making it BIG!

[undo2]

hi, i'm interested in making the world taller and deeper.
for example, a scene where the ground and the sky are all stars is easy to do with skybox and a transparent ground texture, but let's say i want to put a planet model in the scene of big enough size that i can feasibly fly down to the surface of the planet from space and have the appearance of the planet and the action of flying down to it, actually seem like you'd expect were you to do such a thing in a real space going vessel. i guess what i'm asking is, is there anyway to program seamless paging into sandbox?
here's an example of what i mean from the infinity engine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCzDKj3hjOE

the other thing... i need to make really deep and big water, like an ocean type environment. but when i attempt to make the water big and deep, it breaks off at a certain point and won't allow any further water depth. i assume this is also an example of the limitations of non-paging? if not, then i must be doing something wrong. appreciate any help

i noticed when i am in edit mode and fly up in the sky above the textured ground, that i can only fly up so far before i run into an invisible ceiling as it were.. is there a way to set it so the "ceiling" is higher?

[Chaze007]

I think this is quite impossible.
For a transparent Texture, try to make one in GIMP or Photoshop, and import it.
The project you seem forward to seems big, if you're new..start small.
I don't think there's seamless paging possible.
Don't make the water so big
~Chaze007

[Mike]

To make the ground and ceiling limitations bigger, simply increase the mapsize. If you've already created a map and you need to make it bigger, you can type /mapenlarge in the console to double the size. Each map size is double the next, so 11 is double the size of 10 and so on. You can try map sizes 18-20 but from what I hear a lot of computers can't handle them too well. I think I've tried an 18 before and it worked out okay but I've never tried bigger.

I have actually seen that video you are talking about with the infinity engine and it is quite a nice one. I've thought about the best way to handle that in Sandbox myself and there might actually be a few options to play with. I've never tried using a big planet model, but that could perhaps work, or making the planet itself with sandbox.

As far as seemless paging, the code is open source so anything is possible, it is just figuring out how to do it that is the tricky part There has been interest in it and I think there might even be a team that is either working on it and/or got it working, I'll have to give them a holler.

One thing to note is that since you want to use such big areas, make sure to use a really big grid size or you might crash things and/or really slow down. Such as when you are putting in your water, use a massive grid size. You can change the grid size with G + mousewheel. Also to get better performance type /remip in the console and it will make your water and/or land masses to the maximum cube size without wrecking your work. Let me know if I missed anything as far as your questions. Take care.
-mike

EDIT Also I just remembered an idea I had before, we could potentially change the scale size of everything. Just like they do in movies, make you a little iddy bitty space ship and the planet bigger, but since everything would still be to scale everything would seem huge. Also we can change the scale size of models pretty easily. So we could take a planet model and make it huge. One thing about that video is as nice as it is, you never see him touch down. Also that space station is a model, so could make a space station model, scale it up and then a planet and scale it up. We know a guy who made a planet editor too, I'll see if we can get those planet models into Sandbox and scale them up.

[undo2]

oh nice post, mike!

planet modeller would be awesome. i'm trying to start with the very basics. creating the universe itself for the game idea, which really only consists of our solar system in this case. making the cool stuff work first ...et.al, flying down to the surface, before continuing with the next step ..modelling the planet surfaces and so on.

i like your idea of movie type FX... 2 models..one sorta small the other even smaller. only problem is getting the kind of detail necessary on a small model. i also thought perhaps a transparent .jpg might work as a ground texture, where the entire grid is one big "G" scrolled block and the texture applied to the entire thing as one piece with the painting of the planet inset with transparency for curvature of the planet then start the journey down from high up and limit the viewport of the ship.. et. al, you can only turn the craft's viewport so far to each side. up and down would be out of the question lol that'd require like an auto pilot ...which would make the use of a cutscene more efficient, but that ruins the "sandbox" feel of it. i dunno. would take a few modifications, no doubt. one problem with the g-scrolled single block texture is that the grid power size only goes up to 12. can that be modified?

the other thing i was musing on was the idea of a revolutionary modelling concept. normally when we make 3d models, we have to add the bones, vertices, textures and so on. not sure how old you are but do you remember ever playing "Dragon's Lair?" i was thinking...what if we could find a way to make our models into responsive cutscenes, isolated from the rest of the environment like an overlay, like disney type cell animation but with each possible movement painted for any potential move a cutscene model might make that overlays the 3d world...if that makes sense. i know animators do that.. you see the character smiling, running, laughing, etc, and all of it cell animated and layered onto the background, which itself might be animated.

might be a way we can add a great deal more detail to our characters without umpteen different layers of data.

here's 3d ? version of dragon's lair -- later 3d world, could control him although he didn't look 3d himself
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbYwQXCo1QA

i notice they've found a way to show light source effects on him... how'd they do that, with the engine or by painting it in?

