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emajekral

Camera Modifications (Roja this is for you)

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Thanks a lot, this looks great!

 

Sure you can post a video. And if possible, send me a windows binary so I can test it out. Then I'll be able to make a better X for it too once i see how it works.

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Hey the video was really cool, thanks!

 

I think you can easily get a job making video tutorials. Seriously :devlish:

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Really awesome; the view improvements as well as the demonstration video!

 

Btw, what's against using the actual action pointer icons (for walk/fight/door/etc.) at the X position?

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Absolutely amazing, however this video showed at least two problems:

1. the map in high perspective ends nasty;

2. lack of sky, cave top and buildings ceilings.

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Ok here are my comments after testing it out for a while:

 

First off, it's really really awesome! Thankyou so much for doing this work! ;)

 

-The follow camera works much better with the set of options you made for it. It's not perfect, but it's probably as good as it's gonna get.

Maybe what we should do is work out the best settings for the follow camera overall, and make them the defaults. Then players can adjust it from there as they want. (maybe even have a button to return to default settings). Just a suggestion anyway, we don't have to do that.

 

 

-Images for the reticle can be the icons we normally use for the walk/door/attack/etc...at least, i don't see why not :o

However compared to other games, our icons are plain and boring..I'd really like to make fully colored ones to look nicer..although they would have to be pretty small.. anyway, I think it's best if you just use the current cursors, then later on we'll see about placing nicer ones.

 

 

-Can you make an option to disable particles? Or to cull the particles? They don't seem to be getting culled along with the rest of the objects..and they cause a big frame drop if many are around.

Edit: nevermind, there actually already is a particle disable thing, duh :devlish: ..but you have to scroll down to 0 to disable it. Maybe someone can make a "Disable Particles" checkbox next to that to make it easier to turn on/off.

 

 

The LOD works pretty well too. Unfortunately the objects with an alpha map are what really slow down the fps..even if they are not far away. There's only so much you can cull the distance with the game looking good. Anything we can do about the alpha blended objs? Is it the fact that there's just too many of them around?

 

One last thing, can you add a triangle counter so we can observe the slow down areas better?

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Thank you all for your kind words. I hope that the compliments I got from you for the video translate into the real world when I start my new job as CS Lab Instructor next week. (And yes that means the patches from me will probably dry up for a while :devlish: )

 

Btw, what's against using the actual action pointer icons (for walk/fight/door/etc.) at the X position?

 

Nothing really, I just wanted to show off before everything was just so. Impatient I guess.

 

I used a combination of SDL functions to grab the mouse and allow unlimited camera motion, ie. the mouse never leaves the frame. The side effect of that is the mouse is hidden. I was in a hurry and didn't feel like putting up textures, so I pasted a bunch of string copies in the cursor handling code and displayed the strings as the last step of scene rendering. There's no reason I couldn't just put the use quads with icon textures there, but I want to use a proper targeting reticle with the icons off to one side.

 

I tried to use SDL_WarpMouse to move the mouse back to the center after reading mouse motion events, but warping in SDL generates a MouseMotion event and I had trouble finding and ignoring those. The end result was a mouse icon that jittered around in the center of the screen and an uncontrollable view (every move was undone by the warp). So I took the path of least resistance, used the tool provided and life was easier by far. Except I've got a kludge instead of pretty icons until I get up the energy to fix things up a bit and maybe get some artwork from Roja. (I just read your comments about that. I can wait.)

 

I think EL themed crosshairs would be really neat.

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Thank you all for your kind words. I hope that the compliments I got from you for the video translate into the real world when I start my new job as CS Lab Instructor next week. (And yes that means the patches from me will probably dry up for a while :D )

 

Good luck at your new job :P

We have people come and go a lot around here, it's just the nature of this business. So, just do what you can, whenever you have time to. It's not going anywhere and I don't see a huge influx of programmers wanting to do it so it'll be here waiting for you :omg:

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Everything you've done is awesome work, the video is great, we should have something like this for a newbie tutorial!

I do however prefer the "over the shoulder" view where we still see our character, instead of the first person view. Can we have both options?

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I do however prefer the "over the shoulder" view where we still see our character, instead of the first person view. Can we have both options?

 

Yup. Right now there's a hotkey to flip back and forth. The mouse grab mode is available in all views, but is only really useful in first person mode right now. It can be used in over the shoulder with follow camera disabled if you like, or I could make the client lie to you about what direction your character is facing and force it to have its back to the camera at all times. (That would make the client disagree somewhat with the server, but only in an eye candy way. Shouldn't break anything on the server.) That would have to be disabled when your character begins fighting so that you don't look like you're kicking the air and getting bit in the... It's doable. Then again, most people will naturally look at what they fight so maybe its not a problem.

 

As far as further refinement of over the shoulder, I think that the character needs to be made unclickable and an hotkey for a good default view needs to be made, but that's fine tuning that can be done later. What all gets integrated will be interesting to see. We need a sky and better LOD or visible surface culling before this stuff makes it into an official client, so...

 

Anyhow, there's a lot of settings in the modified client right now. Not all of them work well with each other. In fact there's so many that the burden of state management gets a little too high for the player. The options need to be simplified and bad combinations need to be made hard or impossible to stumble into. Which ones we want will take play testing.

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Well, right now the follow camera mode is quite useless in 1st person..that may be one thing that can be automatically turned off/blocked during 1st person?

 

I do agree that the follow camera options will need to be simplified, we should probably make some predefined settings players can choose between..but i think it's going to take us a while to get the right settings down pat. That can be for later anyway, when we're almost done with the new camera/sky/LOD.

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you cannot make first person shooters with the way the map is processed now.

With first person shooters maps are in a format that uses Binary space partitioning Tree data structure to store maps. This is a more efficent format that makes painting graphics easyer but it has the dissadvantage of being more complex and it requires a lot of time to compile the maps into an efficent tree, but this is done ahead of the time once so ingame it is much faster.

 

Doing this will dramatically improve performance (especially indoors) but there are always limitations, it works best with first person shooters where there are walls that block the view, with bsp it allows polygons that are behind other objects to be ignored from paining (instead of paining everything from back to front).

 

BSP-based PVS has pretty much stopped being used by modern games for rendering. BSPs are maintained for other things(like collision detection), but Doom3 for example uses portals for hidden surface removal.

 

I always found a little weird the framerate I got with EL. It just doesn't fit what I see in my screen. The polycount is pretty low compared to what graphics cards today are capable of. Are you using the VBO extension?

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Remember we srill have a lot of users with older cards, so we still have to support systems that don't have some of the modern extensions. The more we can improve it without using the newer extensions, the better off we will be with & without the extensions.

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-Images for the reticle can be the icons we normally use for the walk/door/attack/etc...at least, i don't see why not ;)

However compared to other games, our icons are plain and boring..I'd really like to make fully colored ones to look nicer..although they would have to be pretty small.. anyway, I think it's best if you just use the current cursors, then later on we'll see about placing nicer ones.

 

Fixed and fixed.

 

-Can you make an option to disable particles? Or to cull the particles? They don't seem to be getting culled along with the rest of the objects..and they cause a big frame drop if many are around.

Edit: nevermind, there actually already is a particle disable thing, duh :P ..but you have to scroll down to 0 to disable it. Maybe someone can make a "Disable Particles" checkbox next to that to make it easier to turn on/off.

 

Fixed. Previously the back clipping plane was hooked into the near plane. I have separated the two for the first person mode only. There will be a far plane spin box now. Objects nearer than the far plane will all be rejected leading to a fair speed boost.

 

The near plane will not be adjustable in first person because you will see the ground clipped in front of you. Not good.

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