[WIP] A Temple

[Darth InSidious]

My jealousy knows no bounds.

 

 

Great stuff, Quanon!

[Quanon]

My jealousy knows no bounds.

 

 

Great stuff, Quanon!

 

Hey , thanks.

 

But your WIP does look sweet to me , I'm mainly jealous of the faboleus reskins of characters .

 

Som minor news : Just completed what I see as the whole temple .

 

Still need to maka well fitting Walkmesh , its a bit ruff now + all of the other work that stills needs to be done .

 

And I fear , I noticed some minor framerate drop already . I even didn't add statues ! Then again its a mighty +-12.300 polys .... auch , no wonder Bioware chopped up there areas .

 

Anywayz , that'll be something for later to try and test out .

 

[Darth InSidious]

Hey , thanks.

 

But your WIP does look sweet to me , I'm mainly jealous of the faboleus reskins of characters .

Silveredge I ain't.

 

But you're WIP is doing something entirely new. And doing it irritatingly well.

 

I tried doing this stuff - and it's incredibly hard.

Som minor news : Just completed what I see as the whole temple .

Huzzah!

And I fear , I noticed some minor framerate drop already . I even didn't add statues ! Then again its a mighty +-12.300 polys .... auch , no wonder Bioware chopped up there areas .

I take it multi-room .lyt's are still an issue?

Anywayz , that'll be something for later to try and test out .

 

O_O

 

*drools*

[Revan_Pwn_Malak]

Ok What the heck is up with this? I leave the forums for a couple months to deal with my life and school and i come back to find THIS?! Why was I not informed earlier? Hehe... great work Quanon. I must say that I will definitely be downloading this when you release it.

[Quanon]

Silveredge I ain't.

But you're WIP is doing something entirely new. And doing it irritatingly well.

I tried doing this stuff - and it's incredibly hard.

 

It takes time , but once you spend more then 100 hours in Max you get the hang how to do stuff , but still takes lots of time and some planning .

 

And LUCK

 

Huzzah!

 

Indeed , the newest Kaurora I got has solved the Texture stretch completely , all that has a UV-map looks ace now ; OMG it's so to die for

 

I take it multi-room .lyt's are still an issue?

 

It should be possible to do , but so far I have not tried it out .

It involves Coordinate stuff and such ... guessing work + I'll first try to get that mini-map in .

*drools*

 

Soon my friend , very soon ...

 

 

Scrap the 12.000 polys , its 16000 and counting ... 0_Q

[Miltiades]

Scrap the 12.000 polys , its 16000 and counting ... 0_Q

 

Ouch... I take it you're going to divide your temple in areas too, then?

[magnusll]

Indeed , the newest Kaurora I got has solved the Texture stretch completely , all that has a UV-map looks ace now ; OMG it's so to die for

Just a few hours ago, the proverbial light-bulb went off and I finally squashed the damn bug that was mangling the textures. It's official: from now on, KAurora knows how to handle all types of UV maps

 

It should be possible to do , but so far I have not tried it out .

It involves Coordinate stuff and such ... guessing work + I'll first try to get that mini-map in .

The most difficult and annoying thing would be the actual splitting of the model and the exact positioning of the rooms so they line up correctly. Once you know the coordinates, creating the .lyt file is trivial. I have a suspicion that Bioware handled general area layouts using MilkShape, subsequently importing into 3dsMax for the detail work.

You'd also need to edit the edge adjacencies of the walkmeshes with KAurora, but this is not difficult once you get the hang of it. Still boring, though...

[Quanon]

The most difficult and annoying thing would be the actual splitting of the model and the exact positioning of the rooms so they line up correctly. Once you know the coordinates, creating the .lyt file is trivial. I have a suspicion that Bioware handled general area layouts using MilkShape, subsequently importing into 3dsMax for the detail work.

You'd also need to edit the edge adjacencies of the walkmeshes with KAurora, but this is not difficult once you get the hang of it. Still boring, though...

 

I've been working backwards , I started with loose pieces and plugged them all together ... Splitting it should go easy again ... but I've no clue how the differant AuroraBases work together .

