Builder Haunts?

[Darkness_Falls]

Huggies® = No more saggy diapers that leak

[Domarius]

Actually I've had leaks due to textures with semi-transparent areas in them. When I replaced it with a fully solid texture, no more leak.

 

Sparhawk, this point file thing doesn't point to the exact hole, just the entity that has the problem, it usually points to its center point.

 

That may not be exactly what it's doing either but I've used it enough to discover that it points you in the general direction anyway.

[sparhawk]

I know. But it is still pretty missleading.

[sparhawk]

Just make your own map with a basic  room and drop the Revenant into it.

I created an outer brush and it worked fine. That model looks AWESOME!

 

Good work there! Also on the animation! I'm really impressed with that model. I hope the others will be as good as this one.

 

The only thing that I noticed are the boots. IMO you are wrong with making the boots bigger, but this is only if you look specifically on them. If you just play normally it is not that noticable.

[Ishtvan]

Could you or someone update the non-leaking map to either ftp or CVS so those of us that are editor-challenged can play the map?

[sparhawk]

You have to wait until I get back home. But making it non leaking is pretty easy. You just have to create a brush that fully contains the entire room and assign a texture to it.

 

Crash course:

Load the map in the editor and center it. YOu can do this by dragging with the right mouse button.

Create a brush that fully contains the room by clicking above the left top corner of the room and start dragging the mouse.

With CTRL-TAB you can switch the view. Cycle through the three views and check the the brush is indeed bigger then the room.

To make it bigger in one direction you need to click outside the brush with the edge, that you want to move and start dragging the mouse. If you click inside the brush and drag, the brush will move instead.

When all sides are bigger, then you have an icon in the toolbar that looks like a square with a smaller square inside. Click on it while the brush is still selected and your brush will turn into a hollow box AKA room.

The click on media and select any texture. Doesn't really matter which one as long as it exists and you will not see it anyway.

Compile the map and run it.

 

The Revenant is really incredible.

[Ishtvan]

Cool, thanks, I'm probably going to sleep now, so it will have to wait until I next have some time.

[oDDity]

You can only see the run and attack01 animation right now, since cory has't finished the new AI script yet.

[Macsen]

The only thing that I noticed are the boots. IMO you are wrong with making the boots bigger, but this is only if you look specifically on them. If you just play normally it is not that noticable.

Such quirks seem 'wrong' now but will surely become endearing after the game becomes a long standing object of fandom. I used to think the 'argue' animation in Thief I and II was rubbish, but now I love it and think we should emulate it as close as possible for the Dark Mod...

[Darkness_Falls]

I agree those arguments are kind've endearing, but I don't think we should try to mimic them when we do our campaign. Many of the T2 arguments and discussions just seemed very rehearsed and non-spontaneous (like stiff actors) rather than real situations. It kind've ruined the immersion a bit for me.

 

Having large'ish boots on most of the characters (if they don't look right in-game) wouldn't be very endearing, imo. I still haven't seen the boots "in game" here, so I can't give a good opinion on if their size looks out-of-place or not. But if they really all look big, all the time, I tend to think it would be more of a distraction than anything. Maybe I'm wrong?

[sparhawk]

The boots are not so big that you notice it at first sight. But if you take a cloer look at them it is slightly noticable. Actually I don't really buy that "D3 uses a persepective tweak" argument because it seems rather strange to me from a programmers point of view.

The projection of a 3D environment onto a 2D plane (the display) is a mathematical formula. I was implementing a framework because I started to work on a 3D engine some years ago, and I started from the very basics because I wanted to learn it. The projection is a mathematical fact and works very well. The perspective view is a consequence of this formula. It can be influenced by parameters to give a wider or narrower view, but the perspective projection is still always the same for all objects goping through the rendering pipline.

In order to make the boots appear smaller (why there would be a need for this is still beyond me) the models would have to go through a different render pipeline to achieve this. Also there would be the need to specify which one is a human model to make the boots apear smaller and I think there is no such parameter in the def files. Furthermore this would mean that if you create an animated object other then human characters they would look wrong and it would be very inconsistent for the code to behave like this.

[Springheel]

You don't have to know anything about code to see the forced perspective in effect. As Ish noted above, it is primarily to compensate for the fact that you have a limited POV on a monitor. If you know anything about perspective, you know that the closer things are to the vanishing point, the more forced the perspective appears.

 

It's easy to see in the following image: http://img197.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img197&ima...hot000093ks.jpg

 

that the buildings lean in to the center far more than they do in real life.

