Trismegistus con mit cum Ex

[Holy_Diver]

Yeah, specular can be done. But its not something you can just turn on most likely... unless you just want everything looking metalic-ish. If you prepare a .mdo file you think should have specular I will add it to my test project and see if it actually retains specular material properties. Just set the specular components to something distinctive. Otherwise you'll have to demonstrate a familiarity with Ex and the images.key file before I can justify going to the trouble. It shouldn't be too hard to setup.

Or even easier to start... prepare two .mdo files that should be identical except for their specular material properties, and upload those so I can run them thru a binary diff programe, like vbindiff (or you could do that yourself on your end)

If they are different then I will do with them as described above. If you wanna do multitexture specular (specmap) then you definitely need to figure out how the Ex key framework works / have a working knowledge of Ex.

[Holy_Diver]

Only just noticed today (whilst screwing around with fonts) the protagonist is a lady / the girl in some of the intro pictures.

PS: I'd be really interested in hearing about Tom's process producing the pictures for Trismegistus. I've seen Som produce some pretty psychedelic stuff, but there's just almost no rhyme or reason to the colours going on there. Still they look very tasteful / inviting... even compared to Ex's graphical enhancements

PPS: It's difficult to imagine how lame Som would be without these games. It would definitely be more difficult justifying devoting the bulk of several years of my life to

[Holy_Diver]

Yesterday the D3D9 fonts began disappearing after playing for a little while. I was a bit disheartened / clueless what could be going on.

Anyway, this morning I kinda went thru the fonts related code to see what I could do. I'm still not sure what is going on, but adding some error handling code which basically rebuilds the fonts on failure, and partitioning the fonts so they don't share each others resources, seems to have hardened things. My guess is my graphics card is just chronically out of memory or something (until restart) though it may be there is a real resource error somewhere. Anyway, it's a good deal this prob was recognized/stabilized before too late.

My latest MXM graphics module may be showing signs of degradation (as its line is known to do) ... if it burns up like the last I'll probably just have to keep finding new ones until they're no longer available or something else gives

[Holy_Diver]

I stared at this probably for the best of the entire afternoon.

The lights with HDR look good as long as you have some constant attenuation. 1 is a good number because it means the light never gets brighter than its colour. If you don't have any, the light approaches infinity, and without the non-HDR clamp at 1.0 that quickly gets out of hand. The painful thing though is with the constant attenuation, the diffuse model light can actually become less to non existent the closer you get to the source (see screenshot) which is totally counter-intuitive!!

The reason it's possible is because the only factor modulating the light closer to the source is the angle of incidence (FYI: I may have just made that term up) ... but anyway, it turns out the reason the top flat surface on the lamp is not lit, while the lower one is, has to do with the angle of the vertices relative the light source (for a point light) ... since the lighting normals on the flat surfaces are pointing due up, the wider the angle the brighter the light. There must not be a vertex in the center of the top dish or it would be maximally lit, because it would be as wide as can be basically.

So if you pull the flame up higher it actually rectifies things somewhat, though that's probably not the best way to go. I'm hoping further examination will yield more natural results, but I'd like to get something in the can so I can be done with this business by next week-ish.

I'm actually considering adding a quick extension to make the player shorter just so they can't see the top of the pedestal. Now that I know the player is supposed to be a short girl, you really do seem too tall compared to everything else. Though I worry about being short making some things like the pedestal items rest on seem awkward. Though frankly if you're short you're short. And that might add a little atmosphere.

[Holy_Diver]

You guys may've already figured this out, but in case you're curious, the eye level of the player turns out is 1.5m (4'11") ... let's be generous and say six inches from eyes to top of the head, and the default player rounds out at 5'5". Which is not bad I guess. Seems a little short even for a girl adventurer by contemporary western standards, but the player does seem short / maybe meant to be boyish even (most Japanese heroes are young men... *cough* boys) and everyone knows medieval humans are wee folk.

The player I think is eye level with most of the girl NPCs. Not bad for Dark Destiny I guess, because as I recall Necron seems (if my memory serves me) like he was a squat man. Still that makes shrinking the Trismegistus player character a little more questionable. She does seem to be shorter than the others in all the pictures, and is based on the faerie NPC though it's possible adjusted via the scale variables. The camera seems to tower over if not the king NPCs the statues of the same shape anyway.


PS: An interesting thing occurred to me. I've never liked first person games with disembodied weapons / arms ... even though that's the norm. I like to have as much of a body as possible. So I'd definitely like to make that possible for Som games. Still it presents a number of challenges. Trismegistus is interesting however... in that the PC presumably never changes equipment or swings a weapon, so really she's only required to walk around, and maybe look at NPCs the way NPCs look at the player while talking. I know enough to animate a .MDL file, so the simplest avatar support I can think of (and probably the right place to begin) is to just designate an NPC .mdl file to act as the player's avatar. Playing the walking animation in a crude way (about as crudely as Som's npcs) is pretty simple. So anyway, in probably not too long, probably the Ex 1.0 release for Trismegistus I'll want to take a stab at this for Trismegistus. The only real problem I can foresee is the model may be the scarecrow variety (it's really hard to tell in the pictures) in which case I'd have to take a little time out to up my .mdl game. But just playing back the soft animations is really not too big of a deal, and if I went to the trouble to setup my own rendering routine would probably not be a bad next step in the .mdl dept.

[Holy_Diver]

Sorry, up way too late... just reporting what was done was the player's eye level is now same as the PC's NPC in the 01 map, which I have a feeling is not accessible in game. Then the param files were hex edited to make the lamps a smidgen taller. Then just to be conservative a bob_distance_multiplier extension was setup to invert the bob effect so the player can't see the tops of the lamps while bobbing!! I may be delirious, but the inverted bob seems more natural. And guarantees players can't see over things they shouldn't ‎ 

[Holy_Diver]

There is a good jerk when you first begin the game. I tried to see if there was something funny going on with the starting point. The y dimension (which I'm assuming is the prob) was nonzero, so I zeroed it, but that really didn't help. Unless Tom was trying to do like a teleportation effect (it really just looks like a bug) the prob seems to be there is a 0.1 thick sigil object on the ground the player starts on. I'm assuming Som's collision processing is getting stuck in it or something (maybe because you really need at least two frames before you can start calculating derivatives) ... so I set the Y offset of the .mpx file to 0.1 to account for the difference, but that was no good.

So I noticed anyway the player was getting shoved into the ground with positive numbers, so I tried negative ones, and oddly enough that made the player drop from the sky. Anyway thru trial and error I couldn't get a glitch free start. But I minimized it to a twitch with -0.6. If there is a sweet spot it's between -0.7 and -0.6, but I didn't really get any results trying in between stuff. It's clearly some kind of magic teleportation circle, but it might help to move the starting point so the player doesn't start on top of an object

EDITED: I needed at least one map start frame to smooth out Ex's camera code, so I set things up to skip the first 3D frame after a map is opened. Since I got it down to a twitch, it might work to just add a setting to skip N frames so the twitch can just pass.