Prelate Walking Problem: Solved?

[Ishtvan]

It appears that the walk animation for the Prelate is set up such that it walks 90 degrees from the direction it's facing. If you go into the editor, place some AI and select one, hit the entity info tab and play the various animations, for all of the other animations, when walk or run is played, the AI walk in the same direction as they're facing.

 

When you do this on the Prelate, the walk animation is done 90 degrees to the direction they're facing (the run animation is still in the same direction, which explains why Prelates can run fine but not walk correctly). So if they're trying to walk to a certain point, they will turn to face it, and then start walking, but when they walk, they go 90 degrees to the direction they're facing, which turns them in a circle around that point - exactly the observed behavior.

 

I don't know how animation programs work, but if Odd could rotate the coordinates of the prelate walk animation 90 degrees, so that the walk is in-line with the way the Prelate faces when it's still, I think this might fix the problem.

[Ishtvan]

@Odd: If you get any time to try this, let me know if this fixes the problem, so I can stop thinking about it.

[oDDity]

I don't think I even have that animation any more, it was just a quick hack to throw it into the game really. I'll be rerigging it with the new setup anyway at some point.

You're probably right though, Motion builder requires that characters be facing th x axis, and doom require they face z, to I always have to turn them 90 degrees after animaiton and before exporting to doom, and I could have forgotten to rotate the prelate model's walk anim.

[Ishtvan]

Ah okay, cool. If it's being redone, no need to worry about it I guess. Good to finally figure out what it was, now I can sleep soundly at night (except for the rope clipping into things, haven't conquered that one yet).

[Dram]

with relation to the rope problem: Maybe you could make it so that spawning the rope gives 2 ropes - one tiny section which is at the ropearrow base, and then one which is the long rope that we know. This looong rope would be ticked continuosly, always told to be at -THIS- location - that being the tiny rope piece. In effect it would not be bound to an entity but would stay centred on the rope arrow.

 

I don't know how much of a performance hit it would be for it to constantly check the position of 500000 ropes, but codewise it should be possible. I think this should be a last resort though, if nothing else works.

 

Also, i think it would be nice to be able to cut the ropes. -FEATURE CREEP- !!!!!!!!!!!!!

[oDDity]

I've noticed that by shooting 10 or so ropes into a wall, my framerate drop quite a lot. If I then shoot a fire arrow at the ropes the frame rate drops to nothing as all the Afs have to be calculated.

Then again, dark mod already gives me a 30% framerate drop to start with as comaprd to vaniolla doom on the same map.

[Ishtvan]

@Dram: It's always better to find the bug (which is probably a simple 1 line change) rather than invent a convoluted solution to get around it. It's good to be thinking up solutions though, we just shouldn't need it in this case. The code is all there, so theoretically one can find where the AF checks what it should clip through and correct it to take the MasterEntity off that list. It'll just take a few more hours of staring at it, probably. I also posted on D3World but don't think anyone answered.

 

@Oddity: Yeah, AF's can drop the framerate. The other day I stacked up about 6 zombie corpses, then pulled on the leg of the bottom one in the pile, effecting all of them, and the framerate dropped to about 5 fps.

 

You can set the minimum force it takes to start calculating an AF, and you can set the max speed at which it comes to rest, stuff like that, but then it's a balance between making it look believable (not stopping in a weird, non-equilibrium position) and saving the frame rate. The ropes are set to be calculated pretty realistically right now, so that they only come to rest when they actually come to rest (I set the "cutoff" speed to something like 1 doom unit / second)

[Springheel]

Will we be able to handle that with some kind of video setting? So setting a high video setting results in a higher "rest period" for objects, and a low one cuts them off to save framerate?

[Ishtvan]

Maybe, although that could have some impact on gameplay too, like if a rope stops moving in a weird place that allows you to climb something you shouldn't / doesn't allow you to climb something you should.

[sparhawk]

I also posted on D3World but don't think anyone answered.

 

I noticed that you rarely get answers. You can ask any kind of noob questions, but if it comes to more sophisticated questions you are mostly on your own.

[sparhawk]

Will we be able to handle that with some kind of video setting? So setting a high video setting results in a higher "rest period" for objects, and a low one cuts them off to save framerate?

 

I think we should allow the user to set his cutoff time. After all, he can tune this to his machine and how much performance it's worth for him.

