Old member coming back confused

[ZURI]

Heh, figured the topic might get some attention, but seriously....

I've been gone for Ages, no pun intended , and have some questions that might or might not be answered by digging through 2 years of posts. Due to personal (life) issues/changes, I have been unable to remain current in the community.

I have over a thousand hours (seriously) of work into many ages that I am now a bit concerned terrified that time spent might be lost and/or not realized in the entirety intended. In that light, here are my concerns:

I have used Blender 2.49b throughout my Blending experience. The latest version of Blender is "Here be Dragons" to me. I am also aware that our benevolent programmers are at work, or have been at work, on a new version of PyPRP for Blender. You folks rock, and I am forever grateful for the untold hours, days, months, years, that you have put into providing tools for us. Although we have never met, I love you like family. If it weren't for you, I never would have started in the first place.

My concern is whether or not I can open my source code in the latest Blender without major, a.k.a., "holy smokes Batman, my stuff is useless," problems. While using 2.49b, my modelling/texturing skills were relatively advanced. I learned a lot, and spent untold hours learning ways to making objects looks "right." I am very concerned that by continuing the ages with the current PyPRP, all the previous work will be too difficult to fix to be worth the trouble. On the other hand, it looks like the latest plugin is pretty awesome.

The singular issue with the majority of the content produced so far has been the puzzles, animations, etc. Otherwise, there is quite a bit of content that can be released as-is.

Basically, I can frame this in to a single question: Is it too late to keep working on these ages?

If it is going to be too much of a hassle to keep going with all this stuff, I intend to release all of my work as Open Source - then offer my skills to the community to help with other projects.

[dendwaler]

WB Zuri, i hope all is well with you.

To answer your question, nothing realy changed for Blender users.
We all are still using 2.49B to build our ages.
The new PyPRP2 is not developped enough to build a serious age.
Most of the necessary tools are not implemented.

Hoikas is building a new tool, he named it " Korman", it will be superiour to PyPRP, but there is nothing known around the progress of development.
I can imagine that, because i understand its mainly his " one man project"

The good side of this bad tiding is , that your ages are not " aged" yet, so you can continue to build as before and we all hope you will again enjoy to do it.
I recognize the amount of work and hours that are involved in agebuilding, as i did not release anything since then either.
Still busy with my ages and i will only release it when its worth to be seen.

I am happy to see you around again!

[ZURI]

Thank you Dendwaler. I am genuinely happy that things have stayed the same concerning us Blender users. The thought of having to learn things all over again really scared the wee out of me. It is reassuring that I can just knock the dust off and get back into a groove.

All is well here, and some normalcy has returned. It'll be good to be active in the community again. Again, thanks for the warm welcome-back!

[tachzusamm]

Welcome back, ZURI. You have been missed.

It's not too late to work on the Ages you already begun. Many of us are still using Blender 2.49b, and there are many Ages still in progress.
And eventually there's a chance that you can simply convert your Age to MOULa or Gehn. Transfusion script is the keyword, although this tool still needs maintenance and updates, as I have heard.

[ZURI]

Thanks Tach! I have some good news too. At first, I couldn't find much of my source code. I was afraid it was lost during a hard drive failure. Fortunately, there were a few backups and it all appears to be intact. I am going to put together a new machine just for URU related stuff soon. It seems the glitch with ATI cards creating issues with the rotation of POV is still there even with the latest and greatest. The new rig will have an nVidia graphics card, so with any luck, that problem will be solved. It will be a bit before it's together, so in the meantime I'll see about consolidating everything. Heh, it's amazing how much data one can accumulate doing this venture.

I'll keep catching up on things here in the forum. It looks like we have several new members, which is wonderful! Greets to all of you.

[Tsar Hoikas]

Pick right back up where you left off, Zuri. PyPRP's replacement is still a good way away. We may actually see a PyPRP update to improve performance in the "near" future.

[dendwaler]

zuri, don't install the ati driver.
if you use the driver you get from windows update service , you wont have the pov problem.
For building and playing uru this native driver is good and sufficient.
I also have an Ati card, Radeon HD 4850 and i use it many years already without any problem ever.

[ZURI]

Unfortunately, that isn't possible in my case. I built this as a gaming rig first and foremost. It has an HD7850 in it, and I want/need the latest drivers to enhance the enjoyment of seeing aliens, monsters, and sometimes other players explode in a glorious mess. However, this weekend, I started putting together another machine with a Phenom II and an nVidia GTS250 1GB card. It should do nicely for it's purpose, and will be used solely for modelling related activities. Besides, it will be good to have a dedicated machine.

In that light, I do appreciate your input. It's good to know that the WDDM drivers do not produce the aberations. When it's together and everything is running nice and smooth, work can continue. In the meantime, I'll be busy consolidating the rest of my source.

@Hoikas. Kudos! Keep it up. Some of my ages take over 40 minutes with a modern quad-core cpu to compile. Cutting that time down would be very useful.

Now if I could just find my towel...

[Wamduskasapa]

Now if I could just find my towel...

You might also need your Electronic Thumb for a quick getaway just in case you forget you Linking Book..

[dendwaler]

Zuri, use the latest update for PyPRP made by Sirius.
I believe its already integrated in the latest pyprp 1
That one exports page by page! It updates the sum and fni of the whole age , also if only a single page is exported.
Divide your age into several pages.
Dont forget to update your book with the new pages
Its very easy to do.
Just give one object a page_num property.
Now select all objects you want to have the same page number.
(The active object should be the one with the page number)
Press ctrl c in the object window , choose properties and select page _num from the list.
All selected objects will now have that number.
Personally i named one prp "new objects".
Before one export costed me more then an hour of waiting.
Now its 10 seconds for a new object.
Once a week when i am satisfied with the new objects, i repage them to their final page destination.
Then the "new object page" is empty again and i can continue using very short export times.
If this new option did not exist , i could not build this age because the amount of data is beyond the capicities of blender and my pc.
The current age has 8 pages and around 600Mb data divided over the 8 prp's


Here is a link to the export function Sirius made.
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5944&start=20

and finaly a direct link to the download : download/file.php?id=1957

Sorry for all the edits in this post.