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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.

 

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.

 

Actually it is "The two moons circle the sky in a seemingly erratic pattern. " Which is open to interpretation, but if it is possible it would be very nice to actually display the various moon signs, and for that we would (I assume) really need a "seemingly erratic pattern"

 

The red moon, or perhaps a red sky is for invasions and special events, so that would need a moderator command, so it can be called "on the spot".

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Sorry for reactivating an old thread, but I'm just too curious about the status of this project. Are you still working on this, emajekral?

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And youre not the only one Kl4uz

im really curious what happened with emajekrals projects too since it were

all neat ideas to bring into the game.

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Silly question, but random number generators are not really random. They are a quite repetitive if you don't use a different seed. Why not use a random number generator to make a 2D/3D bezier curve? You could have this formula determine which index to use.

 

hour + (6 * day_of_year) + (number_of_days in year * year * 6)

 

This should work for making the path. The number that is generated could be between -20 and +20 for x and -20 and +20 for y.

 

If bezier curves are not good for you, you could use variance in degrees of path instead. (the big moon turns 20 degrees to the left....the big moon turns 5 degrees to the right...)

 

I hope these rough ideas help.

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I also feel very enthusiastic about this new camera, is it still in the works?

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Resurrecting this topic.

 

Whoa! Lots of changes in the client and I'm adding more.

 

I plan to hand off everything I've done as soon as everything I did is back to where I remember it.

 

I just finished kludging the new camera angles back to where I remember them being. me->tmp in gamewin.c:move_camera() is no longer centered on the player - the camera offset has been added to it and that change interfered with my stuff. :)

 

I hope whoever takes over my stuff knows who played with the camera besides me and can de-kludge my stuff. It was bad enough as it was.

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who played with the camera besides me

It appears those changes were introduced in the commit ("Improve mouse usage and new key bindings" - eh??) from Learner on the 17th of January 07.

 

The changes are quite huge (can we say rewrite?) so I think you'll have a world of fun trying up get things sorted out again. That's a real shame because what you were doing looked unreal.

Edited by Torg

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Unless someone else steps up, I'll likely be the person to take this on... If someone else, or several someones, want to work on this then I can work with them (especially if they don't have CVS commit). I have other stuff on my TODO list as well, but once I get the source/patches and the extra textures I'll be looking at this.

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Torg: No, the culprit appears to be Eye Candy... There's some interesting lines of code in ec_idle (sp?) that appear to muck with camera_[xyz] then store the results back to actor (don't have the source on me right now).

 

I know it's something from after January that caused the problem 'cause last time I hacked at the client it was after merging with fresh CVS on Feb 4th 2007.

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I'd like to add something here: As best I know, Emajekral is going to rewrite some of the actor banner code as well. Yes, there are currently issues with it in-game, they will be fixed in time, so please don't submit patches or bug reports :blink:

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Okay, it is now in CVS!

There are some changes that apply outside of the #ifdef's, but they are generally all trivial, and should not present any problems.

To enable this, use the SKY_FPV_CURSOR feature. You will also need to extract http://users.on.net/~gingerman/sky_cursor-textures.zip into your datadir/textures folder.

 

alt+f to toggle first-person-view. alt+g or middle-mouse-click to toggle mouse-grab.

 

Note, however, that it's still experimental, and there are known bugs. It shouldn't crash, but it will look odd in places.

- the lightning is seen on clouds (at least in -DNEW_WEATHER, where the flash is more noticeable), which isn't really going to be correct. I should be able to adjust this by ignoring the lightning light level when drawing clouds.

- follow cam in first person view doesn't seem to be working at the moment. Hopefully I can find the bug, because I had it working previously.

- clouds, stars & sun go from north to south. funky.

- sky seems to roll when panning camera. Skybox seems unstable. I think it's an OpenGL or 3D maths issue, which means I'll have trouble with it. I've asked a few people about it, hopefully someone will have some spare time in the next few months (as long as it's well tested before the next client update, I'm happy)

- the shadow system in EL only works for a certain distance; after that the shadows look funky. The new view here will make players more likely to be looking long distances, so it is becoming more of a problem.

- actor animations, when viewed from a low angle (such as horizontal) seem a lot more robotic, no bounce, etc. Note: in FPV, head bobbing will be visible to the player as the screen moves. Also note: the shadows seem to move in FPV as the view changes.

- again with being able to see further, you can see when actors disappear. It might work okay if we alpha blend people out at a certain distance, because currently they just pop in/out on actor add/remove from the server.

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Well I finally got the client compiled so of course I had to check this out :lipssealed:

 

The extended camera seems to be broken. All it does is move upward a little bit, and then when I try to rotate the cam up or down it jiggers up and down a few times then stops, it doesn't go beyond the normal camera boundaries like you can do in FPV.

 

Also, FPV feels like the camera is too close to the ground for some reason..it seems like it should be higher.

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But it's quite buggy. Don't know how to explain it, in FPV the mouse view control can get stuck.
What sort of stuck? In mouse grab mode, and moving the mouse doesn't have any effect? Moving the mouse makes it jitter (effect, but it jumps back to where it was), etc?
Well I finally got the client compiled so of course I had to check this out :confused:
That was the idea :hug: If this becomes standard, then there are probably a few things in the art dept that will need touching up (able to see under eaves, animations look somewhat robotic at low angles, closer view of mapbugs in the ground, etc) :lipssealed:
The extended camera seems to be broken. All it does is move upward a little bit, and then when I try to rotate the cam up or down it jiggers up and down a few times then stops, it doesn't go beyond the normal camera boundaries like you can do in FPV.
The jiggling would be because the up/down keys allow more movement than the draw_camera part. It shouldn't be hard to fix. And yes, I did give it the same range of freedom as the normal camera... I could allow more freedom, but... high angles (like top-down) tend to not look as good, and low angles can be as hard to move around in as FPV. Low angles without FPV also are laggier, because FPV is designed with better distance culling.
Also, FPV feels like the camera is too close to the ground for some reason..it seems like it should be higher.
Yes, it seems to be around waist height, I'm not certain why yet.

