changes you can find on your own?

A challenge!

[pappou]

"...I found a way, using it and other tools.
And I have walked everywhere! Ah, the sweet sounds of foosteps when I run around the..."

Chacal, is this a dream?
Or can you really plug all this into the Uru CD game?

Such freedom. I have never even gotten the flyover plugin to work.

pappou

[Chacal]

It used to be a dream. Now it's reality!

[Trylon]

While the plugin can't re-expotr cyan ages, it is possible to make a new city prp with it that adds stuff, like e.g colliders, to any place in the city.
You can then use the other tools to remove the barriers.

I take it that you did something similar, Chacal?

[Chacal]

It's a little more complicated. Adding colliders is easy, modifying existing ones is harder.
Removing the barriers does nothing as they're just for show (they don't have physicals).
Can't do that anyway because PRPexplorer doesn't have an editor for DrawableSpans and I don't want to write one.

What Cyan usually does (except in Relto) is make one single big collider that provides a floor and walls for the entire prp.
Opening holes in that involves modifying it then getting it in the Cyan prp.

The "export selected as single prp" option comes in handy.
Then you must export the object(s) using PRPexplorer, change the page ID and reimport in the Cyan prps.
Oh and if the name of the object is longer than the stupid 21 chars Blender limit, you must fix it manually in a hex editor that can do inserts.

What would be great is a "export selected into existing prp" option which would replace the objects in the prp without touching the rest. AND put the correct Page ID. It would be great for when you want to do a simple modification in your Age and you don't want to export the whole thing again.

Note: the challenge will be published shortly.
After which a tutorial or two could be coming up.

[Chacal]

I had to put this on ice for a couple of weeks because my father died. I will now resume work on the challenge.
I think it will be worth it for everyone to try.

[Chacal]

Tonight I completed some subtle changes in the City, gathered and double-checked all files, changed some object names that would have made certain new areas too obvious (there's nothing I can do for the objects named by Cyan, those darn guys tend to use significant (spoilerish) names).

I also dropped some changes in order to maintain consistency. For example, I decided that new areas will be man-made only. No running around on the island itself (the stalagmites that make up the island) because if I open it at one place, I have to open the whole island and it would take weeks. So basically if you jump out of a safe place into a cliff, you will go straight through and panic-link back to Relto. I had started to build a path from the library to the Arch, but I dropped it. Maybe later, if someone feels up to doing it...

I also tried to be consistent with the existing visible City. So there may be a new opening in a wall behind a visible door, but not in the middle of a stone wall with no visual clue. It makes some sense even if I can't take the visible door out (there's no editor for DrawableSpans in PRPExplorer and I'm not going to start editing THAT in hex). So I only fiddle with invisible colliders.

EDIT: as of November 2010, it is now possible to delete visible objects.

I have written a recipe with 39 manual steps using this syntax:
Delete Age/PRP/Physical(0x003F)/Object
Import Age/PRP/filename.uof

Applying the recipe should take at most 5 minutes. Then off you go and explore, trying to find all new open areas in the City.

I will start a thread where explorers can claim discovery for a new area, I'm thinking by adding a post with a 3rd-person screenshot inside spoiler tags.

I have already posted a tutorial here so that everyone can apply the recipe. Later, when the challenge is over, I could turn this into a full-fledged tutorial on how to add and modify objects, similar to the one I wrote hereabout deleting objects. There's a lot of manual work involved though, including some hex editing.

Tomorrow if I get time, I will do a last integrated test by applying the whole recipe to a virgin copy of Uru:POTS.

If all goes well, the challenge could start tomorrow!

[Chacal]

It's done!
Testing found two mistakes in the recipe. Always test everything, kids!
The recipe has actually 32 steps only, since the RestorationGuild stuff was done in the tutorial. It took me 8 minutes at a lazy pace, including some checking.

I have posted the challenge in the general discussion area, and also a thread for posting claims. I think it will be fun to see who will discover the areas. I hope at the end there's a few that no one will find. Not much chance of that, though.

Hopefully some will view this activity as a learning experience and realize how easy it is to customize Uru with the tools Trylon, Hoikas, Paradox, Zrax and others have provided.

Exploring the City for the first time was awesome. I still remember doing it for a full night after "To D'ni" was released. I hope Cyan can get around to opening new areas. This is the closest thing to it. Maybe it will give them some ideas? GD has said that they have everything planned already, but you never know.

Walking around these new places, I couldn't help but wish other people could join me. I used to think Cyan would never add stuff to the City in MOUL because of performance issues, or because the thing was so big and unstable that any change would make it crash. After playing around with it, I'm not so sure anymore. It is divided in many independent sections, and the engine can cope, especially since the Great Cone Slaughter. Maybe some parts can be further optimized (there are parts with way too many polys) but I don't see new areas bringing more lag. Judging from the performance gained when they killed the cones, it is obvious that dynamic objects are causing the lag (because they force a world update). Keeping the City at 100 players max should take care of that.

Feel free to tell me what you think about this activity.