My RAD entry Pahts Shell 119

[Grogyan]

Robert the Rebuilder gave me a a lot of help today after I brought in the original copy of the shell an attempted for the first time to make it compatible with the GoW plugin.

I also took time out to look at Robert's shell final shell design, and it looks spectacular, he has so many moving bits and looking at the code, I can't see what the codes are for the doors, which is real "craftsmanship".

But now that I have the shell, and have modernized parts of it, I can get onto modeling it, just one problem.

Its not symmetrical ie the door way to the shell isn't in the centre, but I guess I have to work around that.


This is going to be a challenge, even for a long term project.
I have no idea what it could like, no ideas for textures, nothing but a general layout of puzzles I want to introduce.


I need time to think, which is something I don't have time for!

[Grogyan]

Wow does Blender have some holes in it, and its booleans instead of true CSG needs work.

All those extra vertices have chewed up more time than anything else so far, that and the fact they don't want to move where you want them to.

In any case the main structure is nearly complete, just got to change the texture of the supports, i'll have to check with RtR how he did the crystals in Prin, as its the same effect that I am after.

1 out of 3 puzzles I had planned are finished too, at this rate 2 would be finished and the last would have to be amalgamated when I finish the shell after the contest.
2 is ok I think, but i'm not in this to win, but to learn.

[Grogyan]

I have sent away my Shell ready for the judging tomorrow, unfortunately I had one problem that I couldn't overcome, well other than lighting, sprites, a moveable object, a keypad etc in the time frame alotted, that being the journal, it would have explained so much in such a little thing, but that little thing refuses to work, i've gone through many tutorials, and the book still won't open, worse yet is the book is 3 times larger and rotated a bit, which something that the plugin must've done because its no that way in Blender.
The ladder region too is rotated more than it should I don't know why this is happening.

I just need a few days of rest, then i'll see what happens with plugin 1.3.0

[Grogyan]

Well i'm back working on fixing my shell, still working on the over lapping footstep regions.

There are more bugs that need to be worked out, here's what I found
[spoiler]
The footstep sound problem where believe that footstep sound regions don't exist, actually do, everywhere except the slide, and a footstep sound problem on the ladder, changes to dirt then back to rope again, but when nearing the top switches to metal, I have several experiments to do to try and fix this, none I think will actually work, this is one bug to fix.

The hint is not in its final state or location but where I had put it is where it will be till I finally finish it, the hint is actually a polygon not a plane with an alpha texture on it, surprised that none of the judges saw it.

The terracotta hexagon tiles that appear to flicker is a problem with the game engine I believe, I also believe I can fix this by making them cubes.

When looking down or up from that central hexagon "light tube", you can see through the age.

The back crystal has green on it and missing faces, this has since been fixed.

The journal is very large and tilted and non functional, this was an error on my part, had to move the book mesh out, move the vertices, and selected an option called "apply scale and rotation", also the journal is now working in my private copy.

In the under pyramid maze, if you look up you can see the underside of the pyramid, this has yet to be fixed.

Texturing of the under pyramid maze is flat, not what I had intended, but since the new plugin (1.3.0) I intend to use its new feature of animated textures to make that maze more disorientating.

The fact of non existant lighting is simply a fact that I had run out of time to apply any lighting what so ever.

There are also overall too many vertices for any given poly, this is attributed to the lack of bug fixing for booleans by the Blender group
The crystal slide needs a footstep region.

The area that is fenced off will contain story elements, can't say much more

The ladder is missing rope, this was on the back burner until I had fixed another problem, see below

The ladder region is not square to the ladder, this has since been fixed with the menu option "Apply Scale and Rotation"

There is no top ladder region.

The upper hex maze cannot be lowered due to limitations with surrounding geometry

There is a texture bug on this pyramid to fix

The tree, is really a tree not a plane or several planes, this was simply an experiment with Gen3 and how it works with Plasma, this tree has in excess of 8000 vertices
[/spoiler]

[Grogyan]

Well i'm back working on fixing my shell, still working on the over lapping footstep regions.

There are more bugs that need to be worked out, here's what I found

Show Spoiler

The footstep sound problem where believe that footstep sound regions don't exist, actually do, everywhere except the slide, and a footstep sound problem on the ladder, changes to dirt then back to rope again, but when nearing the top switches to metal, I have several experiments to do to try and fix this, none I think will actually work, this is one bug to fix.

