Korman Kickables issue

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Korman Kickables issue

Postby ametist » Thu Jan 28, 2021 8:13 am

I have an issue I hope someone can help me to fix - I have rebuilt my old age Kinnekulle with Korman, and there are six boxes(cube meshes) that should be able to push around. The boxes have a texture with a letter or number on each side, so by pushing the boxes to form a line, and sometimes so they turn around, a certain pattern of letters and numbers should be seen when looking at the line from the front. In the old version of Kinnekulle, built with PyPrp, the boxes were hard to push and didn't respond very well.

So now I gave each of them these settings:


Collision: Convex Hull,
I ticked: Blocks Avatars, Blocks Camera LOS, Terrain, Dynamic, Starts Asleep
Friction: 0.5
Restitution: 0
Mass: 1.0

When I tested in UruCC, they were easy to push and move around with my avatar. So I sent the age to diafero and he uploaded it to DI. But the boxes are gone there! So I figure it must have something to do with my settings, but it's hard to test when it works in offline. Is there something in my settings that causes this?
I should point out that I have placed the boxes a little bit above the ground.
Thanks!
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Re: Korman Kickables issue

Postby Tsar Hoikas » Fri Jan 29, 2021 12:43 am

It's hard to say what's going on. With the old PotS engine, sometimes, kickables would just give up and fall through the floor or otherwise go missing. I would be unwilling to blame anything on the Age itself before I knew, for example, that you were the very first person to link into the Age on the shard. It seems to me, though, that if a kickable is working correctly in PotS offline, then it should work correctly in Deep Island.
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Re: Korman Kickables issue

Postby ametist » Fri Jan 29, 2021 8:52 am

Thank you Hoikas for quick reply! Yes, it is weird when it works offline. I will continue to test and think :)
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Re: Korman Kickables issue

Postby ametist » Wed Feb 03, 2021 11:42 am

So now I have tested. It turned out that if I /!resetage the boxes came back...I dont know how they could have been gone though because no one could have been pushing them. They did not react to the character, I could just walk through them. Hm...
I did /!restartage again and when I returned to the age I found that they reacted and were able to be kicked around. But after going back to relto, or anyone else fanage, and back to the Kinnekulle age again, they had gone back to the earlier behavior, not reacting and possible to just walk through.
I talked to SereneTiki about it and it turned out that he had encountered the same in his ages. In his age Kinnekulle Picnic he has a couple of boxes that animates when clicked. If that was done, the other boxes, which were able to walk through before, were kickable! After some more testing we could determine that if the kickables had the flag 'Start Asleep' set, they were able to walk through. If they had not, they were solid and reacted to the character.

I unticked the box 'Start asleep' in the korman collision modifier on my six boxes and sent the age files to diafero, which has uploaded the age to Di again. I was there just now and tested and the boxes are kickable. I know that the positions of the boxes has to be 'remembered' between sessions, but this is a small age and with no looping animation or other fancy stuff. I hope it does not have a big impact on the performance.
So a mystery or?
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Re: Korman Kickables issue

Postby Tsar Hoikas » Wed Feb 03, 2021 5:47 pm

That's strange - "Start Asleep" sets the same flags that cause the firemarbles in the Neighborhood to float in the air until someone bumps into them. That being said, it shouldn't be a performance penalty to leave this off. Most physics engines will automatically put dynamic bodies to sleep when they find that there is no net force acting on the body. Amusingly, in PhysX 4.1, telling a kickable to start asleep does nothing and causes them to start falling anyway. And I'm responsible for the PhysX 4.1 integration :roll:. It's tempting to just remove the option altogether.

I do most of my testing on MOUL/PhysX 4.1, so there will probably be corner cases around the old PotS/Havok engine. It's difficult to paper over all of the changed behaviors -- some of which are accidental, unknown, and/or on purpose. Please keep reporting any problems you run into, and I'll look at fixing them in my next Korman hacking session. I did at least fix the issue where kickables would just fall through the floor when you hit them 8-)
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Re: Korman Kickables issue

Postby Ehren » Fri Feb 05, 2021 7:16 pm

Tsar Hoikas wrote:Amusingly, in PhysX 4.1, telling a kickable to start asleep does nothing and causes them to start falling anyway.


Huh? Isn't that weird that PhysX 4.1 suddenly makes that stop working?
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Re: Korman Kickables issue

Postby Tsar Hoikas » Fri Feb 05, 2021 7:36 pm

Heh, that's the least of the concerns. You should have seen the kickables when I finished the gnarly first part of the update. You could stand on top of a log in Relto, start running, and "ride" on it all the way past the horizon. Talk about a trip. I spent, no joke, two months on-and-off tweaking the character/kickable/environment interaction.

Of course, there were more amusing things, like ladders that would fling you into orbit or, better, ladders that would lay the avatar facedown... :roll:
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Re: Korman Kickables issue

Postby Eh'ko » Thu Apr 15, 2021 4:44 am

Not sure if this is a related issue, but I have a kickable that works fine, but the texture has completely disappeared and the object is black. However, if I disable the 'Dynamic' flag and have it as a static object then the texturing appears fine.

Any ideas/thoughts what is causing this?

-: D'eux :-
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Re: Korman Kickables issue

Postby Sirius » Thu Apr 15, 2021 9:35 am

That's likely because movable objects (animated or kickables) are using dynamic lighting (versus static objects for which lighting is baked to vertex colors during export). Make sure you marked your Blender lamps as Plasma objects, it might solve your issue (and don't rely on Blender's indirect/environment lighting, that won't work ingame).
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Re: Korman Kickables issue

Postby Eh'ko » Fri Apr 16, 2021 6:46 am

It seems that I just haven't got to grips with how Korman/Plasma work together yet :roll: The problem was that although the lamp I was using was set to 'Plasma Object', because it was also part of a group for generating the lightmap, the kickable texture was appearing unlit. It would seem that the solution is to duplicate the lamp in the same place and have one set as part of the lightgroup and the other as a plasma object.

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