emajekral

Work complete. Some of the uglier library installs are now shiny new DevPaks. Let me know if there are any problems with the directions. I will monitor this thread for about a week. Expect min. 24hr turnaround - I'm a busy guy. Edit by Aisy: Here is the link to his updated compilation guide: http://www.eternal-lands.com/forum/index.p...st&p=283853

I've been through the compile procedure and have a working .exe. There's a few little issues I need to work out, but I should have an updated compile guide up by 4 hours from now. If anyone's on... can you tell me what sector.o is supposed to be and why it's in the COBJS in Makefile.win? There's no sector.c so that target will not work. I notice it's not in Makefile.linux...

How badly do people here want to be able to use Microsoft dev tools to compile the game? I picked up a license for 2k3 and struggled through the setup tonight. It's a bit tougher than DevCpp but manageable if you don't mind building a few things. Had to build: ogg, vorbis, vorbisfile, cal3d (main project only). ( and elc of course ;P ) Got: 3176 warnings (C++ & new headers? What version of cal3d are we using now? Mostly type coercion warnings: double -> float, float -> int, int -> float; but I got a few "inconsistent dll linkage" warnings wrt Cal) Result: working .exe, sweet new icon , and paralyzed 3 turns by a spider? Easy can do: step by step instructions, links to resources, copy & paste defines, libs, directories Not quite "Next step, patches" yet. Code base has changed a bit in ways that affect me (new semantic for frustum intersect update). Need to merge my stuff with it (one good afternoon + evening). Then patches (want to do it right so I don't know how long it'll take. Mehbe someone wants to make the patches for me once the merge is done). I'm not happy with my code, it's not friendly to work with, but it adds a new perspective. Maybe someone will pick it up/fix it. (Wrong thread for this last paragraph, I know, but I'm keeping lowish profile.)

Good work! I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you are using the nova and flare effects in GIMP to render some of the particle textures, right? (I used the same a couple of weeks back to texture the sun... Sun still needs a bit of extra flare so it looks bright when seen through trees and fog. ). That's a neat use of Sierpinsky Pyramids. I wonder why you chose that system though. Collision detection sounds expensive. Are you updating on a timer, or frame by frame? Currently EL has its particles updated by a handler hooked into a SDL timer which produces a new particle event approx. every 42ms, or every third timer event (precise delay is recorded by the timer handler for animation motion vector adjustments). I'm willing to bet you could wrap the current interface around your object/module and convert most of the particle definition files with a little effort. Keep it up! (And don't let me put you off the work. I'm excited that it's getting done. Ignore me if that helps )

How about a few prerendered frames of lightning?

Thank you. Things will look even better with the magic effects Octane and Kindar Naar have been working on. Add that to the current pace of server work and, well... Wow! Speaking of server work... cloud cover, and moon positions/effects may require a server side component - the latter especially because lunar movements are described as erratic and some have asked for "red moon" events. I'm not ready for detailed discussion, but if someone wants to do the thinking for me or for a future developer I wouldn't mind. What I am thinking of is that at login and once a day, preferably when the moons are below the horizon, new moon positions are sent to the client. They could be sent as polar coordinates relative to the sun. Also weather-like signals could be sent to allow lunar signs to coincide with events. I have only a limited understanding of what signals are sent to control weather events, so if there are ways for the client to determine conditions such as clear skies, lightly cloudy, cloudy, overcast, and low fast moving clouds (possibly with a direction of movement) it'd be nice to know them. Right now I can do partly cloudy most of the time, and cloudier when it rains - but the transition is abrupt.

If you've got the packages ready would one of the major unofficial Fedora Core repositories, such as rpms.livna.org or RPMForge, be interested? See also http://www.fedorafaq.org/

If you play around with ambient settings I've got some suggestions: Keep some ambient light at all times. None at all is scary dark. A fair amount of ambient light is needed to make convincing daylight. Daytime outdoor ambient light tends to be blueish (cause the blue sky is the biggest source of ambient illumination) If you turn night/dungeon ambient light very low you may wish to place a light at the camera or player position so that players can read signs as they get close. Quadratic attenuation and dim light will do fine, I'm sure. Navigating with the modified client was difficult because things not directly illuminated were totally black. Daytime with no ambient light just looks bizarre. (cf pic of boat with broken normals)

I'm using Fraps, just like my earlier videos. I figured that since I was doing so much capturing I might as well buy it.

