Escher's Relativity is doable

[Karkadann]

Here is the Max file with the Crazy crate and the Penrose triangle, I also included My TestEx age (Prefix 2010) with a suggestion of how it might be set up.
Tell me what you think what it might need how it can be improved ext,ext. Keep in mind this is just the first draft for these things.

http://www.mediafire.com/?0e04jq72417osb8

[tachzusamm]

I see this thread is still active. Oh well.

Seems I should write some words. ^^

First, sorry for my long absence. I could make a long story out of it, but the short form is: I got sidetracked by real life work. My, umm.. main customer - who paid about 80% of my income - closed, so I had to do this and that various job to survive; plus, as a sidenote, my health was not on it's highest level. As was my mood.
Now - since a while - I'm back in normal business again, feel fine too - and I have quit smoking. ^^

Sometimes it took 3 month or so to let me have a look to this forum. But I've never forgotten it completely.
And I must admit that I became a bit disappointed too. My hope was that someday we will be able to port our ages to the new Blender 2.5 /2.6 tool, to be able to run them on Cyan's server or private servers, in the actual MystOnline client. It seemed this is not going to happen, because the main developers of the PyPRP tools got sidetracked as well. The PyPRP 1 team was a lot bigger, with many smart developers involed.
Regarding Relativity, i felt a bit sad too because I released the complete sources and documented them well in the hope that somebody can take it as a starting point to step in and add this or that to the Age. My deepest apologies here; I was just too impatient. More that a year is simply too short to wait. *grin*

But I see it happen now. That's really great.
You guys are great. What I've seen so far, is truely promising.

Calena, your design and creative skills are on a level I will never reach. I'm soo eagerly awaiting what you will make out of it.
By the way:

[..]I asked tachzusamm if he wanted help finishing off this age while he was still an active member of this community. He wasn't interested.[..]

I doubt that I said something like that. If I remember it correctly, we had discussions about integrating Relativity into your Age (that with the name I can't really spell^^) which I declined because I did not see how a 3 dimensions Age could integrate into a "normal" Age. And still do. And I may have said that I don't need help *currently* (those times ago) because I mainly worked on the AlcScript / Python scripting to get it working first. Could be it was a misunderstanding because our way of communitating was unusual (via text files over Dropbox in different timezones).

To have this said again clearly: Everybody is encouraged to use the project and expand it.


Christian, I really love your design of giving the house a roof (or multiple roofs).

[..]One thing that bothers me about the age as it currently is, that is clearly visible in this picture, is that the garden planes are invisible from the undersides. That makes you see things like the fall tree in this picture, or other people standing on the garden planes, float in mid-air, which I think takes away from the immersion. [..]

I know what you're talking about.
In the first place, I HAD the planes visible. It looked somehow ugly when you have a wall of gras of huuuge height in front of you.
So, it's not the case that the planes are invisible from below is based of lazyness - in fact they are made intentionally invisible from below.
I've set up VisRegions to accomplish this.

So the idea was to make ALL objects on "other" planes invisible.
You can find a comment about this in the last chapter in the AlcScript, named "Defining behaviour of the Gardens".
Each object in a Garden should be added to the belonging VisRegion of the Garden; this should handle it.
The issue that comes into play then is how to let a Garden end at a boundary to another Garden / dimension. I have planned to put big hedges or such on those boundaries, because just letting a grass plane end in space looks strange. I should have mentioned this plan earlier somewhere, I guess.

Of course, Avatars will still be visible from everywhere. Is the a chance we can suppress this too? I'm not aware of any method.


And to all others currently involved I did not mention (sound, ideas): Good job, keep up your work.



Finally, am I back again now?
Honestly, I don't know. Still lots of work and a project with a timeline. A long project.
I will try to visit this forum more often now, but no promises.

~Tach

[tachzusamm]

Seems I can't still edit the post, so an addendum to the hidden planes.

Sometime planes are forced hidden not only from below, but from above as well - when you enter a different dimension. I did this to avoid this huge grass wall in front of you. The explanation above did not describe it correctly. That's the reason for the VisRegions. They are set up and fine-tuned to show only the Garden content (belonging objects) of the current Garden/dimension.

But that's not a must, of course; maybe there's a way to setup the VisRegions in a better way (not only simple cubes for example). I just found it complicated to set them up that times, in a way that everybody still can understand how they are set up and why.
If I don't like huge walls in front of me may be only a personal preference of mine.

[Calena]

Hi tach!! You just made my day . Thanks for stopping in. You were gone, but not forgotten! I hope your rough patch is well and truely behind you.

