Sauerbraten Issues

by _Fanatic on 06/26/2005 03:52, 30 messages, last message: 07/04/2005 06:04, 5846 views, last view: 05/03/2024 21:34

Little issues I've had with editing mainly.

I have a pretty beefy system, P4 3.2 ghz with hyper thredding, 2 gigs ran, SATA hard drive, 256 meg NVIDIA GeForce 6800, 800mhz system bus, latest drivers and patches, defragged daily, minimal running apps in the background.

Now, the issues I'm seeing are with pushing corners. The entire screen and game hangs when I push a single cubes single corner. I created a key that does the push command 8 times to help speed this up (so I don't have to scroll so much), and it's more noticeable with the lag. But even pushing or pulling corners manually causes my whole system to hang.

Another issue is with light placement. There just has to be a quicker way for mappers to add lights and see what it looks like. I have a very complex map with many surfaces, so I have to wait 20-40 seconds for the lighting to render. Is there some kind of a quick and dirty light generator mode, where I can get a rough look to see if the light I'm placing is good or bad?

Next, the water seems to not generate/draw the surface when it touches a cube on the top. For example, a cube with water below it, add a new cube above it, then add the water below it, and the water doesn't show up.

If you need an example of the water, let me know, I can whip one up. It looks like I didn't select the cube areas for water even though I did.

Lastly, there needs to be some kind of a terrain generator or other tools for editing outdoor land scenes. It takes way too long to make flowing mountains with the current tools. Look at something like Warcraft 3, or Stronghold 1 or 2 for excellent examples of terrain editing, they work VERY well to make pretty looking terrains quickly. I've created a few gorgeous maps (the largest size too) in Stronghold 2 in under 6 hours. I've been working on my map for Cube for a few weeks now, and I'm not even 1/4 done.

I'm loving the engine, I just need to be able to edit faster. :)

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#11: ..

by TOGoS_1u2kuhbui on 06/26/2005 19:56

I think you have to get it out of CVS. I can gmzil you a zip if you need...

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#12: Re: ..

by _Fanatic on 06/27/2005 02:32, refers to #11

That would be much appreciated!

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#13: Re: ..

by Aardappel_ on 06/28/2005 04:56, refers to #12

"patchlight" is good for seeing lighting on new geometry, but not necessarily for placing new lights. I guess that could be added to its functionality (ei?)

If you have situations where on a given map, you can do a very specific operation and make it crash, that is of course very helpful for debugging. If that happens, please post the map + instructions to the sauer bugs thread.

landscape generation yes, but it is not easy as you can't translate a heighfield to sauer without serious fudging. It can be done, but it will have to be thought out to be elegant. Not a quick feature add on.

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#14: ..

by _Fanatic on 06/29/2005 03:56

How about a lighting mode you can enable/disable? Like "instalights"?

Add or remove a light, and it does a quick and dirty recalc just on that one?

For the hightfeild, just need a mode you enable, and depending on the size of your grid, it treats the dead middle of the grid you have as the center of the landscape. Scroll up, and you get a smooth mountain, scroll down, and you get a smooth valley.

As long as all the touching corners of each smallest size cube moves at the same time, but progressively faster towards the center, should work fine.

Then an equalize tool, that raises the lower cubes, lowers the upper cubes to "equalize" the two into a smooth surface.

It's that easy! :P

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#15: Re: ..

by TOGoS_1u2kuhbui on 06/29/2005 06:24, refers to #14

You won't be able to make a mountain more than one cube high, though. Think about it.

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#16: Re: ..

by nieb on 06/29/2005 14:38, refers to #14

A terrian type thing for sauer is easy now but it would end up looking like this...
http://www.snieb.com/screen123.JPG
...unless you made it more compicated and made it span slopes between 2, or more, cubes horizontally or vertically, for cliffs and steep hills.

Maybe making a terrain mesh for sauer thats separate from the normal geometry, would be a good idea...

