gamophyte on 4/2/2023 at 23:29
CONGRATS!!
Hit Deity on 5/2/2023 at 04:35
It's a shame there's not a way to "fix" doors to where they no longer require a vision blocking brush in them. I think there are some vision-blocking objects, and can't that property be set manually on them? If you could create a solid door of sorts, maybe you could replace the standard doors with more modern "engine friendly" doors. We have cemetery gates and other portcullis types..
No idea if this would affect how sound propagated through them, but it might also remove the need to have some extra, small Room brushes around doors.. is it even possible? Or would sound just travel willy-nilly through rooms and make an entire building seem like it was one big room???
vfig on 5/2/2023 at 07:49
Quote Posted by Hit Deity
It's a shame there's not a way to "fix" doors to where they no longer require a vision blocking brush in them. I think there are some vision-blocking objects, and can't that property be set manually on them?
well you can make any door you like non-vision-blocking, just go into its Door>Rotating or Door>Translating property and untick "Blocks Vision". but this cell-blocking is a good thing to have! it makes rendering more efficient. dont confuse this feature of doors with the AI>Utility>Blocks AI Vision property, thats an entirely separate thing that doesnt have any worldrep/rendering implications.
Quote Posted by Hit Deity
No idea if this would affect how sound propagated through them, but it might also remove the need to have some extra, small Room brushes around doors.. is it even possible? Or would sound just travel willy-nilly through rooms and make an entire building seem like it was one big room???
no; the interaction of doors with room brushes is entirely separate from its interaction with the worldrep/renderer.
Hit Deity on 5/2/2023 at 15:34
Ahh okay. I figured there had to be a reason to have them in the first place, other than just a hard limit for vision. Thanks for the succinct explanation.
vfig on 9/2/2023 at 10:54
february 9, 2023i dont have a useful screenshot of it, but i went forward with the merging of all three island pieces, which worked great! this was a huge boost to me, as having this capability to rely on resolved a whole lot of worries about the project and its progress.
so of course, the next day, the merging promptly failed again—as i was demoing it on twitch for some other mappers. i should have expected it of course, the curse of demos is not to be sneezed at. what was happening now is that one island slice or another was being treated by dromed as if it was inside out. i have a rough idea why, but after all the intense work on the merge i didnt have the headspace anymore to debug this problem, so i made notes and parked it.
the lack of an actually functioning merge tool isnt a bottleneck yet: i still have plenty of ordinary building in dromed to do, and i can use area brushes to keep things down to a portalizable size. so my plans arent ruined.
what
is ruined is the mansion. well, parts of it; but not enough yet. the last main building work had been interior detailing in the unruined mansion, completing it. but the ruined slice still just had bare devtextured blockouts on the interior, and so all of these interiors needed to be copied over. however, due to the relatively tight layout of the mansion and all the other brushwork going on, using an areabrush to select each room in turn and clone it wasnt going to work: it would pick up far too many other neighbouring brushes that would need to be picked out. so i spent a day and a half slowly (though unpleasantly so) manually working through each brush in a room, highlighting it, and then multibrushing the highlight to create a clone. not the fastest work, but made significantly easier by writing scripts to (
https://github.com/vfig/dromed-config/blob/master/Common/Cmds/NudgeUp512.cmd) move the selected brushes straight up/down to the next layer and to (
https://github.com/vfig/dromed-config/blob/master/Common/Cmds/CamUp512.cmd) move the camera up/down between layers too, which i bound to shift+pgup/dn and pgup/dn respectively. handy! the camera move in particular let me easily compare both parts to ensure they were the same.
well i got a few rooms done that way, before realising there was another problem. and it was this, the ruined east wing blockout:
Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/ROAe4ZR.pngsee, the east wing was to be almost entirely collapsed, with only a few walls left standing, and barely a single bit of floor (excluding the basements of course). lovely and picturesque for exploring the ruined version of the island. the standing walls looked beautiful in the fog. and the openness of the ruin served a couple other small purposes too. but it simply did not fit the gameplay needs for timeline teleporting. the lack of intact floors meant that if you were in the east wing in the past, and needed to teleport back to avoid a guard or something, you would suddenly find yourself in midair, and unable to hover even for as long as wile e. coyote. this would be a quick route to dying or losing most of your health to fall damage,
repeatedly. you might object, "but you could just look down through the device and see that there wasnt a floor there". and that does work. everyone knows players dont look up, but they really dont look down either.
i knew of this problem; i
knew where the ruins had bits of intact floor and where they didnt; and yet i
still found myself teleporting into empty space far too often. it just wasnt going to be good enough if this problem was ubiquitous throughout the east wing. so i realised i would need a shiny fresh new copy of the unruined east wing, that i could then ruin anew in a more playable way.