Interesting. And, indeed, at least part of the code looked like they were being used. Strange, though. Do you know why do the screenshots that I reffed look so flat? It looks like textures with brightness pre-specified. It's easy to come up with more examples: http://www.el-development.com/screenshots/cityentrance.jpg The sides of the bridge are equal brightness to the top of the bridge. Opposing sides of the gate are lit, as though the flames were a light source, yet the wall that the flames are on is dark. First I recompiled with ambient turned down: http://www.cs.uregina.ca/~jaclarke/ELpics/Gate.jpg The problem here is the point light source is too close to the wall and the wall has a low polygon count. The light sources are attached to the flame particle systems. Wild stuff. Here I move the light around in the editor: http://www.cs.uregina.ca/~jaclarke/ELpics/FlameFix.jpg Here's a diagram of what's going on: http://www.cs.uregina.ca/~jaclarke/ELpics/badAngle.gif Nope. They're long rectangular prisms. Not many vertices to light. They are trying though. No but the trunks are *completely in shadow* look at the ground around them. Here's a no ambient light snap of the same scene with light sources marked and their effect pointed out. Two light sources. http://www.cs.uregina.ca/~jaclarke/ELpics/TwoLights.jpg I'm not sure if that's a bug, but I'm going to agree with you on this one. Some objects are not lit correctly. They have had their material properties or normals set so that they are bright even when there's no light on them. They are bright regardless of time of day. No ambient version of rowboat scene: http://www.cs.uregina.ca/~jaclarke/ELpics/Emit.jpg At first I thought the object must be set to emit, but commenting out all GL_EMISSION settings and glDisable(GL_LIGHTING) calls for 3d objects didn't do the trick. Map editor says it's not set to emit. Is this a bug? Ah! I see Entropy says that some objects have "issues" (being euphemistic). How about boat1.e3d, tile_stucco3.e3d and tile_stonewall6.e3d for starters? (Glow in the dark objects I noticed while making pics and video... tile_stonewall6.e3d is shown glowing just before sunrise in my video)

Video with examples of Lambertian lit models under changing lighting conditions. Also note that there's a mixture of smooth shading and flat shading. I captured the video at too high a resolution so many fine details are lost, but I don't have time to redo it. Also included are samples of Point Particle adjustments which may be applied to magic effects with a bit more work, my skybox work so far, and Learner's efforts to bring together LOD and Frustum optimizations (-DSIMPLE_LOD -DNEW_E3D_FORMAT). *Babble mode engaged* Something that would be really nice would be some way to turn on phong shading for some objects to make them look shinier. Even old OpenGL cards do phong shading per vertex, but that only works well for highly tesselated models. Given that EL is conservative with polygons the effect would be poor. Hence the need for normal maps before we go to Phong or even better BRDFs. Another lower tech material property to try would be environment maps rather than texture maps for some armor. Bring on the shiny! (They could be combined for cards that support multitexture or pixel shaders)

Just remember that there are two moons, one bigger and one smaller. For the calendar see: http://www.eternal-lands.com/page/calendar.php For the moons, see: http://www.eternal-lands.com/page/moonsigns.php Equations noted. Not much time to work with them. Some exist in simplified form already... Sun position for example. Moon is currently implemented in a different manner, but I may switch over. I am open to trading off the sky code if someone wants to give it a go. It has very few comments at the moment though. To whoever works with light, sky colors, and sun position: I found code that did most of that stuff in lights.[ch] and used it. That may or may not be the best place for it, but I was trying not to completely overhaul the game. Video with much of the work to date is here, also posted in response to lighting questions in another thread. I captured the video at too high a resolution so many fine details are lost, but I don't have time to redo it. Also featured is some of the LOD work that Learner has been sharing with me. I'm getting some decent framerates in MM and other complex maps thanks to some clever object adjustments and size dependent culling. (Learner: I promised a video of how FPV and EL_NEW_OBJECTS work together... here you go. Yeah, I know not the best demo for that.)

We have a particle system setup that uses point sprites and quads (one or the other, not both ). It isn't set up to make particle systems track moving actors though. That would be a nice bit of work... (If you dig through this forum I've posted a quick and dirty fix for point sprite scaling. It's not in CVS yet, but my FPV test client uses it. There's some clips of it in the video I'm posting in the skybox thread later tonight.)

There's little to no directional lighting (sun) at night so objects will appear rather flat - but nights in EL are lit unnaturally anyhow (too bright). During the day or near light sources (there are up to eight lights enabled and some street lamps actually turn on at night) you can plainly see that the normals on objects are set appropriately. There may be a glitch or two but none come to mind. The ambient factor is set fairly high so dark areas are filled nicely, but you'll see the shading on your character change as it turns, etc. I'll try to provide a moving example shortly.