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#17: ..

by tentus on 06/29/2005 15:10

aside from just using the largest gridsize to make mountians, and making a generator/toolset, another way of making landscapes has yet to be mentioned: two layer skyboxes. seems like this would be a relatively easy way of making the illusion of mountains. im thinking a command like this example:
/secondsky tentus/hills 0x6699FF 16

obviously, secondsky would be telling Sauer to make a second skybox inside the current one, tentus/hills would be where the skybox is.
0x6699FF would be the color for sauer to make transparent (it's hexidecimal for a bluish color). 16 would be the flexibility for transparencies, taking the 16 closest colors up and down the hexadecimal scale.

this kind of thing has been in place in console games forever, in order to foster the illusion of sprawling landscapes. (Sonic the Hedgehog anyone?) I'd say it'd be a valuable addition to Sauer, if it works.

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#18: Ick.

by Pxtl on 06/30/2005 03:13

I think the best approach for mobile terrain was Aard's idea of just having Sauer structures also used for in-game objects and just using that to design trains, crushers, vehicles, and elevators and suchlike as was done in Quake 2.

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#19: Re: ..

by _Fanatic on 06/30/2005 05:27, refers to #15

TOGoS_1u2kuhbui - I don't mean to sound rube, but that was a stupid comment. Of course I know you can't make a terrain with a single cube. That is pretty obvious.

Everyone else - what I want to do, I can do now with the engine as is, it just takes *forever* to do.

I'm just asking for some kind of a tool to allow me to do it quickly and easily.

Just have a peek at how Stronghold 1 or 2 does it, or Warcraft 3 does it.

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#20: ..

by TOGoS_1u2kuhbui on 06/30/2005 05:46

Not as stupid as your misunderstanding of it, though. Stronghold uses a heightmap. In Sauer, you can make the equivalent of a heightmap one cube tall. Past that you'll have lots of problems.

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#21: Re: ..

by jean pierre on 06/30/2005 11:38, refers to #21

No there are no forums to talk how stupid he is
It is ment as an offense to say how stupid he is and all forums dont accept the behavior of what he does and etc......this is also ment for chatting in IRC.

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#22: Smooth terrain

by TOGoS_1u2kuhbui on 07/01/2005 22:02

If you're willing to do some trickery, you might be able to do better, but using the obvious method, this is about as good 'smooth' terrain as you can get. The whole 'non-planar-cube' issue doesn't help, either. The big cube on the right shows the size of cube used to make the heightmap.

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y85/TOGoS/Sauerbraten/tmapgen/sauer-smoothterrain.jpg

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#23: wow

by shadow516 (away) on 07/02/2005 01:43

That looks nice. Good work with Tmapgen.

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#24: ..

by TOGoS_1u2kuhbui on 07/02/2005 01:46

Looks alright in the screenshot, maybe, but not much fun to play on. I much prefer the blocky stuff.

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#25: ..

by Sparr on 07/02/2005 22:05

you CAN make heightfields more than one cube tall, but you have to pass over the whole thing and adjust all the slopes to eliminate sauer-impossible layouts, which is a non-trivial task

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#26: Re: ..

by Aardappel_ on 07/03/2005 16:44, refers to #25

I have an algorithm planned for more than 1 cube high heighfields. Just hang in there.

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#27: Re: ..

by Gilt on 07/03/2005 17:53, refers to #26

I just put in a quick thing, editheight, that could be used to create terrain. meant to be used like editface mode 2.

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#28: Re: ..

by kurtis84 on 07/04/2005 04:04, refers to #27

It's a tough choice on what grid to use when you start a terrain area, but I find it's better to stick to that one size for the whole map, which leaves a few blocky areas....BUT THATS OK, it still looks pretty damn good -

http://www.fidnet.com/~kesler/thecliffss1.jpg

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#29: nice

by Wolf on 07/04/2005 05:10

togos and kurtis those both look pretty nice.

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#30: Ooh pretty

by TOGoS_1u2kuhbui on 07/04/2005 06:04

Oh, wow. That looks really nice. You could automate something like that (with tmapgen or whatever) where cliffs go between different 'layers' of cubes. The biggest problem for me is that Sauer doesn't predictably render non-planar cube faces (sometimes they're concave, sometimes convex). If I had taken a screenshot of that same place, it probably would've looked kinda weird. :)

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