Noloben/Crowthistle fixes + new Age

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Sirius
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Noloben/Crowthistle fixes + new Age

Post by Sirius »

Hello everybody !

You might remember I fixed the Tiwah from Myst V. Well, recently I did that for Noloben as well. I hate spending hours doing it, but Noloben is a lot easier to fix than Laki'Ahn or Todelmer.

I also received the Crowthistle book some days ago, which means I installed the demo environment on my computer... And since the Plasma version used for Crowthistle is the same as Myst V's, I fixed a few things in these Ages as well !

CT-Nlbn fix.zip
(302.15 KiB) Downloaded 700 times


Also, a bit off-topic but it isn't worth creating a whole new thread for it...
Some of you might wonder what are the progress on my version of the Mechanical Age. Well: none at all. I didn't do a lot more because of the huge scaling issue. I might resume work on it later, if I feel like doing this.

I did interesting things on Blender though, mainly on the Tehranee Maze.
Don't start dreaming, it's not complete, and I have no idea when it will. Might take a very long time, since I'm doing this as a hobby.

But I might release the link-in plazza someday, as a garden Age. Since it's quite small, I won't spoil with pictures of it (and won't create a thread about it).

However my ego pushes me to release just two pictures of it... It's Blender-render but I'll try to keep the good visual quality in Uru.
Here and there
Understand why it takes me so long to build ? :D
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Calena
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Re: Noloben/Crowthistle fixes + new Age

Post by Calena »

Sirius wrote:
However my ego pushes me to release just two pictures of it... It's Blender-render but I'll try to keep the good visual quality in Uru.
Here and there
Understand why it takes me so long to build ? :D
Nice. Very nice. You do realize that showing that to us and not ever releasing it is just plain cruel and unusual punishment, don't you?

I'll disagree with you on one point, though. When done right, the Plasma renderer can put a Blender render to shame ;) . That's one of the main reasons I stick with Plasma even when others are moving onto newer engines. Now that I've convinced you that this can look even better in-game, pretty please will you release it some day :P ?
Galatians 2: 20-21

"Don't mess with me today. I have my CAPS LOCK key and I know how to use it!"
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Sirius
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Re: Noloben/Crowthistle fixes + new Age

Post by Sirius »

Calena wrote:I'll disagree with you on one point, though. When done right, the Plasma renderer can put a Blender render to shame ;) . That's one of the main reasons I stick with Plasma even when others are moving onto newer engines.
Well, the reason Plasma renders look good is that you use Blender to calculate everything Plasma cannot.
Modern game engines can do this themselves, and without the painstaking process of baking everything yourself.

Calena wrote:You do realize that showing that to us and not ever releasing it is just plain cruel and unusual punishment, don't you?
Oh, I do, I do ! :twisted:
It's just a lot longer to make Ages with good quality than Ages with... well, plain textures with no lighting and no UV mapping.
And my reason to make Ages for Uru (which is part of Myst) is to keep the Myst visual quality. Of course I can't have Riven or Revelation-quality rendering, but I can hardly imagine a Myst-like environment with bad visual quality (and that's my main reason to dislike most fan-Ages).
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Chacal
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Re: Noloben/Crowthistle fixes + new Age

Post by Chacal »

I completely missed this thread and the one about Tiwah.
Thanks a lot, I'll try your fixes ASAP.
Chacal


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D'Lanor
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Re: Noloben/Crowthistle fixes + new Age

Post by D'Lanor »

After applying the fix for the Crowthistle water horses the game freezes every few seconds in the Great Marsh. This happens because the animation states are written to the age SDL. Is that bad? Well, it can be when 726 objects are trying to do that all the time.

Here is a patch to get rid of this freezing. It sets the "excludepersistentstate" flag on the animations of the objects in question.
MarshScene_WaterHorses_AGMaster_exclude.zip
(196.89 KiB) Downloaded 571 times
You can install this in the same way as Sirius' original patch (see his instructions).
"It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself." - Goethe
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Annabelle
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Re: Noloben/Crowthistle fixes + new Age

Post by Annabelle »

Thank you very much D'Lanor!!!

I never tried to install Sirius' fix yet. I will try his with our new patch and see if I can see the nice horses wander about the forest just like the tall woman do. :D
Annabelle ;)
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Sirius
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Re: Noloben/Crowthistle fixes + new Age

Post by Sirius »

Argh ! SDL-synched animations again ? I should really check this flag whenever I mess up with anims... Anyway, thanks ;)
It's weird, because I don't recall freezes or lags when I was testing it. Maybe I simply didn't notice at the time.

... By the way, since it's bad, why is this flag off ? Is it Cyan who didn't bother when making Crowthistle, or was it removed from latest versions of Plasma, or is it Drizzle who forgets to convert it ?
If so, this means it would have to be fixed in the Tiwah and Noloben versions as well :o (which, I admit, am a bit lazy to do)

D'Lanor wrote:This happens because the animation states are written to the age SDL. Is that bad? Well, it can be when 726 objects are trying to do that all the time.
Meh, is it saving the frame number/position for every bone in these horses ? It sounds better to simply save the frame number for the whole animation. Well, this is Plasma we're talking about
D'Lanor
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Re: Noloben/Crowthistle fixes + new Age

Post by D'Lanor »

Sirius wrote: ... By the way, since it's bad, why is this flag off ? Is it Cyan who didn't bother when making Crowthistle, or was it removed from latest versions of Plasma, or is it Drizzle who forgets to convert it ?
It must be a Drizzle thing. I just dug up the original Crowthistle file and PrpShop shows the "exclude all persistent states" flag on these objects. Drizzle somehow converts this to the "has constant net group" flag, whatever that means. I haven't seen that flag enabled before.
"It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself." - Goethe
Tsar Hoikas
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Re: Noloben/Crowthistle fixes + new Age

Post by Tsar Hoikas »

That flag is garbage on everything except for Until Uru :lol:
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