Oh well. It was just a thought. Sorry.

The benchmark only tells us your relative performance. Try the stability test - Press start and stop when the render starts to get corrupted. It'll show whether it is a CPU/GPU stability issue that is causing EL to crash. You should be able to run for 10 minutes or more. Have a look at the FAQ for a few more details. What the program there does not tell you is how you video card will perform with OpenGL, only with DirectX. It's not actually a very good benchmark. I only suggested it to see if the crashing could be narrowed down to a hardware problem and not a driver/EL problem.

Ok that last part I don't get at all. The EL folder is that the "elc" folder by any chance? The EL folder is the folder you will be playing from. By default it is c:\Program Files\Eternal Lands\ libcal3d.dll, libcal3d.dll, and the .exe file you compiled must be moved there for your compiled program to run properly. I also suspect you will need alut.dll, but I can't remember. If you need it, it will be in c:\dev-cpp\lib if you followed my directions.

Have a look at this. It may explain things a bit. Maybe not. http://freestone-group.com/video-card-stab...esults.html#ATI Could be that the Radeon Xpress 200 series cards overheat easily. Are you using a laptop? Some of my suggestions may be difficult to try if so. Use notepad on el.ini to try setting limit_fps to less than 5, using a small window (640x480) not in full screen. Also enable v-sync in your video driver's options if you can. If this solves things I would: see if you can underclock your GPU Improve the cooling on your video card. You can do this by buying aftermarket fans or cooling fins, or in extreme cases of dust contamination by getting your PC case cleaned. I've used after market cooling to resolve video card stability in the past. One card in particular required passive cooling on memory chips AND a good fan on the GPU. Solution cost was < $30 CDN. A success story from the site I mentioned:

I've noticed both behaviours as well. The GPU one in Linux, the other in Windows. Dunno how to solve though, so unless I'm doing speed tests I set limit_fps to about 5 fps over my goal and enable vsync too. That refresh rate looked right to me labrat I hear that American movies are generally pitched too high in PAL format because they just speed up the film from 24fps to 25fps. Is that true? (Offtopic, I know)

I've updated my directions. See if they help. Let me know one way or another. The stuff you asked about is, admittedly, advanced. The last point is someone saying that they fixed the problem in their Non-Windows OS. (Debian or Ubuntu Linux I assume). The first is high level, low detail. To work through what is needed you would: locate the binaries listed there that are for your OS. Ones labelled SDK or dev are usually what you want, though you may have to look around. Unpack or install what you download. Open the new folders, copy lib files to your lib directory, copy include files to your include directory, preserving directory trees as much as possible. Copy stuff up directory trees (or down on occasion) until everything compiles or it becomes clear you are still missing libraries. Once you know what is actually needed promise yourself you'll use the Compiler/Linker Directory Management Tool next time instead of copying willy-nilly. Unless packages are bundled for you or are provided in a clean package grabbing system (dev-cpp was designed with one in mind, but...) you end up with this situation. Linux folk know it as dependency hell.

OpenAL + ALUT errors resolved in my guide. My instructions now show how to install latest AL libraries. Unable to reproduce the deeply nested include error, but that's probably a good thing. If there's still an issue with the instructions let me know. I'll be watching my messages and the dev threads for a few days. I was able to get a working build using my instructions on a clean install of Dev-C++ and fresh CVS, but that doesn't always mean I haven't omitted a step that seems obvious to me. (like copying your new OpenAL and ALUT .dll files into the Eternal Lands directory you will execute your newly built .exe from. I'll change it if it's an issue with anyone. I didn't reinstall all of EL.) The first few lines of my build log look like: Compiler: Default compiler Building Makefile: "C:\Documents and Settings\Control\Desktop\elc\Makefile.win" Executing make... make.exe -f "C:\Documents and Settings\Control\Desktop\elc\Makefile.win" all Are you following the directions here carefully?

OpenAL + ALUT errors resolved. Unable to reproduce the deeply nested include error, but that's probably a good thing. If there's still an issue with the instructions let me know. I'll be watching my messages and the dev threads for a few days. I was able to get a working build using my instructions on a clean install of Dev-C++, but that doesn't always mean I haven't omitted a step that seems obvious to me.

He's not buying just any Star Wars. He's buying the legendary Holiday Special. George Lucas has denied the existence of it, but those in the know can hook you up. Nasty trippy drugs for the Star Wars junkie.

Some of the spells have targets. Other people's spells would be nice to see. There's a lot of reasons to do it his way.

You mean they're implemented server side and ready for client side implementations, right? I might have time to knock one off over Christmas, but probably not before then.