RAD July pre-contest discussion

[Jishin]

Will do, Robert. No problem.

I REALLY wanna help judge the next one after this, though!

[LaReh]

This sounds like great fun! I'd love to be one of the judges.

[Lontahv]

these contests are a fantastic way to learn under a fun enviroment

Hehee, and when you learn the results hope you don't have a heart-attack. *runs away*

*runs back*

Also a good way to go crazy.

*runs away again*

Jk, they are fun.

~Lontahv

[Lontahv]

Now more practically...

This was one of the guidelines for the RAD contest:

Please no hexadecimal level editing.

Uh... so, HMM, what a pity. There are so many borked-and-hard-to-fix features in pyprp. So, the way Prp-devs usually apply "polish" to their age is by hex-editing. What is it, 4 vs. the whole GoW.

I guess this is an incentive to make new better tools that don't need hex-editing to make a decent age.

Why is there this guideline anyway? *looks around*

~Lontahv

[Tsar Hoikas]

LOL It's a good thing I had no intentions of signing up (I would have been set for last place since I can't texture worth bull). I'd have been disqualified, seeing how much hex editing I do (a lot).

[Paradox]

Please no hexadecimal level editing.

What about PRPExplorer editing, or editing with other tools that you've written specifically to change a certain thing.

PyPRP is horribly limiting in what types of flags can be set on Layer, and certain things such as projection lamps, Imagers, wavesets, GUIs, DynamicTextMaps, etc. require specific flags to be set. Currently the only way to set those flags is in hex.

In fact, if hex editing weren't permitted, both of my shells would stop functioning entirely.

[D'Lanor]

PyPRP is horribly limiting in what types of flags can be set on Layer, and certain things such as projection lamps, Imagers, wavesets, GUIs, DynamicTextMaps, etc. require specific flags to be set.

That seems like an odd complaint coming from one of its developers.

[Nadnerb]

This is supposed to be an art contest, is it not? Why should it matter what tools each person uses, as long as they're comfortable with them? What if someone developed their age outside of blender and imported it to use in their age? What if someone used a technique inside blender that they hadn't explained to everyone else how to do while making their age? For that matter, what if someone knew more about the files than you and used that knowledge to polish their age? How is that different from the two above? I don't want to join a contest with too many unnecessary restrictions.

That seems like an odd complaint coming from one of its developers.

Blender's file structure does not match Plasma's. In order to export at all, certain compromises have to be made in naming conventions and in how object properties are determined. (For instance, the blend mode of a layer is defined in plasma within the layer, however, in blender, that is determined in the material, so the same layer could be used in multiple places with different blend modes, which is impossible in plasma. As a result, layers are duplicated for every material they are used in.)

The point of all this is, a lot of the stuff Paradox does could be done with PyPRP alone, but the resulting files would make him cringe, because he is obsessive-compulsive about them. Going back to the point about tools, people should be able to use what they're comfortable with.

[Trylon]

I kinda agree with Nadnerb on that...

[Lontahv]

~Lontahv