After waiting a year, the only age writers left here are the ones that do it for the sheer love of doing it. I've got Max7 and I've already built in it, but I admit I have zero desire to build for MOUL. Too many hoops to jump through, too many cooks in the kitchen, it just isn't worth it to me. But fortunately, diafero kept his word and still has Deep Island available for any and all who want to share what they build.

When I asked you about helping with this age, you actually never answered me . I took that as a no. To be honest, looking back at the work I was doing then, I don't blame you. I somehow never caught on that you posted publicly for us to keep working on the age. You can thank Karkadann for his never ending patience and determination for getting this thing started again. Once I understood what you had said, I cheerfully went to work.

I didn't break it yet! Seriously, I'm working very hard to follow your guidelines and keep this whole thing very, very, extremely organized.

The way the VisRegions were originally set up made sense at the time when it was black all around the house. Putting in the sky sphere made a huge difference visually. I also think it needs changed now.

I changed the color of the sky. I had to do this visually from Christian's screen print. Sorry Christian, but there is no such thing as a -5 hue. I tried using +5, but that wasn't even blue, so I eyeballed it. That's usually not a very good idea because different monitors display colors differently. It can be easily changed if it's still unsatifactory.

Only two screenshots tonight to show the new sky color and where I put the new geometric sculptures. I really just picked spots with lots of room. They can be moved, but it would be best done before I start baking the new lightmaps.

Crazy Square

Penrose Triangle

What I have left to do is -

- Add Rhee's flowers
- Animate the doors
- Finish up my personal contribution (not telling )
- Put snow on the ground in the winter scene
- Put dead leaves around the fall tree
- Bake the lightmaps
- Put the new sounds/music in

I think that's it. My window of time to work on this will close soon, but I should be able to get this all done and upload the new file in a week or two.

[tachzusamm]

I somehow never caught on that you posted publicly for us to keep working on the age.

It was mainly in the post itself where I put the files for download:
viewtopic.php?p=55240#p55240
"I think its time to release it, because others are waiting to contribute. [..] When contributing: Please do read the documentation I wrote in Blender."

You can thank Karkadann for his never ending patience and determination for getting this thing started again.

Indeed, that's true. Thank you a lot, Karkadann, for your continued posting and asking people for help in working on this projekt. You did better than me. Some people tell me that I'm really patient, but you beat me on this. ^^

Seriously, I'm working very hard to follow your guidelines and keep this whole thing very, very, extremely organized.

I'm not sure if you can imagine how happy I am when I read this. *lol* (no, really. No kidding.)

The way the VisRegions were originally set up made sense at the time when it was black all around the house. Putting in the sky sphere made a huge difference visually. I also think it needs changed now.

Hmm... *thinking*
I don't get it. What have VisRegions to do with a sky sphere?
Maybe there's a misunderstanding what VisRegions do or how they are used. VisRegions DO NOT have to surround any object. They DO NOT work like "show me what's inside a VisRegion".
Instead, they are used to hide objects that are linked to a VisRegion when the CAMERA is outside the VisRegion.
In words: "Show me all objects linked to the VisRegion if my camera is inside this VisRegion; otherwise don't show the linked objects."
(Other objects not linked to any VisRegion are shown always of course).

So, if you don't link a SkySphere to any VisRegion, it can be seen every time. It will also be seen from each Region when it's linked to all Regions (although this does not make much sense in most cases. But there are cases when this can be useful.).

Anyhow, again great work on the objects you created. *claps hands*

A last thing: On the table, could you rotate the wood grain on the bandings? (Not sure if my english dictionary gave me the right words here).
Normally the grain would follow the banding. (Actually, it's not really a banding I assume. But my english is far for complete. What I mean is the frame of the table, where the main table plate is inserted.)
And the overall grain would look better if you scale the texture smaller (if it's possible. It will require either a seamless texture or an image with smaller grain).

~Tach

[Chuckles58]

This is very exciting. I am glad to see such a great team continuing to make Relativity the most amazing age in Uru. Keep up the good work!

[Christian Walther]

Welcome back Tach! Great to hear from you!

Christian, I really love your design of giving the house a roof (or multiple roofs).

The roofs are totally preliminary work-in-progress. I think it’s important to close up these walls that presently just end somewhere out in open space into proper buildings, but in some places I was struggling with determining what’s “inside” and “outside” – if the gardens are outside, as gardens normally are, then the area with the stairs must be inside, which doesn’t really work either… maybe in some places the only way out is to consider both sides “outside” and have a roof only over the wall in between.

Sometime planes are forced hidden not only from below, but from above as well - when you enter a different dimension. I did this to avoid this huge grass wall in front of you. The explanation above did not describe it correctly. That's the reason for the VisRegions. They are set up and fine-tuned to show only the Garden content (belonging objects) of the current Garden/dimension.

