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16

General Discussion / Re: WME 1.7.2 (Mar 11 2007)

« on: April 10, 2007, 09:51:50 AM »

i think that papay's "pay with a credit card" option actually forces the buyer to open an account.

paypal is evil anyway

17

Technical forum / Re: Unbelievably basic variable question

« on: April 03, 2007, 10:04:44 AM »

Your solution in "if ... else if ... else if ... else if ... else" would have worked too. But, yes, using a "switch case" statement is cleaner

18

Technical forum / Re: 2D Engine Speed

« on: April 02, 2007, 09:42:55 AM »

Sorry for drifting a little bit, but after writing my previous post I remembered that WME does quite a bit of texture handling. For instance it can divide sprites into smaller textures in cases where the video cards doesn't support the texture's resolution (for example one 1024x1024 sprite will be split into four 512x512 texture if that's the video card's maximum texture resolution). Mnemonic, does the engine also pack separate sprites into a single texture to minimize empty texture space ?

In this case my first point is not valid.

19

Technical forum / Re: 2D Engine Speed

« on: April 02, 2007, 09:37:34 AM »

Just a couple of ideas, don't know if they'll work in your case:

1) Use small textures and keep dimensions as close as powers of 2 as you can (32, 64, 128, etc). Most video cards use only textures with dimensions in powers of two, so if your sprite is, say, 65x129 the Direct X driver will put the bitmap into a 128x256 texture that's almost 4 times bigger than needed. This can add up and fill up the video memory with empty pixels and use memory bandwidth for no good reason. If you have 1024x768 backgrounds made of a single sprite you can divide them into two sprites of dimensions 1024x512 and 1024x256, you'll save one megabyte of video RAM per background image on some cards.

2) Transparency usually hurts rendering speed because pixels have to be processed even though they are not rendered. If you have big transparent textures try to divide them and limit the amount of transparent pixels

I hope this helps

20

Technical forum / Re: Viewports and 3D actors

« on: March 27, 2007, 01:03:29 PM »

We only change the viewport's position but i don't think that we change its size so maybe we didn't se the problem you mention. And also the 3D actors don't move during the earthquake...

21

Technical forum / Re: Viewports and 3D actors

« on: March 27, 2007, 09:31:17 AM »

Yes we use SetViewport for an earthquake effect and maybe other things too.

22

Technical forum / Re: Adjusting Walking Speed and Zooming

« on: March 26, 2007, 09:58:34 AM »

For your second post, the game sends events "ActorEntry" and "ActorLeaves" to the regions when the actor Enters or leaves, if you have only one actor then you can try to use this.

[Scene.AmbientLightColor]

23

General Discussion / Re: WME 1.7.2 (Mar 11 2007)

« on: March 13, 2007, 12:43:58 PM »

It's now possible to set ambient light color in SceneEdit (only affects 3D characters). It can also be changed programmatically using the Scene.AmbientLightColor property.

awesome !

24

Done / Ambient light for scene

« on: March 02, 2007, 06:43:21 PM »

Hi,

Our artists are complaining about the lack of ambient lighting in Wintermute. They have to put the scene lights behind the camera or the characters can get very dark, so the 3D actors are always lit the same way and the real-time shadows do not match the hand-drawn shadows from the scene. With ambient lighting they could put the 3D lights at the same position as the light sources and still have a realistic scene.

We can always put omni lights around the scenes as suggested here, but it's a tedious process for something that could be done in 3 mouse clicks and the result wouldn't be perfect. Another option might be to set an ambient colour in the actor's material but I'm not sure that it works and if it does then the colour is set once for all scenes in the game unless we export a separate mesh for every kind of lighting (night, day, indoors...), that's not convenient either.

Is there a chance we might be able to set ambient lighting per scene in future versions of Wintermute ? Either in script or in the editor would be nice.

Thanks,
Olivier

25

Community bulletin board / Re: Finished competition games!

« on: March 01, 2007, 02:31:09 PM »

leucome, your links seem to be dead.

26

General Discussion / Re: Finding a publisher..

« on: February 27, 2007, 02:10:44 PM »

I think that the best way to meet publishers is to go to professionnal conventions, you'll be able to meet several publishers on the same day when they're actually shopping for new projects. You'll probably need to arrange for appointments in advance.

From my experience, the publisher finances the development of the game, but not really. They usually pay every time they approve a 'milestone' (defined in the contract, it should pay at least for the developpers' salaries) and then a bigger amount on project completion. The developper earns royalties on the game, but these royalties are first spent on repaying the publisher for the money they gave to the developper, so they're not really paying for the development, they're actually advancing the funds (To be honnest I should add that most games don't sell enough to repay for their development costs). In very few cases the publisher will support the development cost and pay royalties on every box that is sold. I know that Nintendo does that with 2nd party developpers, but PC publishers probably don't.

Hope this helped.

27

Technical forum / Re: In-game notes

« on: February 02, 2007, 05:17:00 PM »

Thanks, too. I spent a lot of time looking for this function in the documentation this morning (maybe it should be mentionned in the page about localization)

28

Technical forum / Re: .X file export trouble.

« on: January 30, 2007, 10:29:08 AM »

sorry but i don't remember too well and i deleted my test results after we decided to use physique for all models in our project.

i think that we decided to use physique because it always works. skinning may work, or may not, depending on the model and the way it's skinned but we were not able to determine exactly what could be causing problems.

i hope this helps

29

Technical forum / Re: .X file export trouble.

« on: January 29, 2007, 10:43:17 AM »

"reset X form" is always a good thing to do in MAX before exporting (except if it's a camera), and so is collapsing the modifier stack (maybe not all the stack though, at least not the skinning modifiers)

some of the problems in your exported mesh could also be the result of double-sided materials not being exported to the X format, so check that your normals point out of the mesh and not inside.

as for the pandasoft options, i did a quick wiki page of the options that work for us. we use biped and fully skinned characters (we tested the "skin" and "physique modifiers, both worked), you can find it here

edit: oops, didn't se that the person asking the question and the first one to answer were the same 

30

Technical forum / Re: How do I place new item in the game scene?

« on: January 02, 2007, 11:34:48 AM »

it looks like you forgot to reference the new script in the ACT3D file. you will need to edit actors\teapot2\teapot.act3d and change the "script" line to "script=actors\teapot2\teapot2.script" or something like that.

and by the way, happy new year everybody