[oDDity]

I noticed that you rarely get answers. You can ask any kind of noob questions, but if it comes to more sophisticated questions you are mostly on your own.

 

THat's because when people like you do discover these things, you don't go there and write about it, you keep it to yourselves, yet you expert everyone else to have the answers ready for you)

[sparhawk]

That's not really true. I already wrote some tutorials on the WIKI page and also asked Ishtvan to do the same. And I also plan to continue this. It's not as if we find out usefull stuff every day.

The problem is more that many people do keep things to themselve, and a lot of newbies frequent the forum, so that when you ask actually advanced questions that you get no response because most people, who might know something, probably wont even look there.

There was a thread about compilation which had so many glaring errors that it hurt, but when I corrected the original poster (who was a noob) started to complain and refused to acknowledge his errors even though he readily admitted not knowing much about the topic he posted.

When I see postings that say something like "A compiler is a tool to create an encrypted DLL" then you can't really expect that more serious people will look there for help which in turn leads to a downslope.

 

For example: When I posted that I found a way around the button limitation I got no response at all. I guess the reason is either that other people don't see this as a problem (which I don't quite believe) or the poeple didn't even understand the implications (which I tend is closer to the truth), and apparently nobody knows enough about programming to actually help in finding a solution for Linux (which I asked for in that posting), which means that I'm back on my own anyway (like always).

[oDDity]

Well I also wrote a tutorial about setting up AFs, whic far outweighs any benefit I've ever had form the place, so my conscience is clear.

There aren't that many people doing advanced mods for the engine in the first place, so you can't expect many people to have worked out advanced stuff.

Most people there are doing stupid weapons mods or something.

[sparhawk]

Most people there are doing stupid weapons mods or something.

 

Yeah. That's the main problem. Most mods I have looked for are mostly more of Doom 3.

[New Horizon]

For example: When I posted that I found a way around the button limitation I got no response at all.

 

I noticed that. I thought it strange that nobody said anything about it. I've searched for info on D3world myself and it never really seems to be that beneficial.

[oDDity]

No, mainly because you can use quotes to seach for exact phrases, or include a hyphen to ommit words, but then that's the standard on most forums, and it's completely useless.

[Domarius]

I gave up on that place around about the time I began attempting the bow weapon switch thing. Brian is so much more reliable, even if he takes two weeks to respond.

A compiler is a tool to create an encrypted DLL

Haha, gotta find that thread, sounds like a good laugh.

 

Hm... I can't. I entered that phrase as a search term and got this error "

SQL Error : 1114 The table 'SQL383019e0_0' is full" Guess you are right oDDity, their forum backend sucks.

[sparhawk]

That's the thread. Funny thing is, the author thaught that he can set the forum rules and the moderator will have nothing better to do than obeying him.

 

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic...f807560351d9446

[Ishtvan]

Yeah, the activity seems to have died down a lot lately. I would post some question, and then check back days later, and my post would still be the most recent post in that forum. There have been a few times when it's been useful, the D3CDit project generated a lot of useful stuff (like our water! ), and I got some AAS answers out of it, but it seems like it's mostly useful when two people happen to be working independently in the same area (AAS, Gravity, etc), which doesn't happen that often.

[Domarius]

Hah, the funniest part about that whole thread is the concept of it and how firmly they supported it - "We don't want to know any coding stuff but we want to be able to compile a .dll" WTF are you compiling for then??? And there was other guys there backing up son_of_sam2 saying you were just nitpicking on him, they were totally clueless about what all of this meant.

[sparhawk]

Hah, the funniest part about that whole thread is the concept of it and how firmly they supported it - "We don't want to know any coding stuff but we want to be able to compile a .dll" WTF are you compiling for then??? And there was other guys there backing up son_of_sam2 saying you were just nitpicking on him, they were totally clueless about what all of this meant.

 

Yeah. If you checked the posts from the other guys who were supporting me, they were the oines that actually contributed some code or knowledge to the forum, while most others, backing son_of_sam2 were noobs themselve.

 

Well, I don't really frequent the board much anymore. There is no point. I do look there quite often, but this is more out of boredom when all the other forums on other sites dried out and I have to wait for something. I don't really expect much in tems of actual info.

Currently the most hottest topic apparently are wether VC2005 is nice or not. What can you do?