The hint is not in its final state or location but where I had put it is where it will be till I finally finish it, the hint is actually a polygon not a plane with an alpha texture on it, surprised that none of the judges saw it.

The terracotta hexagon tiles that appear to flicker is a problem with the game engine I believe, I also believe I can fix this by making them cubes.

When looking down or up from that central hexagon "light tube", you can see through the age.

The back crystal has green on it and missing faces, this has since been fixed.

The journal is very large and tilted and non functional, this was an error on my part, had to move the book mesh out, move the vertices, and selected an option called "apply scale and rotation", also the journal is now working in my private copy.

In the under pyramid maze, if you look up you can see the underside of the pyramid, this has yet to be fixed.

Texturing of the under pyramid maze is flat, not what I had intended, but since the new plugin (1.3.0) I intend to use its new feature of animated textures to make that maze more disorientating.

The fact of non existant lighting is simply a fact that I had run out of time to apply any lighting what so ever.

There are also overall too many vertices for any given poly, this is attributed to the lack of bug fixing for booleans by the Blender group
The crystal slide needs a footstep region.

The area that is fenced off will contain story elements, can't say much more

The ladder is missing rope, this was on the back burner until I had fixed another problem, see below

The ladder region is not square to the ladder, this has since been fixed with the menu option "Apply Scale and Rotation"

There is no top ladder region.

The upper hex maze cannot be lowered due to limitations with surrounding geometry

There is a texture bug on this pyramid to fix

The tree, is really a tree not a plane or several planes, this was simply an experiment with Gen3 and how it works with Plasma, this tree has in excess of 8000 vertices

[ametist]

I still like it Grogyan!

[Grogyan]

Thats very kind.

Update on progress. What progress?!

Needless to say that my real life needs attention to, and keeping up tabs in SL now with my hood buddies.

I got the top footstep region working as it should, apparently it had missing faces? Don't know how the version for the RAD contest could have worked, oh well.

Looking at adding another puzzle to the shell, but it requires python coding, ugh, but i'll looks at some AlcScript a bit later to see if I can skip the python part, probably won't have an effect.
If I can get coloured layers of a texture to come up sequentially between dark grey (off), Red, Green, Blue and white (on on correct sequence) under AlcScript, maybe it won't be such a problem.

Next real task though is getting rid of those nasty terracotta corner tiles, and fix that center hexagonal hole

[Grogyan]

Last night I changed some more settings still havn't got the outline to show in game.
Took the oppotunity to convert my audio recordings from amr to wav and edited them in Audacity.
Put that recording into blender along with the required AlcScript, but heard nothing in game, and I have an idea why, I must've forgotten to add to the sound emitter the logic property "page_num 119"

As I was following the tutorial, I have feeling that it hasn't been updated with the new way, and new flags.

[Grogyan]

Wow, its been a long time since I made an entry here, not surprising really as I have had way too many things keeping me well and truly occupied that I havn't had much time at all to work on this shell, which is missing a lot of lighting elements.

Now that the plugin has reached version 1.4 and version 2.0 not too far off, I hope to be able to make use of every feature as I can, for example when wave sets were implemented I immediately came up with an idea of how to implement this.

I can now say for near absolute certainty say that the rope ladder will be no longer necessary, which was mentioned several time in the GoMa forum.
It was great to get this feedback as I will also implement further puzzles, which means more fun for you guys and a better template I hope than the FuncChk Age.

Andy has also released ZC into a near finished state, but as of yet I cannot even get it up on ULM.

As for linking within an Age I still don't know how to do it, but I think I might just send Aloys another PM as the nexus for Prin will use a similar interface, but i'd like to do it with D'Lanor's book template

[Grogyan]

I've come back to work on my shell again to hopefully finish it as a complete something, when the rest of PyPrp is finished.

I was working on it till I heard lots of, loud, fireworks, that is when I looked at my clock and it was 1st Jan 2009

Show Spoiler

I've added a small room, an changed the ladder setup, and would like to know how to stop the avatar from climbing all the way up the ladder.

I've also gotta figure out what precisely is the angle the star in Pahts is pointing, plus a whole lot of light mapping above and in the water labyrinth