Suppose we get tools from Cyan now...

[Zander]

BAD: I take your point, but saying "Cyan will never release tools for age building" seems to me on a par with saying, three months ago, "Cyan will never put Uru back online." We don't know. Rand's pipe dreams have had a habit of becoming reality over the past fifteen years or so.

I really hope this one does, because I find Blender and the plugin too difficult for any kind of comfort. Making Ages this way is a lot harder work than I feel it should be, which is why I've been in limbo for so long.

[Chacal]

Things we actually need (from Cyan or GoW devs):

- Official specs for the latest Plasma version and differences from CC.
- Specs for a dev environment (a way to use the game off-line for unit testing by the Age writer)
- Specs for on-line multiplayer Ages (exactly what's needed for making the Age compatible with MOUL).

We need to be able to make MOUL-compatible Ages ourselves.
Cyan, in its current state, will not be able to do any kind of work on our Ages before putting them on-line.

Zander, we can hope but the logistics make this unrealistic at this time. 10 people left at Cyan, remember.
Anyway, it doesn't matter what tools we use, as long as the output meets the specs.

As for making Blender more user-friendly for our purposes, we had this discussion before. Some goos ideas were suggested.

[belford]

My impression, just from reading the Programming and Builder forums, is that there are a lot of little corners where Plasma and the Blender tools don't meet up. Questions answered with "Well, make that number bigger and it will work" or "You have to set that property over there, because."

I buy that you folks have worked out a *lot* of information about Plasma's functioning, but my experience is that reverse-engineering is never the same as having good documentation. Some of what you know turns out to be only partially true, or it's true in all released ages but doesn't have to be that way, or whatever.

So I hope that Cyan is willing to release some documentation, or even keep a hand in on these forums to answer questions. I think it would help us make our tools more stable and usable.

However, as I was saying in a MOUL forum post, I don't *count* on Cyan doing that. They could very easily say "Here's a server binary, here's where you put Age files to make them downloadable, go run some shards." That would be a rational use of their (extremely limited) manpower.

(If it's not obvious, I think the chance of them giving us *new* tools is zero. Not gonna happen. I know, some of you are disagreeing in this thread, but this is the position I'll stick with until better news surprises me.)

(As an unrelated point, I *really* hope we get a chance to start using the MOUL-era Plasma client, as opposed to the UruCC-era one.)

[belford]

Yes, that last post overlapped a couple of the previous ones from other people. :)

[Jojon]

Well, we'll see...
I was under the assumption ( <- note! ) that Cyan's toolset is not one integrated entity, but that they may be using several smaller ones, for specific tasks, such as a game logic building.
We'll see... :7

[Chacal]

Actually no, it has been known for some time that Cyan has built istelf a "do-it-all" 3DS plugin.

[Jojon]

O-ho.

[Tsar Hoikas]

Okay, I said I to myself was going to be nice from now on, but now Hoikas is adopting is "kill the idiocy" persona. If I seem a bit harsh, please forgive me... I really need to stop writing these posts before morning coffee (looks around for coffee... Oh wait there is none).

What IS different now is there is no longer a need for the devs to refrain from spreading their knowledge. Cyan asked them to stop that a few years ago, but now there is no need.

WRONG. Cyan has never said we could spread our knowledge. My Plasma 101 wiki article is pushing it.

request programming help from Cyan when it is a option.

I'd rather shoot myself. Have you seen how Plasma does some things? Oh wait, you haven't. Sorry, I forgot that most of you don't spend hours looking at x86 assembly of UruExplorer.exe and going "WTF?" Besides, it looks like they aren't going to be able to lend us any assistance for a good while to come.

I really hope this one does, because I find Blender and the plugin too difficult for any kind of comfort. Making Ages this way is a lot harder work than I feel it should be, which is why I've been in limbo for so long.

You may be surprised to know that even I have trouble using Blender. Yes, me, one of the (albeit less active) PyPRP Developers. I can only say to stick with it. Modelling in Blender finally clicked one day... I can't say the same for my texture skills, but I work on them every now and then.

- Official specs for the latest Plasma version and differences from CC.
- Specs for a dev environment (a way to use the game off-line for unit testing by the Age writer)
- Specs for on-line multiplayer Ages (exactly what's needed for making the Age compatible with MOUL).

This is already know by the plugin developers and Dustin knows a lot of it himself. You will find writing ages for multiplayer is a lot simpler than many people describe it. It's mostly a question of "is the writer smart enough to consider what happens in the logic if multiple people are around?"

Cyan, in its current state, will not be able to do any kind of work on our Ages before putting them on-line.

Likely so.

As to the accuracy of our reverse engineering... Let's just say that we know every function and variable name in the MOUL Live2 build. That's from around December, 2006... Of course, Cyan went and changed a lot of stuff in Live 5, but we've got that figured out. (An exists bool prefixing the hsKeyedObject!!! O.o)

[Nadnerb]

Yeah, where's that conversation with brice... >.>

*asks dox*

here:
http://www.hurustudio.org/share/Brice.html
http://www.hurustudio.org/share/Brice2.html

Cyan's tools are almost exactly what we have, except in max instead of blender. Before you start asking for Cyan's tools, buy max and try learning it.

Also, as Hoikas has pointed out immediately above, (ninja'd) we are really not in need of specs for anything.

[Tsar Hoikas]

buy max

I hope you have $2,000 to waste