Ah, that’s a great idea. I didn’t think of that. I admit I haven’t examined the age source for your comments, but was just going from memory. If it could be made to also hide the “floating” avatars, that would be a perfect solution. As far as looking from below goes, I wonder if this could be achieved with some drawing-order/depth-buffering trickery (using the usually annoying X-ray effect to our advantage).

I’m still dreaming of one day seeing Relativity on a MOUL-type engine, maybe even in MOULa itself. That might even allow us to fix the remaining issues like the mouse-look gimbal lock (or whatever it was). I have no idea how well our current conversion abilities deal with Tach’s wizardry though.

I changed the color of the sky. I had to do this visually from Christian's screen print. Sorry Christian, but there is no such thing as a -5 hue. I tried using +5, but that wasn't even blue, so I eyeballed it. That's usually not a very good idea because different monitors display colors differently. It can be easily changed if it's still unsatifactory.

Looks much better! I still think it’s slightly too dark and saturated, but it’s tolerable now. The color is one that you would see near the zenith on a clear day, and seeing such a color near the horizon looks strange to me. Since there is no fixed horizon in this age, the best we can do (unless we put the sky into the per-dimension visregions) is make the whole sky some average color between typical zenith and typical horizon. The -5 is not an absolute hue, but a hue adjustment in Photoshop’s Hue/Saturation adjustment dialog – “make the blue a little bit greener”. But as I said, don’t take my numbers as gospel, they are based on my subjective perception and my uncalibrated monitor too. If you’re not using Photoshop, the numbers probably won’t help you anyway, as other programs probably scale their numbers differently.

[Rhee]

got those flowers finished! hope they are satisfactory, but if they aren't I will happily do some tweaking! Had a deuce of a time getting all the normals facing the right way for some reason... haha.

Its not /exactly/ like the painting because the painting is so... 2D. For instance, all the leaves were facing the same way (sideways) and to my eye looked rather silly oreinted that way in 3D, so some of them are aligned differently, and also the middle-height flower has been aligned differently for the same reason. This is what it looks like.


And here's a link to the .blend file. (I'm new to SkyDrive so if it won't work lemme know! haha)
https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=4B57021395439374!153&authkey=!AN6bh33MzhfioeE

[Calena]

Maybe there's a misunderstanding what VisRegions do or how they are used. VisRegions DO NOT have to surround any object. They DO NOT work like "show me what's inside a VisRegion".
Instead, they are used to hide objects that are linked to a VisRegion when the CAMERA is outside the VisRegion.
In words: "Show me all objects linked to the VisRegion if my camera is inside this VisRegion; otherwise don't show the linked objects."
(Other objects not linked to any VisRegion are shown always of course).

Now I get it. I was moving back and forth watching the ground plane pop in and out of view. It was the camera region that I was triggering. I didn't realize that, as I haven't had much time to study the code . . . yet .

The roofs are totally preliminary work-in-progress. I think it’s important to close up these walls that presently just end somewhere out in open space into proper buildings, but in some places I was struggling with determining what’s “inside” and “outside” – if the gardens are outside, as gardens normally are, then the area with the stairs must be inside, which doesn’t really work either… maybe in some places the only way out is to consider both sides “outside” and have a roof only over the wall in between.

Hehe! I know the feeling. It's definitely easier said than done . Thinking about your walls and roofs, I realized that once they're in place, all the lightmaps inside the areas covered by the new ceilings will have to be done again. We need a plan.

Now, on to Rhee's flowers . Rhee, I really like the way you modeled this. The drawing is a bit cartoony and I wasn't certain what type of flower to use. It sort of looks like giant daisies, but after giving it some thought, I realized there's really only one flower that big. Here's my interpretation on Rhee's model:

Big Flowers!

And per your request tach, I cleaned up the UV Mapping on the table and chairs and changed the wood image:

New Table

I tweaked the sky texture again too, but I have two monitors and the thing looks completely different as I move it from the "cool" monitor to the "warm" one. So I give up. The good news is if everyone hates it, the age is available and it can always be changed.

[Karkadann]

Everything looks great, and its nice to see some old faces Welcome back Tach, was hoping you would be able to see the progress, the sunflower look perfect. and the table looks more realistic the roof however im not sure how your going to manage that with out altering the main structure, I wanted to keep it as close to the original drawing as possible, and although when I was building the drawing in Autocad 3D I was considering putting a roof on it but I could never figure out how with out altering it to much, and then their is the camara for the box/seat on the Zplane that the roof might block. its an interesting idea, but you also havta consider the complexities of the exiting structure. On the other hand it just might work, and it might fit in nicely one never knows.

again I would like to thank every one for their contributions.
You guys have taken this age beyond my expectations
I really hafta learn blender one of these days