Guild of Writers

Grogyan wrote:Sweet!

thank you... Not up to YOUR scripting standards... even if you ARE at an impasse.

Jojon wrote:Nice.

Actually the double helix thing could SAVE you faces. :7 You could use a single closed profile, cutting right through the the entire pillar doing both sides with just six points - eight faces for the price of six, sorta, given that two would be shared between the heli on opposite sides. I truly think that more than 10 points for such a twin profile is a bit of a waste, for realtime stuff; you'll mostly notice the nice rounding, given by any points beyond that number, from the profile of the pillar.

Not sure what you are saying there... do you have any examples?

It is also possible that it is I, who go butchering models much too heavily, to reduce polygon count...

I do notice that you have more rounding detail on the bases for the closed version of the new design, but would still expect it to actually use up fewer polys than the open one - did you remember to delete the parts of the eight heli, that wound up inside the pillar, where they can't be seen? (same opportunity to save faces by "shared mirroring" here, by the way.)

Actually, the open version of the outside pillar is just the outside piller - I copied it - deleted the faces between the curves, then added faces to the back-sides of the curves. so I guess I could say that, Yes, they really ARE single-sided polygons

Here is an update for the whole temple. I've gone from 114,619 vertices to 45,357 - a 60% reduction there. I'm sure I can get more... I just need to figure out where.

greypiffle wrote:Not sure what you are saying there... do you have any examples?

Sorry about my bad grasp on language. :7 Something like this, roughly, with a single profile describing both spirals:


EDIT: Remember that in Uru, the vertex normals, not the face normals, are used for shading.

ah... I THINK I understand, and that is basically what I have. The spirals are not tubes that intersect the column, but bulges like what your picture suggests.

Haha, I love language and how different people interpret words differently. The way I read what you wrote above, it looks 100% contradictory. :)

If I had written bulges, I would have meant that the very face of the central cylinder would be bulging out, with an extra vertex at every point where cylinder bulges out into a spiral profile, meaning you couldn't take the spirals and move them away, leaving the cylinder intact, whereas by intersecting surfaces, I would have meant *unbroken* edges. Opposite interpretations of several concepts; beautiful. :)

ok - that makes sense then. Well what you said makes sense.... but I do not see how that could reduce the number of vertices. you either have vertices that are joined to the column, or they are joined to the vertices on the oposite side of the spiral.

But I think I've gotten it down enough to actually work in the game now.

Now, I need to work on the ground. I've got a default sky put up right now, but I need to pop into Vue and make a sky I like and then texture a different sphere with it so it looks nice. That way, I can put the sun where I want it and have the clouds the way I want too.

Here is a new slideshow of my world.


I hope to have something ready by the time we have the code ready to use, but judging by my internal time-line of 6 months until we can have that, It may be cutting it a bit close.

ok - I've worked on this for the past couple of weeks, and gotten my cavern from 15,355 vertices to 11,851
got the temple itself from 114,619 to 15,385.

found lots of cooidencent vertices in the temple and the cavern both. The braziers were 15,000 vertices each! too much geometry in that temple, so I reduced a lot.

One of the things I find very relaxing and therapeutic is point-editing. I loose track of time, and the world just fades away. For those who don't know what point-editing is...
you edit the points and edges of an object to transform it from one thing to another.

What with getting things to look just right, it can be very time-consuming. I spent until 3am for the past 3 days, and just finished this one a few minutes ago. Going from one of the rocks in my canyon into a man-made cave home in 3 easy steps. OK... maybe not too easy. But it is a lot of fun!!!



I will wait until I can publish Temple canyon for you to discover the interior layout.

Quick! before my modem dies again...



Slideshow of the changes I've made. I'm having modem problems, so I don't know if I can update very much for a bit, but this is what I have so far... I like the ground, but the canyon walls need a new texture. The one I have (like the sky) is a place-holder only. I've added the "light plates" to all my "doors" and fixed the globes I have so far. I will be adding more globes and some ceiling lights in some places as well.

Wow, good on ya

I can't start on my Age concept till other things are done, like features to be implemented in PyPrp.

For one I want there to be a "roller coaster"
Every Age I believe has to have a ride of some sort

Back to your Canyon, tell me how does it look if all those walls and peaks had the "SetSmooth" button toggled, I rekon it would look a lot better and more "real".

Just my humble opinion

I don't have any "rides" in the canyon. but I do plan a puzzle.

for the texture:
well... in Truespace, there is not a setsmoth, but I assume you mean something like smooth normals - which makes the faces look rounded? The whole point to the canyon is the sharp flat faces, so that wouldn't do me any good. I just need something that looks like stone that can be repeated a few hundred times.