and that made me realise that i had been going about getting the new interiors to the ruined island all back to front. the amount of detailing work in the ruined slice was quite small: only the east wing basement (which was essentially a vertical slice to test out the texturing and modelling workflows i would need), and one room in the west wing basement (to test out a puzzle mechanic). it would be
far easier to take a fresh new copy of the entire mansion, and just regraft those two pieces onto it.
fortunately, i had been careful to keep the geometry of the bare island terrain and the mansion separated in time. first in time came all the brushes for one slice of the bare island; then the near-identical second slice of bare island; then the near-identical third slice. after that came all the brushes for the healthy mansion. and finally all the brushes for the ruined mansion. (object brushes of course come after all of this; but objects are
much easier to manage just by area multibrushing, so they dont really matter for this problem).
to illustrate, here is the unruined mansion slice:
Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/zi54RRo.pngif i set
time_filter_hi, i can hide all the brushes at a higher time to get just the bare island:
Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/4CP56eF.pngand if instead i set
time_filter_lo, i can hide the low-time-value bare island brushes to get just the mansion:
Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/vrqShjG.pngand that—together with area brushes to isolate the basement parts that i needed to keep (relatively easy to unpick them from the rest, since the basement levels are much more flat than the rest of the mansion) meant that in another day i was able to get a fresh mansion fully ready to keep ruining. so thats what i have been doing now; heres the last screenshot for today, showing the destruction-in-progress:
Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/1GoeJWS.pngvfig on 15/2/2023 at 14:16
February 15, 2023
a really quick update today. no time to take screenshots for it.
ive continued ruining the west wing of the mansion. progress is slow, largely because theres a lot to do; when i did a "vertical slice" test of ruining the east wing basement, i unconsciously benefited from the relatively few textures that area used, that i needed to make ruined variants of. but in the more richly decorated rooms upstairs in both wings, i had been throwing textures at the walls and floors and ceilings with wild abandon, making it look sumptuous when fresh, neglecting to consider that i would need to make it look, er, slumptious in its ruined state. making each ruined variation of a texture only takes a few minutes—most of the work is reusing various dirt/grime/moss/cracks overlays i had prepared already—but theres a lot of it. and then more models to make ruined variants of, too! but the progress is pretty steady.
i also discovered that while i had decorated the walls of the west wing main hall, i had neglected to furnish it in any way. and in doing that realised that i needed some more paintings to hang around the mansion. i decided the works of the French painter Hubert Robert were exactly what i was after for this mission, and selected a whole bunch of his paintings (source from wikimedia commons) and converted them to appropriate size textures.
so thats all good progress. but the real news today is this: i figured out why my merge tool had suddenly, confusingly broken a week and a half ago: its because it hadnt! instead, i had made a ridiculous tiny mistake when creating the batch file to automate the merge process. see, between the first (ruins) and second (intact mansion) layers of the island, a rough halfway point is at Z 416.0. so i had put in the batch file that the separating plane between these two should be 0 0 1 416 (the 0 0 1 is the plane's normal vector, meaning it should be a flat plane facing straight upwards). but the last number, 416, is not the Z coordinate of a point on the plane, as i had clearly confused myself into thinking, but rather the fourth coefficient of the plane equation, ax + by + cz + d = 0; geometrically, it is the distance from the plane to the origin, in the direction of the plane's normal. which means the plane, facing straight upwards, sitting at Z 416, needs its fourth coefficient to be minus 416. it should have been 0 0 1 -416. the merge had started failing simply because i wrote it out wrong when making the .bat file. sigh.
at any rate, i am very happy to have found the cause of the fault. i wasted a lot of time trying to understand why the output of the merge was wrong, trying various different strategies to debug it, without actually double-checking if the input was right! i would say "lesson learned", but this is an old, old lesson that i clearly still havent fully learned. oh well.
vfig on 20/2/2023 at 19:28
february 20, 2023progress is slow in ruining things. because of my profligacy with detail, every other room needs a whole lot more ruined textures, and some more ruined models. still, progress, although slow, is progress. heres another before/after of a room:
Before:Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/NZ28QL1.pngAfter:Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/xXcOiuH.pngmeanwhile the next rooms i started to ruin had wallpaper instead of wood tile textures, so my previous process for doing dirty/faded/moss-grown texture varieties needed some changes. i dont know yet whether i will want moss growing on the wallpaper? but i do want torn wallpaper. so heres some of the wallpaper variants i put together today:
Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/SaZXfbI.jpgthere is a little other progress, but i am too tired to write it up or go chase down screenshots. so thats all for todays update!
Hit Deity on 21/2/2023 at 04:46
Looking very interesting..
nicked on 21/2/2023 at 08:59
How is that tree growing inside though? Needs more holes in the roof. :laff:
vfig on 21/2/2023 at 10:30
Quote Posted by nicked
How is that tree growing inside though? Needs more holes in the roof. :laff:
there is a big hole in the roof thats not really visible in that shot—but yeah, wouldnt really let in enough light for a tree that size. the tree is also of a species that doesnt grow on this island, so i need to change it anyway. for now, think of the tree as a metaphor, or something.