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What sort of stuck? In mouse grab mode, and moving the mouse doesn't have any effect? Moving the mouse makes it jitter (effect, but it jumps back to where it was), etc?

Yes, that's it.

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What sort of stuck? In mouse grab mode, and moving the mouse doesn't have any effect? Moving the mouse makes it jitter (effect, but it jumps back to where it was), etc?
Yes, that's it.
Okay, granted, I've been guilty of "The answer to 'a or b' is yes" before, but not really in programing... Which of the above? And do you have any more info?

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When Emajekral had done this initially, he gave me a test client that had both FPV and the 3rd person view that had full camera rotation(well up until the top of the sky and the bottom of the ground). It looked really nice. So if you can do it like it was done before with the 3rd person view that'd be great. You were also able to zoom in/out, unlike FPV.

 

Ah..I still have screenshots for how it looked like!:

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v59/ffle...=newcamera4.jpg

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v59/ffle...=newcamera3.jpg

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v59/ffle...t=newcamera.jpg

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v59/ffle...=newcamera1.jpg

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v59/ffle...=newcamera2.jpg

Please put this camera/view in, I really loved it :happy:

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When Emajekral had done this initially, he gave me a test client that had both FPV and the 3rd person view that had full camera rotation(well up until the top of the sky and the bottom of the ground). It looked really nice. So if you can do it like it was done before with the 3rd person view that'd be great. You were also able to zoom in/out, unlike FPV.
When he gave it to me, it had the greater range of camera freedom... However, non-FPV with low angles didn't have the same LOD adjustments, and got really slow (especially on large maps). So it can be done, but it will take more than just changing the limits.

However, I'm starting to wonder what extended-camera is really for. I'm inclined to remove the option, and make it the default. Of course, the next thing people will want is more zoom when not in FPV, so they can see further... However, now that we need to make sure it looks okay in FPV, I'm not sure that we have as good a reason to say no :)

 

 

"The answer to 'a or b' is yes"
Both. First the jitter, which becomes worse, the completely stuck.
Okay, so, you move the mouse, and it moves and them jumps back? And eventually it doesn't move at all, and you have to middle-click again to release the mouse? Where does it finish at, top of allowable mouse range? Bottom? Middle (exactly)? Do you still have left/right when up/down doesn't work?

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However, I'm starting to wonder what extended-camera is really for. I'm inclined to remove the option, and make it the default. Of course, the next thing people will want is more zoom when not in FPV, so they can see further... However, now that we need to make sure it looks okay in FPV, I'm not sure that we have as good a reason to say no :P

 

 

 

 

Go on an inside map and zoom out :)

An idea would be to auto-disable this extreme zoom when you enter an inside map.

 

I thought the extended camera was there to give that 3rd person "over-the-shoulder" perspective as seen in the screenshots I posted above.

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An idea would be to auto-disable this extreme zoom when you enter an inside map.
The only way to do this is by checking the dungeon flag, which means that houses as well as true dungeons and such would be limited zoom. However, some caves and castle insides and such are pretty large, perhaps as large as some outside maps (as one block you can travel around in, as opposed to separated rooms).

The ideal solution, IMHO, is for it to only display the current contiguous area (with a tolerance of a few tiles, so that you can see through iron bars to another room if you would be able to use-click something to go through (but not walk straight there); but although that's more flexible (as long as mapmakers know the tolerance of pseudo-contiguous regions for when designing maps, they shouldn't break anything. Heck, with this, you could design maps with the padding between rooms of only, say, 5 tiles instead of 20, so you could pack it a lot tighter) it'd also be more work to code.

 

As for seeing into other rooms, we've had that since at least the update that added perspective, many moons ago.

 

The extended camera does a few things. It lifts the camera focus from the character to a meter or two above. This gives a bit more visible range in camera-forwards, but I don't think it's that significant a change.

It also affects things like the range of freedom for the camera. I suspect players will prefer that anyway, so an option to reduce camera freedom (ie disabling ext cam) wouldn't be used much.

And finally, ext cam is required to use mouse-grab (the middle-mouse to enable. As opposed to the old style of hold-middle to pan. Mouse-grab also requires non-SDL cursors, although this is just so that you can have decent crosshairs and could be worked around). But this is the only one where I think it's worth being configurable, so I think it'd be best to make the above two the default, and label the mouse-grab option.

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I don't think a contiguous area can be defined so easily...how would you determine that? Right now as it's set up the mapmakers follow a "4 ground tiles inbetween each inside" distance. So limiting the zoom range should work well, if not with the dungeon flag then a list of maps that this would be used in? Or even area boundaries on the maps?

....Remember too that these maps were made with the before-huge-perspective got turned on. I can play the game with a lower perspective and not have this problem. So it's just a matter of limiting it on the inside maps.

 

 

Although I'm not 100% certain, I'm almost sure that the extended cam enabled the "over-the-shoulder" view that I had in Emajekral's client(that's why the camera got raised, it moved "over your shoulder" instead of at your waist...I think). Please make it do that, it was REALLY fun to play with that camera view :P

Otherwise there doesn't seem to be any point in having it, as there's little difference between it and the normal view.

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I don't think a contiguous area can be defined so easily...

Not sure how hard it would be to limit the camera view, but _this_ can in theory be done, either by counting clusters while loading the map, or by extending the map format with a "cluster number" field which is stored when saving the map.

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