Guild of Writers

After reading through Chris's wiki article, and having finished Camp Bravo for now, I turned my attention back to Zephyr Cove.....

What a mess 1.5.0 made of it. But I plodded along, getting my transparancies fixed, the waveset fixed, the shores fixed (erm sort of).

Now, I started working on the Visregions. I got it to sort of work, but it was acting strangely. So I turned to my little test Age and worked on them there. I can get objects to disappear like they are suppose to, and re-appear when I enter and exit the visregion.

Finally I figured it out.

Here's a blender pic:



Okay, I have a cube and a sphere, I'm trying to affect the visability of them. The larger black box is my Visregion1, the smaller black box is Visregion2.

As you can see, you link into Visregion1. I gave the Cube the visual property of this visregion and when you link in, tahdah! You don't see the cube.
But you DO see the Sphere, which I gave the visual property of Visregion2.

Walkforward, and when you leave Visregion1, the cube pops into existance, and when you enter Visregion2 the Sphere winks out!

yah!

I've applied this to Zephyr, and have noticed a DRAMATIC increase in performance.......

of course it took me like 4 hours to go through and manually and hundreds of objects to my scripting......grrrrrr.....BUT! To have my waveset stop flickering, and my palm tree tops stop winking in and out randomly was worth it!

Thanks Chris!

Cool...

Now be warned: VisRegions will handle visibility in PyPRP 1.6.

Rather than objects being invisible when inside the region, they will be visible (so you don't have to do complex inverted regions). If you're planning to do a lot of work with them, I'd suggest waiting until PyPRP 1.6 is released (probably around the end of August).

I'd like to note that it is fairly easy to invert softvolumes, so if you come up with a working configuration now, as long as there aren't too many actual regions, (doesn't matter how many things are affected by them) it shouldn't be a problem to invert them when this fix is released.

No sweat. I'll just reverse the regions guys!

I'm only using 2.

However, I do have a question:

This is about the plugin itself however.

You know how if you copy something in Blender, it will append it? Like Rock1 copied becomes Rock1.001

Can you use that in the ALCscripting?

IE:

Code: Select all

Rock1.001:
    visual:
        visregions:
          - Visregion1

Or will it get ignored?

I think it should work...

Alternatively, if you have planning to copy a lot of identical meshes, and they don't need collision data, Lontahv and I have got ClusterGroups working and will include those in PyPRP 1.6.

andylegate wrote:You know how if you copy something in Blender, it will append it? Like Rock1 copied becomes Rock1.001

But why keep that name? You can simply rename it. That is always the first thing I do (both OB and ME).

Speed.

If you're not planning on doing anything special with the objects, duplication and just placing can be extremely fast.

You have to remember: a LOT of Zephyr was built in 2 weeks for a RAD contest. I didn't have time to sit and be maticulous with it.

Of course I've been paying for that ever since....

Okay, the reason I asked is this: Those objects are NOT responding to the visregions. I'm going to try and renaming them today, when I get time (I've got a building being delivered out here today, and it will take them hours to get it set up, leveled, and strapped down against storms.

Thanks for the simple tutorial Andy, will be useful.

Paradox wrote:Cool...

Now be warned: VisRegions will handle visibility in PyPRP 1.6.

Rather than objects being invisible when inside the region, they will be visible (so you don't have to do complex inverted regions). If you're planning to do a lot of work with them, I'd suggest waiting until PyPRP 1.6 is released (probably around the end of August).

That's a good news, it'll make it's use much more intuitive (IMO) it'll make for much shorters Alscripts.

Actually, Thank Chris, he wrote a VERY detailed article on Soft Volumes over on the wiki, here is the link:

Soft Volumes

I know it really goes indepth, and I'll be honest with you, there were parts I had to read about 3 times to "get it", but it really helps to understand what is going on with Soft Volumes and how that work to use them correctly. He also shows you different ways to use them too with sounds, lights, etc.

For me it was trying to remember to think backwards for Visregions....that and remembering to set the bounds to convex on the regions themselves that screwed me up too many times to mention here!

Hmm, so it won't simply be a matter of defining in- and outstrength to pick sides? Dang! :7