Breldur, my new age

[D'Lanor]

I use alot of softvolumes for lamps. They fade in and out.

I should have been more clear. I did not mean lamps as in lights. I meant the lamp objects plus their sprites. They fade, presumably by visregions.

[Christian Walther]

There may be some flag combinations with visregions that make objects fade or whatever, I don’t know. I didn’t dissect any Cyan ages when I did my research for that article, I just experimented with what PyPRP exported.

[Paradox]

To my knowledge you can’t fade in and out stuff using visregions (even though they use soft volumes). According to my research, it’s a hard threshold at field strength 1.0. If anyone knows for a fact that this is incorrect, please edit the corresponding paragraph in the wiki article.

But what did Cyan use for the lamps in Ae'gura then? They clearly fade in and out.

And these are the only objects in Ae'gura that fade (along with a few barriers). So if these are visregions they aren't really used that often by Cyan and apparently more for effect than for lag reduction.

I believe those may be DistOpacityMods. Most common example of them is the GZ markers, which fade out of view with distance.
Unfortunately they aren't (to my knowledge) implemented in PyPRP, but they shouldn't be too difficult to add.

[Jojon]

At first: I'm still realling thinking of changing the huge garden into a small canyon like Ercana with just two or three garden places. Yesterday I've found great canyon textures. You will be surprised! 8-) Trust me!!

Sorry mate, the only way you could surprise us, by this stage, would be if it totally sucked. :7

I'd hate to think of you compromising your artistic output too much, in order to go get with the technical limitations, but in this case, it sounds like you may wind up with something more.. "focused" , "condensed", "refined".. Ah-blergh, I don't know what I mean. :P

Your visregion code looks fine to me. I am pretty sure that yes; they do have to be convex and to get more complicated ones, you'll have to union/intersect two or more basic ones.
Also, as the soothsayers have stated, there is no fading (which appears to be done using 'em DistOpacityModifiers, which, in turn, it sounds like Dox might add somewhere under visual:, in the next pyPRP (pretty please? *puppy-dog-eyes*)), so any softdistance other than 0, will only result in visibility not popping in and out at exactly the same spot.
Note that you can use the inverse of a visregion, right with the object_name.visual.visregion entries, with the syntax "!(MyVisregionSoftvolume)", quotation marks included.

[D'Lanor]

I cannot find any DistOpacityMods (or FadeOpacityMods) in the city prp files. Just Vis Regions and Relevance Regions. Could the latter have anything to do with the fading effect?

[Paradox]

Relevance Regions are used to handle which areas the client needs to pay attention to, not for object hiding.

It's possible that the flares could use some sort of material effect.

[Jonnee]

Sorry mate, the only way you could surprise us, by this stage, would be if it totally sucked.

*lol* Thanks for this bunch of flowers.

I'll try this code this weekend.

[Jonnee]

Ok. The code works. I was testing it a few minutes ago. The test object switched on and off without fading by using the 0 value.
Next step: Adding all Visregion to the old version of Breldur and checking what happens to the performance of the age.
Maybe I don't need to delete the garden.

edit: A few hours later....
It seems that we are successfull. I put many objects of the bota room (the one that made the most trouble) into a Visregion and have changed some object's borders to "convex hull" or I have deleted the borders totally.

After exporting the age the lag dissappeared as long as I was outside of this room. There is just a minimal lag when I enter the Visregion and the objects of the bota rooms get drawn. But these 0.1 seconds of lag are absolutely acceptable.

Tomorrow I will start to include Visregions for the other rooms.

[kahinj]

Excellent news Jonnee, glade your back in the builders chair.

kahinj

[diafero]

That's great
Maybe you could add some of your experience to the new Wiki page by Aloys? If you need help translating something to English, just send me a mail to diafero AT arcor DOT de (which I prefer to a PM)