 

Each piece needs one , but one of them must the Master or Root where all the others relate to , for coordinates ... I think ...

 

If I'm correct the .lyt is just a list with all the part names .

 

MasterName

Part1a

Part1b

Part2

 

Something along those lines + you need to set them in the .are aswell ...

Swooozschh , long dreadfull work

 

Anywayz I'll do this kind of thing with simple box-rooms first and all ... If I find the time

 

Temple first , rest of all the crazy stuff later !

[southern_fox]

This would be amazing for the Tatooine Rakatan temple, seriously. Amaznig anyway, but even better for the temple. You know what it looks like to me? One of the temples from Zelda: OOT. Maybe Fire or Spirit... Quanon, go and design for Nintendo!!!

 

I'm still holding out hope that Quanon wants to tackle completing the Tatooine Rakatan Temple soon - after this, of course.

 

I do get a feel that this module resembles the Spirit Temple. Maybe a bit less Egyptian influence though, but the similarities are definitely there.

[Darth Xander]

I am glad your mod is is turning out ok.

[magnusll]

but I've no clue how the differant AuroraBases work together .

 

Each piece needs one , but one of them must the Master or Root where all the others relate to , for coordinates ... I think ...

 

If I'm correct the .lyt is just a list with all the part names .

 

MasterName

Part1a

Part1b

Part2

 

Something along those lines + you need to set them in the .are aswell ...

 

Close. You need to decide how to split up the area into rooms; once you've done this, all you do is to simply create one model for each room, with its own AuroraBase and all the children nodes. The .lyt is just a list of rooms (and a few other things like doors), each one having a set of coordinates. Coordinates do not have any particular meaning, i.e. you don't need a master room at (0, 0, 0) or anything special; they're simply needed to align the rooms, otherwise the game wouldn't know how to place them relative to each other.

 

You're right about the last part; you need to list all the rooms which make up your area in the .are file. Also, the order in which you list them will be the one used in the walkmesh edge adjacency; i.e if you are editing an edge which leads to, say, the second room in the .are list, you'd need to set the edge adjacency to 1 (the count starts from 0, so 1 actually means "crossing this edge brings you to the second room"). You need to edit this adjacency value for every edge which connects one room to another; even with KAurora visual method, this may be quite boring, especially when you have a large border comprising dozens of edges (like those in the Dantooine outdoors).

[glovemaster]

You also need to sort out a .VIS file which is set out:

[ROOM NAME][sPACE][NUMBER OF ROOMS VISIBLE FROM THIS ROOM]
[DOUBLE SPACE][FIRST VISIBLE ROOM]
[DOUBLE SPACE][sECOND VIDIBLE ROOM]
[DOUBLE SPACE][THIRD VIDIBLE ROOM]
[sECOND ROOM NAME] [NUMBER OF VISIBLE ROOMS]
[DOUBLE SPACE][FIRST VISIBLE ROOM]
[DOUBLE SPACE][ETC.]

 

So its kinda like:

 

NewArea_001a 1
 NewArea_001b
NewArea_001b 2
 NewArea_001a
 NewArea_001c

 

If you can understand If your having problems just ask on MSN

[H2O]

Loving the progress Quanon! Looking amazing. Can't wait for this new version of KAurora to be released!

 

I had a crack at working with multirooms and .lyt files in TSL and GMAX a while back. I eventually gave up on that, couldn't get anything to align properly and kept getting stuck in one spot without a walkmesh. Here's my learnings in case they help.

 

I was trying to figure out (without much success) 'what references what' in terms of coordinates:

- Does a .lyt coordinate of (1,1,1) mean it's aurorabase or the GMAX origin will end up at (1,1,1)? (couldn't get either to work)

- Do walkmeshes do the same or are they related to the in some other way?

- Do GMAX coordinates correlate directly to .lyt coordinates?

 

Anyway, one of my attempted techniques was to create and arrange several rooms in GMAX, and keep all the reference points for each room in one place with respect to the big model. That way you can keep all the different rooms at (0,0,0) in the .lyt and they'll still line up nicely. All you'd need to do is cut up your big model into separate objects and link/export them separately. But as I said I still couldn't get it to work for some reason.

