Tweaks for Complete Chronicles

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Tweaks for Complete Chronicles

Postby Sirius » Thu May 08, 2014 2:51 am

These are two small tweaks for Complete Chronicles' engine. Because I always wanted to fix these issues.
It won't work for Shards like DI.

First tweak: this modifies the default Field of View ratio to 16/9, which is really interesting if you want to play the game fullscreen on a widescreen monitor.
However, it does not work in third person in Cyan's Ages (most Fan Ages should be fine, though), and does not affect the GUI (things like the KI will still be stretched).
It should always works in first person.

Second tweak: this increases the max pitch angle, which allows you to rotate the first person camera all the way down or up, so you can actually see what's directly under or above you. In other words, at the bottom of Myst V's Tiwah, you can now look at the huge shaft above your head (which was not possible before).
Please note that this does increase the vertical mouse look sensitivity.


[EDIT] - This is now included into Drizzle 32, in the Uru Widescreen tab. You no longer need this
Show Spoiler


-----

In case you're wondering how I did this, well, I simply had a look at MOUL's source code of Plasma for cameras, and found which values I didn't like. Then, I opened CC's UruExplorer.exe into an hexadecimal editor, and asked it to replace these values. I made sure it didn't replace anything else, so hopefully it shouldn't blow up your Uru game, or even your computer :)
I guess this could be considered hacking, but to tell the truth I don't know anything about real, serious hacking (I tried learning but ran away screaming :D ).


Things to know about the field of view tweak:
- Uru has a VERY weird way of calculating FOV settings. The horizontal field of view is always too high. If you played Myst Online in widescreen resolutions, you obviously know what I'm talking about. This problem shouldn't occur with this version. Thankfully, it seems people fixed it for Gehn as well.
BTW, this bug also applies to 4/3 resolution: there is a very light vertical stretching...
- About the issue with GUIs and third person cameras still not working: that's because the cameras in PRP files override the default camera ratio settings :x The only way to fix this would be to tell the game to ignore this override, and use the screen ratio settings (this is what was done for MOULa). However that's waaayyy beyond what I can do.
[EDIT] - Drizzle 32 has a workaround for this, which works generally well.
Last edited by Sirius on Mon Aug 15, 2016 6:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Tweaks for Complete Chronicles

Postby Tsar Hoikas » Thu May 15, 2014 7:45 pm

Sirius wrote:- Uru has a VERY weird way of calculating FOV settings.


Whoever wrote that code was on drugs and clearly didn't understand math at all.
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Re: Tweaks for Complete Chronicles

Postby Karkadann » Fri May 16, 2014 8:59 am

I didn't do it, HONEST!
The Optimist see's the glass half full, The Pessimist see's the glass half empty.
Its the Realist who see's the glass is half full with air, half full with water
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Re: Tweaks for Complete Chronicles

Postby Sirius » Fri May 16, 2014 9:49 am

Karkadann wrote:I didn't do it, HONEST!
ROTLF !
:lol:

Another fun fact: the current ratio in this fix is 1.57 (105 degrees / 66.7 degrees). Since this doesn't apply to GUIs, I edited the PRP files so that at least the KI would render correctly. But GUIs don't have this bug: you must use a normal 16/9 ratio, which is 1.78, and not 1.57.... What the heck.

So, now my KI renders correctly (along with the Relto book, and a few menus). But text fields and text labels still render in 4/3 :shock: Looks like they aren't affected by the PostEffectMod settings.


Oh, and one last fact: I'm messing up with both OpenGL and DirectX in my spare time. I'm not at all a professional (I can barely display a few untextured triangles). But handling field of view and ratio in both OpenGL and DirectX is a real piece of cake. And should you choose to re-code yourself the whole projection matrix thing, there are tons of websites that provide the exact code to do so.
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Re: Tweaks for Complete Chronicles

Postby Annabelle » Fri May 16, 2014 2:41 pm

Sirius: Is it possible for you to post before and after tweaking pictures to us, poor souls with low abilities in visual technicalities, who get the point that something has improved but not how?

Thanks!
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Re: Tweaks for Complete Chronicles

Postby Sirius » Sat May 17, 2014 3:16 am

Ok - here goes.

First - widescreen issues

Show Spoiler



Now - about the pitch thing...

Show Spoiler



As you can see, the KI is not stretched in these pictures - I managed to fix it, but like I said the cursor and the fonts are still stretched.
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Re: Tweaks for Complete Chronicles

Postby Annabelle » Tue May 20, 2014 4:35 pm

Sorry for the late response...

Thank you very much! :D

I have something to submit you after talking to some explorers during the Shorah Pahts' open day last saturday. It concerns the KI chat text.

Show Spoiler


As you can see on the picture, we have 15 lines of chat text in tiny font size. Is there a way it could be improved?
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Re: Tweaks for Complete Chronicles

Postby Sirius » Wed May 21, 2014 10:59 am

Annabelle wrote:Thank you very much! :D
You're welcome ;)

About the chat size, do you mean you would like a bigger font, or more lines to display it (or both) ?
Of course if the "font size" slider worked, it would already be a huge improvement. I tried tweaking the KI python script, but it seems the error lies in the engine again - and again that's beyond what I can do. Sorry.

The solutions left would be to manually edit the PRP file, so as to shift some vertices a bit to make the chat area wider (I'm not even sure this would work correctly), or to create duplicates of the chat area, each with different font size. Either way, that's probably too hacky and complicated.

A solution would be to replace dat/Arial Bold-10.p2f with another font. Might work.


But no matter what you do, this won't work on DI, since it would have to be installed on the server first, and it's not going to happen unless it's 100% working and 99% person are happy with it.
As for using it offline... well... kindof useless.
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Re: Tweaks for Complete Chronicles

Postby Annabelle » Wed May 21, 2014 5:52 pm

Yes I meant bigger font because as you can see the first picture is hard on the eyes.

With the 2nd picture you can read easily the silly text chat I wrote just for you since I know you understand French (...obviously ;) )

Sirius wrote:As for using it offline... well... kindof useless


Tu serais surpris... :lol:

I know it sounds weird but doing videos I thought of using chat text to do "solo dialogs" to inform the viewers of my actions with no avail...because it's too tiny. I'll just use the text editor on my video editing software!
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Re: Tweaks for Complete Chronicles

Postby Sirius » Thu May 22, 2014 5:01 am

Annabelle wrote:
Sirius wrote:As for using it offline... well... kindof useless


Tu serais surpris... :lol:

I know it sounds weird but doing videos I thought of using chat text to do "solo dialogs" to inform the viewers of my actions with no avail...because it's too tiny. I'll just use the text editor on my video editing software!
Clever, I forgot about that !


At least there is a way to make the chat area use another font:
- replace dat/Arial Bold-10.p2f with any other font AND open the new Arial Bold-10.p2f with PlasmaShop 2. Obviously, change the name to "Arial Bold", the size to 10, tick bold, and save. This works even if you're using the Atrus font (which looks pretty cool IMHO :) )
- OR, open dat/GUI_District_KIMini.prp with PRPEditor, look for [0098]GUI Dialog Mod, open the "KIMini" object, change the settings to whatever font you want to use, and save.


Ca devrait rendre le tout plus lisible ! :D
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