New Age

[ZURI]

Yep, got it. A few nights ago I tried following a tutorial online, when I tried to unwrap just a few faces, blender crashed. I'm not sure what I was doing wrong but it's working now. It works the way I expected it too, just with different steps. I've used proprietary software to build game levels before, but they were never this complicated. I think I'm going to have to make custom textures for it to look the way I want. Wow, this is going to be a lot of work. The modelling part is easy, it's the texturing and other stuff that's going to be a journey. The thought of how I'm going to add the puzzles makes my head spin.

[ZURI]

Jojon,

Thanks for the explaination. My previous modeling experience was with CAD and QeRadiant. I'm amazed at how truly powerful Blender is. I haven't posted much since I started my project - as my time has been consumed by the enormous amount of information and tutorials available online. After going through a lot of it pertaining to game level development, I'm beginning to understand just how important it really is to optimize the environments we create for gameplay. In light of this, I thought it wise to start completely fresh - with a fresh idea. My brother and I are working on the initial design right now. I'm doing the modeling and he's providing concept ideas and possibly some custom textures. Before we go much further, I would like to throw an idea out there without giving too much away.

Here goes. The age is inside of an absolutely vast, ancient building. It's midnight black in areas, but there is enough light in places to make out the magnitude of the place. The walls are smooth, but uneven. They appear to be made of blocks of an odd, metallic mineral. The roof will appear so high as to be almost indistinguishable, like in D'ni (but it's not in D'ni.) There is a light fog covering the main floor, which glows with a soft blue hue. If you listen hard, there's music coming from somewhere, but you can't tell the source. It seems to be eminating from the walls and floor. If you look up, you'll see four massive floating platforms. They're extremely old, constructed in a time long forgotten. It seems surreal, impossible! Ahh, but that's part of the mystery of the age. Sometimes you hear the rumbling of a massive machine - one that seems to rattle the whole place. There is definately something deep beneath the floor. Something powerful.

In the center of the age, is a large conical structure. Actually, it is a series of structures (sorta like a Ziggurat made of Mastabas). In order to reach the top of the structure to reach the goal, you must unlock a series of combination puzzles. Each puzzle (when completed correctly) will rotate one or more of the levels of the structure either clockwise or counter clockwise - revealing a maze that leads to the the top (Where the player will find a linking book to it's sister age and a continuation of the journey.) The structure is big, each layer around 10 feet high. The bottom layer is about 250 feet wide with the top about 30 feet. My concern is whether or not the animation of the layers rotating will be too much for older machines. The ENTIRE face count for the structure, including all 13 layers is 204. At completion it will probably be closer to 300 faces.

I am trying to make the age super-efficient, with a very low poly count. Taking the advice of others on these boards, I'm concentrating on the texturing, audio, lighting and ambience to set the mood - rather than breakneck graphics. The age is fairly large, but very low poly (Only around 15,000 faces total). At completion it may be closer to 25,000.

Attached are renders of the platforms in the corners of the age. They're 1671 faces. That number will increase some, but not much. I want to give them a "dripstone" look.

Whadaya think?

[J'Kla]

I have been thinking is our polygon count such a stopper given the lead time to game has to be at my figuring at least "Cyan delivery" plus twelve months.

Processing power has grown massively just while we waited for the game trap fiasco to run it's course.

I started Myst on a 386 PC with a 32 Meg Hard drive with 1 meg of memory.

Given Moore's law our last problem will be Polygon Count The biggest unknown in the formula is "Cyan delivery"

[ZURI]

J'Kla, that thought had cross my mind as well. The problem I think we're going to face is the Plasma engine itself. Unless Plasma can be modified to support multiple CPU/GPUs and modern rendering technology, we're still going to have a major bottleneck when it comes to building high-res Ages.

For example:

My machine is dated by today's standards - while being light-years ahead of the machines of URU's day. Even with the extra processing power, the games still comes to a crawl in the Great Zero (with everything turned up). In order to play smoothly, I still have to turn down some of the advanced settings (AA, AI etc.). This is because the current version of Plasma doesn't take advantage of the extra 3 Cores and the extra Graphics Card.

I can play Fallout 3 with all the neat bells and whistles turned on and it looks beautiful. The gameplay is smooth, the particle effects are spectacular and the ambience is breathtaking. This goes for pretty much any game made in the last few years.

But, I cannot run the same settings in URU because the game engine is not as advanced. Another example of this is Command & Conquer Generals. It's an older game too (circa 2003), and uses an older engine. Ever since the game came out, I have judged computer systems as to how well they play Generals. Well..., until I built my newest machine.

With my previous PC, which had an AMD 2800+ and a Radeon X700 Pro - Generals ran about as smoothly as it does with my newer one. When I run a huge map with lots of bots in it, the game bogs down just about as much as it did with the old computer. This is because the game engine is still only seeing a single CPU core and a single Graphics card. Short of spending tons of money overclocking my CPU and Graphics card, I'm pretty much stuck with the same performance. (Don't get me wrong, it does play better - but not as significantly as the upgrade should theoretically allow.)

If I'm wrong here, hopefully one of the Gurus will correct me.