 

(And might I suggest adding some columns of light? Unless of course it stuffs up whole the 'sith' feel you're going for...)

[glovemaster]

This is interesting because i had a look at .LYT files a while ago and i have a theory;

The .LYT file does not actually have anything to do the area models and is infact the location for the walkmeshes, i had a closer look and roughtly managed to decompile the walkmeshes with KotOR Tool and imported them into 3DS Max, i then selected the individual meshes and manually typed the coordinates from the .LYT file. I found that the meshes actually aligned to form the area i was creating, it was about 98% accurate but that maybe down to Bioware not aligning meshes properly.

I suppose this doesnt answer the question as to how the area models are actually aligned but i *think* that KotOR aligns the corresponding MDL, MDX file's walkmesh (The walkmesh actually in the model, sometimes "WalkMesh" or align those lines) with the positioned walkmesh file.

 

Like i said, its just a theory but i've tested a few things and its the only explanation i can see.

 

Hope that helps

[magnusll]

I was trying to figure out (without much success) 'what references what' in terms of coordinates:

- Does a .lyt coordinate of (1,1,1) mean it's aurorabase or the GMAX origin will end up at (1,1,1)? (couldn't get either to work)

- Do walkmeshes do the same or are they related to the in some other way?

- Do GMAX coordinates correlate directly to .lyt coordinates?

 

I can tell you this, as I had to learn it the hard way while figuring out walkmeshes...

 

Basically, the .lyt coordinates represent a translation matrix which gets automatically applied to every node of the room model (not just the AuroraBase). So if, for example, you have one room at (100, 100, 0) in the .lyt, all the objects of that room will be displaced by 100 units (I think the game uses meters?) in the X and Y direction. If a node's base coordinates in Gmax were (20, 30, 5), they would become (120, 130, 5) within the game due to the .lyt displacement.

 

Incidentally, the .lyt translation is the sole reason the "refactor" menu item exists in KAurora. You see, walkmeshes need to be stored in ABSOLUTE coordinates. When KAurora imports a walkmesh from NWMax, it obviously knows its Max coordinates, but it can't know whether these coordinates are final or if a .lyt translation will happen; so it needs to be told this bit of info. It would be possible to let it automatically learn the data by reading the appropriate .lyt file, but it's a feature I'll add later as it' s secondary; manually entering the .lyt coords takes a few seconds anyway, and you only need to do it once for each room before generating the .wok.

 

Glovemaster: you' re right about the .VIS file; note though that it's not really mandatory. The .vis is used by the game to ease the workload of the graphic engine, by telling it which rooms are visible from each other room, so it can skip the rendering of all rooms which are not visible from the player's point of view. If it is not specified, I believe the game will default to rendering all the rooms in the area (though of course it will still use view frustum culling and all the rest of existing 3d techniques to avoid computing unnecessary objects).

Of course, if you went all the way to splitting your area into rooms to ease the graphic workload, you might as well complete the job and properly edit your .vis file, otherwise the rest of the work would become moot...

[H2O]

Thanks magnusll, that makes sense now. Very strange how it does that, but at least there's a solution available.

 

note though that it's not really mandatory

 

No, no, no! The .vis is absolutely mandatory!

Much content + much coolness = many polys

Push the engine to its limits I say.

[Quanon]

Thanks magnusll, that makes sense now. Very strange how it does that, but at least there's a solution available.

 

 

 

No, no, no! The .vis is absolutely mandatory!

Much content + much coolness = many polys

Push the engine to its limits I say.

 

 

Man , I'll have to read through these post a few times ...

 

My head is spinning with all that info ... and I'm a sucker in Math .

So matrixes scare the hell out of me

 

But I believe GM will guide me through this maze of .lyt and .vis .

 

Their both important as I fear I reached a point to how much polys you can put in a one room area .

 

A frightfull aspect is that it might go choppy when I add enemys , so far the thing runs smooth , but that could all change when other objects , besides the party are running around .