[undo2]

holy toledo, map size 19 is endless. i never did find the edge! i did notice however that the closer i got to the opposite side from where i started, the worse the fps rate. it was down to 3 fps by the time i started seeing what looked like, the opposite side of the map. still not sure if that was the end of it. lol yikes, that's huge. it's strange but the fps increased in the middle and slowed down on the sides as if the engine has to work harder to render the edge of the map than it does to render the middle of it! that a limitation of it or some other fluke ?

i realized afterwards, that the big mmo maps like the wow map are separated into huge seamless sections. wow, for example, is separated into huge chunks - all of the east continent. all of the west continent. all of the north continent and then all of the outlands continent. the only thing that didn't make the world of azeroth itself, entirely seamless, was instance zone lines and a zone line across the ocean on the planet. so clearly they were using something like paging for that, yes>? or do you think there's a shortcut to paging they employed? the game is old! isn't seamless world paging new? cause there's no way that's all one piece of ground. the continent of kalimdor, for example is outrageously big. takes over 2 hours to swim along the shoreline of the entire thing, at increased swim speed, and yet you don't zone at all. it's one big zone.

[Mike]

Now you are getting all sorts of creative juices working in my head!!! What happened to the first link of dragons lair? I thought that was an interesting comparison though I was going to note that it might not be kid friendly due to the dudes language. I remember seeing people play that game in the arcade as a kid haha.

Even though you can't personally see that entire map (though you could probably make it by changing the fog value), the computer can. That is why it is important to use geometry aka cubes/blocks/brushes (same thing), to break it up, because if the wall is thick and big enough it blocks the sight of the computer. Models such as trees and such act differently. Even though you can't see through them the computer can so it is trying to render everything behind it as well.

There are a few tricks we can do to increase the fps. For one thing, instead of repeating our 512 X 512 grass texture, we can scale it up to make it massive. The more times the grass repeats, the more times the comp has to render it. We can also make sure we have a light weight texture, as in no added normal or bumpmaps to it. In addition, we could create some terrain such as mountains and such to block the line of sight.

With your talk of cel shading and such you inspired some very interesting chat in the IRC room today This was one of the results!
http://www.moddb.com/games/platinum-art ... e#imagebox

That infinity engine video has actually made me really want to make it so you fly out of a space station and then fly to the planet and have a picnic I think it would be a fun thing to try in a size 18 or 19 SB map, if my poor comp can handle it haha.

Oh yeah about your size 12 grid size, we could probably make it better, but I want to talk to the coders about it first so we don't break anything, haha. Take care!
-mike

[undo2]

wheee, well i found this today at intel as well. they're show offs over there since they make the chipsets i guess lol

anyway, this is kinda starting to address the question about the cel-shaded concept i had...something that doesn't require bones (or as many bones anyway). it'd work even better i think, if it auto interacts with the physics! no more need for bones and vertices other than maybe a simple frame work!
http://software.intel.com/en-us/videos/ ... cpu-power/

i want that but it'd definitely need the advantage of the multi-threading thing. i'm on a dual core i think, as are most casual gamers, so i'd only get 4 threads but still big difference in how much you can render on screen and i'm assuming this cloth/physics fine tuning will be really nice with the multiple threading thing.

[undo2]

oh this is cute! nice job. how'd you do that?
http://www.moddb.com/games/platinum-art ... e#imagebox
he needs one long hair curling up from the top of his bald head

original dragon's lair? this is tamer i guess. just an old advertisement for it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLgF_kQT6wA
that game cost 50 cents a play and most casual players didn't get past the first couple obstacles before they had already expended their extra lives. it was expensive but really amazing for its time.

i'm having a bit of trouble understanding the art pipeline instructions. i think it's me old age. just a random beef but why didn't these software designers all get on the same page to begin with and create a standard for these things? it should have been as easy as putting a .gif, .bmp or .jpg in a paint program but noooo, instead we have to jumpa threw hoops of fire just to make the art available to use after we've already made it. lol the word proprietary should be outlawed with the exception of finished product, but not for the creation of products that the program is designed to make in the first place and which will, out of necessity, need to be usable by the client in various applications.

ah well, could be worse.

[undo2]

i found the original dragon's lair without the "colorful metaphor" commentary, and it appears to start at the first scene, which is good. it's short, however. the little beeps you hear are the game requests for the player inputs, as you couldn't control him at all till you heard the little beep and then you only had a handful of choices of what you could do with him. it was extremely limited in options
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80ZsCIOE3gY