[J'Kla]

So to all intents and purposes our limiting factor is the plasma engine as it stands.

Taking that as a given we have to work around as Cyan did by using a sparing use of polygons and better texture manipulation.

Even with these limitations Cyan have set a high benchmark of quality. By the time Cyan get the open source thing sorted (given their current record) all could be obsolete.

From my reading around and thats been cursory at best it looks like Plasma technically belongs to Cyan. I don't pretend to understand the implications and would like to understand the difference between,

a) Staying with Plasma as is.
b) Upgrading Plasma in some way.
c) porting to another game engine.

[I.Brattin]

Here is what I think... There will not be a port to another game engine, Cyan won't allow it. Reason being Cyan still has hopes of releasing their own material in the future when funds become available to do so. If we port Uru to a new engine it will make things difficult for Cyan when they want to release something.

They may let us upgrade Plasma, but only with the condition they can test the upgrades before they go live. Though I highly doubt it, most companies are highly proprietary of their stuff, especially if their still using it. Isn't Cyan using Plasma for MQ.

I expect everything will likely stay the same though.

[kaelisebonrai]

The thing is, IF they do what they claim they're going to do, (Release Plasma as "open source") then, they simply CANNOT prohibit upgrading plasma. To do so, would mean it is not "Open Source" merely that the source code can be viewed by the public.

So, yes, unless Cyan is lying to us, we will be able to upgrade the engine, essentially. How we upgrade it may be limited by the effort it takes, and just how far we can "go" (technical limitations, i mean) with the engine.

What I'm getting at, is, once open source uru happens, it won't be a proprietary engine, anymore. This all depends on if Cyan has been lying to us or not. And, I use "lying" purposefully, and all negative connotations ARE indeed intended. "Open Source" means very specific things, and to claim it is to be "open source", and then not deliver something that is, indeed, "Open Source" is lying. There are different kinds of "Open Source" licenses, but they /all/ have certain things in common, otherwise they would simply not /be/ "Open Source". To say otherwise is to be mistaken.

[GPNMilano]

They may let us upgrade Plasma, but only with the condition they can test the upgrades before they go live. Though I highly doubt it, most companies are highly proprietary of their stuff, especially if their still using it. Isn't Cyan using Plasma for MQ.

I expect everything will likely stay the same though.

Cyan is using Plasma 2.0.5 for MQ, most likely. This is the engine used in Myst Online (2.0 was Uru: ABM, while a slightly different version was used for Uru CC) 2.1 was the version used in EOA and Crowthistle. While MQ uses the MOUL engine, whatever agreement that was reached between Cyan and Creative Kingdoms allowed for the use of the Plasma Engine while not affecting the open sourcing of said engine.

Once the source for the engine is out there, will determine wether or not upgrades to the engine happen. The problem being mostly is 1. The proprietary stuff in the engine that does not belong to Cyan (Physics and Bink mostly) must be ripped out of the engine as they cannot distribute that without permission to do so. All they can do is rip out the code that is not their's to use and put placeholders telling us what goes where and allow us to either A. put it back in. or B. Use a new physics and a new media player.

[ZURI]

Here's one for you all. When I try to export my age, it give me a python script error. I states: ValueError: face has no texture values.

I did a search through the forum and found several examples of the same issue. Ok, so to narrow down the culprit, I started by making a backup then deleting one-by-one all of the meshes in the age.

I have four floating islands in the Age, some misc meshes on one island, the main terrain mesh and 13 other meshes. I checked and double checked all the meshes to make sure they had textures and they do.

If I delete everything island and everything around it, the age exports fine. If I delete just the island, I get the error. If I delete everything but one (completely random) mesh, I get the same error. As soon as I delete the random mesh, it will export. Everything has a texture. At this point, there aren't isn't any UV mapping done, just blender's colors.

What's going on here???? It doesn't matter which order I delete them in. I can't narrow down one particular mesh that is causing the problems. I'm not sure what to do. Help!!!!

[GPNMilano]

Here's one for you all. When I try to export my age, it give me a python script error. I states: ValueError: face has no texture values.

I did a search through the forum and found several examples of the same issue. Ok, so to narrow down the culprit, I started by making a backup then deleting one-by-one all of the meshes in the age.

I have four floating islands in the Age, some misc meshes on one island, the main terrain mesh and 13 other meshes. I checked and double checked all the meshes to make sure they had textures and they do.

If I delete everything island and everything around it, the age exports fine. If I delete just the island, I get the error. If I delete everything but one (completely random) mesh, I get the same error. As soon as I delete the random mesh, it will export. Everything has a texture. At this point, there aren't isn't any UV mapping done, just blender's colors.

What's going on here???? It doesn't matter which order I delete them in. I can't narrow down one particular mesh that is causing the problems. I'm not sure what to do. Help!!!!

Your problem is simple it's this:

At this point, there aren't isn't any UV mapping done, just blender's colors.

Your objects need to be UV mapped, or else PyPRP won't know how to create the icicles for a drawable spans. Basically once you uv map everything your age will export. If you have an object that's not UV mapped, it won't export unless you uv map it. Hope that helps