 

Creating sounds , running AI scripts and all , creates other pressure on the engine ...

 

If I look at my area and the way I went about to model it ; I'd say I've got about 6 rooms .

 

Not much , allthough I would need to remake the walk meshes .

 

Ugh , all the sudden the work load grows beyond ...

 

Anyway , I feel I'm nearly there to give out some sort of Béta .

 

All this .lyt and .vis will be for a time later .

 

And I would prefer to test it out with simple box models , just to see how things actually work , before trying to do this with more complex models .

[Quanon]

Bump

 

Not really ...

 

Some news ( later when that blasted Terragen finishes rendering ) .

 

Question ( GM or Magnusll , HEEEEEEEEEEEEEELPP ) :

 

So I looked to create that mini-map ...

 

I went into Max and noted these Coordinates down for the WalkMesh :

 

the 0,0 point or most upper left point was : X1 = -3292,49 , Y1 = 11996,427

the most down to the right point : X2 = 2761,488 , Y2 = -5527,42

 

So after some Math , I got that the X runs from 0 <=> 6053,978

and the Y runs from 0 <=> 17523,847

 

That's a bit big pixelwize , so I divided by 100 => So I got something like this :

 

61 pix / 175 pix a bit weird , but my Walkmesh is not a nice fitting squerre .

 

I took a topdown render , fiddled with Photoshop to make it fit the size and then started to look in the .are file .

 

Should I set

 

WorldPt 1X and 1Y still to 0

and put 2X and 2Y to 61 and 175

 

and Keep the MapPt X1 and Y1 to 0,1

X2 and Y2 = 0,9

 

OR is it totally differant and I should use the big numbers from Max to set everything straight .

 

So far no mini-map popped-up ...

 

If anyone has more brain-power for these kind of things , please help me out

[Quanon]

The News :

 

After working on this all day , I finannly got some satisfaction with this outdoor area ...

 

Its still not perfect need , to fiddle with that AuroraMesh modifier for the skybox . Bit to bright still , its dawn and the sky turn purple / orangy .

Nice long shadows of the PC and party , allthough I'll need to make some parts dubblesided .

Allthough a large part is still cliff , but you get a look at the strolling wasteland .

 

But I got a sky I want ... custom made

+ some minor things need to get fixed .

 

*hopes LKA_SKY01 doesn't override a texture*

 

 

 

[Marius Fett]

Looking Good!!!

[glovemaster]

This is looking awesome, when you finish send it over so i can finish the link between it and the cave and get those scripts in

 

About this minimap, you will need to make sure it is names lbl_mapm77aa.tga (or lbl_mapm77ab if its the tomb)

 

Incorrect naming is the only explaination i can think of for the map to not show at all...

[LeftWing]

After reading the entire thread, have to admit: Looks damn good,

Never knew it was possible to model a map for KotOR, and in other words: You've just inspired me to do something myself .

 

You still seem to have some slight UV-map issues though on the buildings (the texture stretching still looks too funky).

[sekan]

Nice work

[Quanon]

After reading the entire thread, have to admit: Looks damn good,

Never knew it was possible to model a map for KotOR, and in other words: You've just inspired me to do something myself .

 

You still seem to have some slight UV-map issues though on the buildings (the texture stretching still looks too funky).

 

I know , I rotated the temple , then used the ResetXform and that my friends killed the UV ...

 

I'll have to redo that .

 

Incorrect naming is the only explaination i can think of for the map to not show at all...

 

Wait a minute if I dumb those brackets [name] it will show up ??

Besides the .mod is called NewArea002 => So thats the name I used for the map , but it should be the name of the model ?

 

Worth a test then

 

EDIT : The mini-map appears now , but it looks like crap .

In the Menu where you can view the map , I only get the top left ... so it got stretched out somehow ...

 

While in the game-world I't gets reaped , so its to narrow ...

Bummer ... I got no idea what I'm doing ...

[Darth InSidious]

O_O

 

There aren't words to describe the awesomeness found here.