Community Nexus

[kaelisebonrai]

@Atheni: Next time you get a chance, can you drop by #writers again? =D

I had that feedback you wanted for the model =D

[Chacal]

I like the idea of multiple rooms with multiple machines.

[Carl Palmner]

Wow, I'm stunned (in a good way) by Atheni's idea to make the Writer's Nexus a community area rather than a private one. There's something absolutely perfect and sublimely simple about doing it that way. This would mean basically that the Writer's Nexus would not just be the Nexus of the fan Ages, it would the AeGura of the fan Ages as well.

I'd really like to contribute something, but the modelling and programming are both taken up by others (plus, I don't have the skills yet to do them anyway). I'm a pretty decent hand with textures--could I contribute something in that way? Examples of my stuff are in the link in my sig. If you guys tell me what you want I can probably do it, or I could just come up with some stuff on my own.

[Egon]

Personally, because of technical reasons, I would like Writer's Nexus to be one (as small as possible) room*, so loading time would be as short as possible.

* - in complexity sense, not size of course

As for "community area of Fan Ages". Well I really like idea, and concept behind this age.

[Carl Palmner]

This is a possible floor texture that I spent a few minutes making. The repeating marble background is from another of my textures. What do you guys think of using something like this for the Writer's Nexus floor?

picture Show Spoiler

This is just a basic idea. I could easily alter this in any number of ways, or do something completely different if no one likes this idea.

[D'nial]

What would the IC background for such a Nexus be? Would this be a re-purposed D'ni room? Would it be a room that someone constructed in a D'ni Age, or possibly in an Age that an explorer wrote specifically for the purpose of holding the nexus?

Or are we abandoning canon entirely to accommodate the Plasmuru Ages?

[Pavitra]

Carl, a few suggestions:

- I like the idea of using rose-colored marble. It's just enough red to say "Writers" without being too dark or intense for architecture.
- The engravings look slightly pixelated, or maybe unantialiased.
- The Perlin-noise background is a bit too sharply-contrasting. I think it would be visually distracting.
- I think the engravings would be difficult to see, when it was applied as a texture in-game rather than presented direct and square-on like this.
- Square tiles feel not quite right for D'ni. Maybe hexagonal tiles, or a Penrose tiling (for the Five motif)?

[Carl Palmner]

Pavitra, thanks for the feedback! I just checked the texture in Bryce (a rendering software useless for Uru but great for quickly viewing how textures look in a 3d environment). You are absolutely right, the engravings don't show up very well at all. I think that problem can be easily rectified by deepening and widening the engraving lines, though.

A Penrose tiling would be absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately, as far as I know there is no way to create a penrose from repeating square segments. So the only way that could be done is if the entire floor were just one instance of a texture--and that means that for it to look good, the texture would have to be gargantuan in size. However, single penrose designs might look good, in the middle of the floor, perhaps. Alternatively, I could use large square tiles that each contain a penrose design.

A hex tile would also look good and you may be right about it looking more "D'ni-like". I have often noticed that simple square-tile textures in many fan Ages often evoke images of modern surface life for me rather than a mystical fantasy world.

As for the background--I don't know, to me it seems fine. What do others think? It would be very easy for me to turn down the contrast.

As for the pixellation of the engravings--my thinking is that this will not be apparent in-game. However, I can easily fix it.

I'll play around with some penrose and hex alternatives and post some results when I can. BTW can someone tell me how to spoiler-hide things on our forum? It makes posting pics more convenient and less messy.

[Pavitra]

A Penrose tiling can't be assembled out of square tiles, but it can be assembled out of non-square tiles. Hexes would probably be easier and use fewer prims, though.

The spoiler tag requires an equals sign: [spoiler=]like this.[/spoiler] You can also make a... [spoiler=named spoiler box]like this.[/spoiler]

[Carl Palmner]

I didn't realize Uru could handle textures that repeated in a pattern other than a rectangular one. I'll have to learn how to create repeating tiles of other kinds now!

Here's another texture I put together in light of Pavitra's suggestions--not an edit of the first one but an entirely new texture. I like this one a lot better than the last, but it could probably still be improved. One thing I'm not sure about: I used slightly imperfect hexagons and intentionally made it so the symbols don't all line up perfectly. This was all done on purpose to try to give it more of a "hand-made" feel. If people don't like it, it would be fairly easy to redo this in a way that everything would line up perfectly. Let me know what you guys think:

second texture Show Spoiler

EDIT: I forgot to mention, this texture is not actually usable yet--when doing the engraving I took a shortcut in order to finish it faster, and as a result the engraving lines will show a "seam" in places. I will of course fix this if we end up deciding we want to use this texture (along with making some other improvements).

EDIT2: I realized I should probably explain what I'm going for here. With both of these textures, I was trying to incorporate the GoW symbol in a subtle but visible way. The idea is that it shouldn't jump right out at the players and say "Look! I'm the Writer symbol and I'm all over the place!", but should still be recognizable to anyone paying close attention--so that a player might suddenly say, "Oh! I just realized that the floor pattern has the Writer symbol repeating in it!" With the first I failed--the symbol is nearly invisible when viewed at an angle. The second one, when Bryce-tested, seems to give the proper effect (at least to me)