Guild of Writers

Okay, so while I know quite a bit about Age creation, enough to write tutorials, I don't know everything of course.

The main way I DID learn so much was by asking you guys here question after question, after question, after....well those of you that have been where a while know that 3 years ago I was a major thorn in your side.

So I'm back with a new thorn: Global Animations.

I want to know how they are done. Not the PyPRP part. I simply want to know how Gira has a day and night cycle.

What is going on? How did Cyan do this? What is a good way? What is a wrong way? What is a "so bad it will screw everything up" way?

How would you do it? Lay it on me.

Cyan used two different types of Global animations for the changing of the day in Eder Gira. the lamps for the sun and the moon have age Global Animations. All of them using the same ratio for the timing of the animations. 5500 frames. As to how they got this number, I honestly have no clue. I know that the other ages with ageglobalanims all use different numbers of frames. Some smaller, some larger. The only fan age I know of with one, Reltoo, uses a small amount of frames. So it's entirely possible that it really doesn't matter how big the animation is in terms of frames, since it's all played out based on the time of day. (Which is determined by the length of the day in your age file). As to how gira works. The lights all have ageglobalanim's to adjust their color. So when it's night the lights that control sunlight go dark, while the lights controlling the moon grow bright and vice versa. At dusk both lights are on, but the light for sun is a purplish tint, while the light for the moon is a orange hue (I think). The lights are than tied to a dummy object, that rotates with it's own ageglobalanim that controls the setting of the sun, and the rising of the moon and vice versa.

Finally the sky dome, vista plane and sun and moon planes all have global animations called LayerSDLAnimations (These are not available yet in the released PyPRP) these have the same values as the ageglobalanims in terms of their frames. And their ambient color for the layer is controlled by the animation to go from light to dark in various steps.

At some point during the beta days (not sure when that was exactly) the whole landscape of Gira used real time shadows for the day/night cycle.. It didn't look exactly nice and it ran horribly slow. Also it had no sound at all. The fun of beta versions.

Thanks guys.......

With Max and the plugin, this should go pretty good. I've decided to take Camp Bravo out of retirement and have ported it over to Max. I'm going to make it have a Day/Night cycle (not to mention fix some really bad Age Creation things I did back then... )

I loved Camp Bravo as it currently exists, but a true day - nite cycle will be an excellent addition that will add so much to the atmosphere of that age...