How to add the GZ beam to a cavern location

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Re: How to add the GZ beam to a cavern location

Postby Sirius » Sun Oct 05, 2014 2:01 pm

That's weird, the most common behavior is every SDL variable being local to the Age it's from. There is an exception with Ahnonay which uses yet another method to sync the current active sphere in CC, but that's not the case here.

It may be related to instancing - sharing SDL stuff is the sort of thing sub-Ages (or child-Ages, I don't remember) are for. However, I don't recall seeing the D'ni locations as sub Ages of the city or the GZ.
According to the Offline-KI, the GTP is a public link. And it doesn't seem to be related to server-rules since it applies offine too.

Or it might mean somehow SDLs can be made global to the whole game - which could explain why every SDL variable begins with the Age name, so that we know from which record they are from.
I doubt that's the default behavior, though. At some point I used two identical variable names in two Ages, and they were never in sync (which I verified just now).
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Re: How to add the GZ beam to a cavern location

Postby Tweek » Sun Oct 05, 2014 4:20 pm

Deledrius wrote:I'm not entirely certain of that. My understanding was (and it's been a while since I read about them) that those markers were placed at the GZ-equivalent spot for the Age, and were indeed meant to provide coordinates for the KI in those Ages as well. Perhaps not.

Anyway, I'm not saying that it can't be explained (The Cleft has no GZ coords, which is odd given the KI seems to work generally everywhere but not the GPS function? I guess distance matters after all...), just that barring such an explanation there's no reason to assume it doesn't work (because it should). Anything else is just making IC-allowances for OOC-mistakes or OOC-laziness, and those should be avoided when possible.

I think it's unlikely anyone will end up duplicating locations if they bother to place one, and if they do it's something that shard-owners can work with the Age's author(s) to rectify for consistency before inclusion. In every other aspect, there's no guarantee that anything about a fan-made Age makes sense or is consistent with the rest of the game (and in fact many existing ones in the wide list available already don't bother). You make a great point about building at the origin though. That certainly increases the likelihood of conflict.


In the end, the choice lies with the author. We can only offer guidelines:

  • Use the broken setting.
  • Use the repaired setting, and provide a reason for the lack of proper GPS.
  • Use the calibrated setting, and be sure to measure out your location properly.


You are correct, maintainer marks within the various Ages are supposed to be like mini Great Zeros. If they worked properly (there was talk about them being implemented in prologue when the GZ was released) they would then provide KI coordinates within said Ages (it's worth noting Minkata doesn't have a maintainers mark as that would defeat the purpose of the Age for the later generations of surveyors).
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Re: How to add the GZ beam to a cavern location

Postby Deledrius » Sun Oct 05, 2014 9:36 pm

Ehren wrote:This is just a hypothesis at best, but I think the important thing is for it to have an SDL var of "islmGZBeamVis". That would probably make it sync for the offline game and I would guess it would be important to have a consistent name for the beam across 'ages' on an online server too?

That's correct. The Python file which controls the whole thing and bridges the responders to the animations via the state of the SDL is called islmGZBeamBrain, and it's hard-coded to reference islmGZBeamVis no matter the Age we're in. I'm not sure if Cyan has a server-side script which flips them all together, but it would be fairly trivial to change the global SDL islmGZBeamVis in the affected Ages. Presumably they have something similar to enable the per-Age MarkerVis SDL as well. It's also possible they simply do each one by hand. ;)
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Re: How to add the GZ beam to a cavern location

Postby Doobes » Mon Oct 06, 2014 3:19 pm

So, speaking of the Great Zero again, I just got something else working:

Show Spoiler


Still needs a bit of tweaking as far as the direction coordinate (ie the GZ GPS' rotation), but the two other coordinates seem to match my reference point in the City Age (the middle window in the conference room).

Progress! :D

I needed to fiddle with PrpShop again to get it to work though. Is there an "AlcScripty" way to create a Maintainer Marker Mod for the GZ origin empty?
KI #s: MOULa - 6302, Minkata - 35287, Gehn - 14291,
TOC - 82340, DI - 44387
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Re: How to add the GZ beam to a cavern location

Postby Deledrius » Mon Oct 06, 2014 4:14 pm

Doobes wrote:I needed to fiddle with PrpShop again to get it to work though. Is there an "AlcScripty" way to create a Maintainer Marker Mod for the GZ origin empty?

Check my first post in this thread... ;)

Great work getting it all working!
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Re: How to add the GZ beam to a cavern location

Postby Doobes » Mon Oct 06, 2014 4:58 pm

Well, fiddling with PrpShop is no longer required (thanks to Deledrius pointing out what I had skimmed in this thread :oops: )! I added the process of getting coordinates into the tutorial:

http://www.guildofwriters.org/wiki/Grea ... oordinates
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