Guild of Writers

Is there any faster way to test an age? Rather than just dropping it into that jumble of other ages in the .dat file. I really hate testing ages for several reasons, but most of which is that it takes so freakin long. I also hate possibly losing age stuff in the dat file. I don't know if I'm ocd or what, but knowing that I may have useless files anywhere on my machine really, really bothers me. I like to keep my files as close to sterile as possible. At least highly ordered. If anyone has any suggestions or thoughts on this...

No there is no other way to test ages. You have to drop it in to Uru.

Here's how I do it:
Export:
1. Use this trick: http://forum.guildofwriters.org/viewtop ... 17&p=45270
2. Directly export to Uru/dat folder; avoids the need of copying files after export.
Uru start:
3. Rename the files Intro0.bik and Intro1.bik in your Uru installation avi folder to something else, e.g. add a .BAK extension; this way Uru starts faster because it skips the videos.
4. Assign a keybord shortcut for starting the Uru setup.exe (e.g. Ctrl-Alt-U); allows to start Uru in no time when export is done.
5. In Uru, enter "/autolink <agename>"; links you automatically to your age as soon as you land in Relto. Requires the OfflineKI installed.

I have noticed that with some small changes you do not have to restart uru. So you can link to your relto, copy-paste in the new files , link back. You could try this of you're only changing a texture or so, it will take some figuring out when it works and when not (you just stackdump, not a really huge crash).

Great! Very helpful. I will try all these things. Thanks guys. Blender 2.6 makes it much easier on me than 2.49 as far as letting me bookmark folders. God did I hate having to always redirect the save, and I was afraid to export directly to the dat folder because I wanted to know exactly what I was putting in it. As I get more familial with the process I'm sure I will be able to streamline it a bit. Thanks Tach for the excellent suggestions.

Did I hear about work being done on a test environment addon to blender? That would be monumental. To be able to see what ur lighting actually looks like or how much emit you need on each material.

Personally I have a bit of an aversion to dropping the export, complete with texture cache and log, directly into the dat/, so I have a little batch file, that I can click, which copies over the relevant files from the particular project's "export" directory and also deletes the age's sav file. :7

Speaking about batch...

That's not much, but here is the script for a batch that will launch Uru without having to run UruSetup. It is for Windows only (I'm sure there is a way to do that in Shell for Linux, but I don't know how).Copy this in a blank file, then rename it so that it ends with ".bat".

You have to put your directory name at line 5. Please note that a folder of more than 7 letters MUST have a special syntax. For example, your directory path is:
C:\SomeFolder\Uru - Complete Chronicles
Line 5 will look like:
cd C:\SomeFo~1\Uru-Co~1
Quite weird but that's how it works.

I often have to modify Cyan's Ages, and that's truly a real pain to start Uru over and over.
And if you want to use Uru offline in hight resolution (using UruStarter from DI), this is a way to make sure UruSetup won't overwrite the config file (I won't explain fully how to do it here).

I hope this can be useful.

Well that was totally and completely over my head. =)

What does the "-iinit To_Dni" parameter do?
Are there other parameters possible for Uruexplorer.exe?

When you double click on UruExplorer.exe, it just starts UruSetup.exe. And once you click on the Play button of UruSetup, it calls UruExplorer, but with -iinit To_Dni as an argument (or whatever this is). So when you use this command in MS-DOS this doesn't make any difference for Uru.
I found that on another thread when trying to use Uru in a higher resolution.

And I just tried to find back this thread, and found you could use a simple shortcut instead of a batch file to do this !
So, forget what I said in my last post. Here is a better way:
Right click on UruExplorer.exe, click on Create shortcut (I guess that's how it is named). Then right-click on your newly created shortcut and go into Properties. In the Shortcut tab, replace:in the first tab byAnd you don't have to bother with the way MS-DOS handles folder, your folder name can be of any length.


I guess there are other possible parameters, but I know none of them.