[sparhawk]

This looks more like a lense distortion effect to me. Like looking thourhg a fish eye. I doubt that any reasonable enginew would include such a hack to make arbitrary parts of the bigger or smaller. This is an effect of the lense that you use. I don't know the proper term but you can select a lensewidth in most 3D engines to use for the projection. This will broaden or narrow your view, and of course changing this value can cause the view to get distorted like this, but that doesn't mean that the models should compensate for that. Especially not in a 3D environment where you can walk around freely because you models will only lookg good from a certain perspective. And taking the whole image into account they would still look wrong, because everything else will be distorted but not your models.

[Springheel]

It's not a fish-eye effect--none of the lines curve. It's just what happens when you use a fairly square monitor. If we went widescreen it wouldn't be as noticeable.

[sparhawk]

Which proves what I said. That there is no such thing as a "perspective correction" inside the engine.

[Springheel]

I'm not sure anyone said there was. What it boils down to is that when you look at an object in D3, it is distorted by perspective more than it would be in reality. Anything above or below your eye level will quickly start to look small. This includes a character's feet (unless you are lying on the floor where the feet are at eye level).

[sparhawk]

The problem with modelling for correction of that is simply that it is wrong because it depends on the center of the view. Where the player is looking it. If the player is standing on a stair and the character moves right in front of his eyeleve the boots will suddenly look much bigger and when he stands in front of him they look normal? If somebody changes the FOV then the models boot will still look different or if he uses a weird resolution.

The models should be made exactly as any other model. We don't broaden the floor of a chest for the same reason. That it will look straight when the player looks at it.

[oDDity]

Well, I'm for making big boots anyway, it's my trademark - you should see the pair of giant dockers hobnail boots the noblewoman has under that dress.

Feet always look too small to me in games.

[sparhawk]

I already made the boots smaller for the revenants. I also added some scratches to his mail, because he looked to clean. I just have to put the finishing touches and then will commit it to CVS.

[oDDity]

How could you have made he boots smaller - you didn't have the .lwo - and even if you did you would have had to re-rig and weight it and then export it again.

I first got the idea for maiing the boots a little larger from this article on the unreal develoeprs network..

"Modeling for games is unique in that the camera has a wide range of motion. This leads to difficulty for artists, though - since the camera can be directed at a model from a variety of distances and perspectives, it can distort an otherwise good model into a misshapen mess. Looking straight down at a model's feet sometimes has the effect of making them look too small, the legs tapering down to the floor. Contrast this with looking at the same model from 50 yards away, where they might look appropriate. Some artists like to compensate for this effect by subtly widening the legs as they approach the feet, which are similarly oversized"

[sparhawk]

I have a special April version of Lightwave.

[New Horizon]

:lol:

[Renzatic]

You can change aspect ratios in the engine, and it does have a slight bit of perspective correction issues to the left and right of the screen when put into widescreen mode...but nothing that'd effect the size of the feet.

[sparhawk]

Of course not. Because feet are just models or part of them like verything else.

[Ishtvan]

Well the thing is: Going from our real life field of view, which is something like 160 degrees horizontal, to a monitor which takes up maybe 90 degrees of our view, when you're sitting at a reasonable distance in front of it. So until whatever company makes VR wrap-around goggles a commodity, playing a game on a monitor IS like looking thru a lens because it has to compress that 160 degrees down to 90 degrees somehow. The result is that stuff around the edges get distorted.

 

You could only display 90 degrees of the vision arc and be 100% accurate, but then it would look like you were wearing horse blinders or looking thru a narrow opening in a helmet or something.

 

So if you have a model in a 3d engine, on a monitor, it CANNOT look good from every perspective, because the edges of your vision will always be slightly distorted.

 

So a model maker has to make the decision: At what angle will the player MOST OFTEN look at this model, and at what distance? The answer is pretty clearly eye level, and a medium distance.

 

You COULD make the boots look the perfect size, and it would look right if you looked right at the boots, but then when you move your view back up to your regular eye level, the boots would move to the edge of the screen, getting compressed and looking ridiculously small.

 

So I guess model makers have a decision to make, and the route Oddity has chosen (and apparently a lot of other professional modelers) is to assume the player will usually be looking eye to eye with the model. This means that the model's head is about in the center of the screen, and the boots are towards the bottom of the screen, where the "lens" distortion/compression of distances effect is the greatest.

 

So they make the boots a little bigger than they "should" be, to compensate for the shrinking of distances that takes place near the edges of the screen (ie, where the boots would be if the player looks eye to eye with the AI).

Edited April 3, 2005 by Ishtvan