Thank you all, very much ! I like hearing you like it !
So, to try to answer all comments...
Shadows: I didn't use Korman's automated lighting, because I wasn't sure how to set things up for the shadows of the palm trees cast on the ground. It had to be a lightmap to keep details, but I had to use vertex color for the rest of the terrain mesh where there weren't very complex shadows. Since I wasn't sure how best to do it, I decided to use a trick I found used by Cyan: create a duplicate of the area under the trees, and apply the shadowmap as alpha to it (which might explain why they look too dark). Then I removed remaining vertex shadows cast on the main mesh. Not exactly a piece of cake, but it does the trick (although it might be why shadows are too dark around this place).
I'll have a look at increasing the resolution of this texture, but I must also smooth the shadowmap manually since Blender doesn't apply antialiasing to shadows
As for shadows on the avatar... Well, these are really tricky, they require either real-time shadow casting (which is slow and ugly), or projection of the shadow map by a light. I'm not sure if Korman supports it yet.
(oh, and I also noticed the avatar wasn't casting shadows either, but that may be because I don't use Korman's light baking.)
Workaround: play in first person !
About the foliage: I'm aware about alpha artifacts. I removed most partial transparency in the textures and set the kBlendAlphaTestHigh flag for these layers, but totally forgot about passindices. Honestly at that time I was more worried about shadowing and terrain stenciling being completely wrong
I'll also improve the beach mesh in a later version. The way I build my terrains, I always build a low-poly mesh, then add subsurf/displace/decimate modifiers. This allows me to keep a very simple mesh which is easy to edit or unwrap, which Blender instantly transforms into a more complex and more natural high-res terrain. The only downside to this method is I can't decide which part gets more vertices than another, and I don't have much control over smoothing of particular areas until I apply all modifiers.
(this is actually the issue I mentioned on the
Korman thread about my canyon Age - didn't have time to reply to Aloys and go into more details on this.)
TL;DR: I'll smooth things out in the next version, so it feels more natural (especially where the water meets the beach, which I assume is the area Tweek considered glitchy).
Overall texture resolution: texturing is my bane and I'm doomed to run into this issue until the end of times, grrr ! Hem, anyway. The thing is, I mostly fetch my textures on CGTextures, which doesn't allow me to download high-res versions of tiled textures. Which means I often go with the low-res version (which is itself downscaled to a power of two on exporting).
If it's that much of an issue, I'll download a non-tileable, hi-res version of the texture, and tile it with Gimp. Problem is, Gimp doesn't allow me to tile textures horizontally only, which is a problem in some places (also, I wonder if CGTex's tiling isn't a bit better). Either way, I'm by no means a master of Gimp or textures.
I did work a lot on the sand, though - it combines 3 textures with different blending and size, and even though it's still a bit pixelated, it's almost impossible to notice the tiling. I even managed to blend all these textures without the saturation, contrast or brightness going overboard which, in itself, is quite an achievement for me.
Since you're wondering, I didn't put a swimregion for various reasons: 1. the beach is too steep (again!), which makes getting out of the water annoying, 2. swimming avatars don't follow the movement of waves, unfortunately, 3. I didn't see the option anywhere in Korman, which means I must add it to a separate page with PyPRP (which is what I did for sounds, actually - sounds aren't part of Korman yet ?). I will add one eventually, have no fear.
Anyway, I noted down all your ideas for the next version.
And I thought the first complain would be the ugly palm tree billboard on top of the cliff...
janaba wrote:I couldn't find anything 'special', no 'special feature' as you've all mentioned and experienced, no special rock, a 'turtle rock' even or sth similar extraordinary lol
There is a stone slab on the ground between some of the palm trees
By the way:
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don't play with the Water→Height component in the GUI. I forgot to update it and it will make wavesets disappear
Anyway, about the special feature:
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Cyan put a whole section in their Python API dedicated to animating wavesets, which is only ever used in Kemo to change the appearance of the pond during a downpour - the change is quite subtle and really hard to spot if you don't know it's there.
Anyway, after seeing this, I thought we desperately needed an Age to experiment in real-time with all the available options. That's the whole purpose of this Age, even though I decided to increase visual quality.
I hope you're not having a hard time with the interface, though ! Did you notice you can move while using it ? Keyboard isn't locked, and you can actually use the mouse to move around if you place it at the edge of the screen (meh, I had to downscale the interface just because of this ! This is not an issue on my install since I force the game to render in 16/9, which means the margins on the sides of the screen are much larger)
Aloys wrote:Nearly drowned myself. :p That very neat, I had no idea you could control that at run time, even less with that kind of interface.
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Looks like I was right to put GeoStates and AmpOverLen at the top of the list ! Maxing amplitude and wavelength is just so fun ! 
dendwaler wrote:Ok , there some minor glitches but that happens if you put it together in a short time, its not the the main purpose of this age to be " pretty" after all.
Yeah, as I said, visuals weren't the goal at first. It took me the best part of two days to put together the interface, and two more days to build the area. This is actually fast work, but I didn't do much else during these days...
I love peaceful places like that.
With steamy sausages.. Yummy..
