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1

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

2

Done / 3D actor animations in Scene Edit

« on: December 06, 2006, 12:51:06 PM »

Hi Mnemonic,

I think it would be an interesting feature to select the animation that is run on a 3D actor in Scene Edit. At the moment, only the animation called "idle" is played, and it can't be overriden in the actor's script with IdleAnimName. When we want to place an actor precisely for interaction with the world (eg. opening a drawer or picking up an object) our only options are to re-export the animation with the name "idle" or to edit the .X file by hand and change the names.

Could it be possible to play the first animation listed in the .X models, in case where "idle" cannot be found instead of nothing ?

Cheers,
  Olivier

3

Technical forum / Animation channels

« on: November 20, 2006, 03:14:54 PM »

Hi again,

We're having trouble with animation channels, I just can't get them to work. Is there something specific to be done before we can play several animations on the same object ?

Thanks,
Olivier

4

Technical forum / Camera roll in 1.7b1

« on: November 15, 2006, 06:29:45 PM »

FIX: Camera roll value is now properly read from 3DS files generated by 3D Studio Max.

Hi Mnemonic,

This is not working in SceneEdit 1.6.091 (the one from 1.7 b1 and from wme_latest.zip). In our 3DS scenes exported with MAX 8 the camera does roll, only in the wrong direction. I haven't tried it yet in the game but I can do it tomorrow if you want me to.

With the SceneEdit.exe from 1.6 the camera does not roll at all in our scenes.

Cheers,
 Adonf

5

Technical forum / Wide scenes and 3D actors

« on: October 27, 2006, 02:44:18 PM »

Hi,

We're trying to use scenes that are wider than the screen (We want the scene to scroll as the actor goes left or right. They do this a lot in Runaway, it makes the scenes seem less static.). This seems to work well with 2D actors but we have 3D actors and we're having trouble with the 3DS file. In the scene editor and in-game, the 3DS model is squeezed into the first physical screen : our game runs in 1024x768, the scene is 2048x768 and the 3DS model fills a 1024x768 area at the left of the scene.

I tried changing the camera's FOV and I managed to get correct dimensions for the 3DS model, but it is still centered in the middle of the left screen.

Is there a way to work around this ?


Thanks
Olivier

PS: we're still using WME 1.6 but I couldn't find anything related to this in the changelog for 1.7

6

Technical forum / Using "Move by" in sprites causes wrong positions in Scene Editor.

« on: September 20, 2006, 05:32:52 PM »

Hi Mnemonic,

I noticed the following behaviour that looks to me like a possible bug:

When an animated sprite with a "move by" property is placed in the scene and the user saves the scene, the position that is saved in the .SCENE file is not the position that was entered in the entity properties, but its current position at the time the file is saved.

Is this intended ?

Thanks.

7

Technical forum / foreground layer

« on: September 12, 2006, 03:08:32 PM »

Hi,

I thought that free entities and actors lived in the main layer (as confirmed by this thread) but when I tried to play a video in the foreground it got hidden by a free entity.

Here's what I did: I created a foreground layer (same dimensions as main layer, not set as 'close-up' and placed after 'main' in the layer list) and placed an anchor region at the position the video should play. Then in the scene script I call

Code: [Select]

var my_video = Scene.GetNode("video_region");
my_video.PlayTheora("scenes\video.ogg", 1);
The video is partly hidden by a free entity with a higher Y position (well, lower in space but higher in value).

Is there a way to ensure that something will always be in the foreground ?

Thanks,
  Olivier

8

Technical forum / Fullscreen doesn't work

« on: June 08, 2006, 01:48:08 PM »

Hi,

We tried our demo on a high-end laptop (one that is marketed toward gamers) and the settings dialog box doesn't let us start the game in fullscreen mode, only windowed. The checkbox for "windowed" is checked and grayed-out.

The screen has a non-standard, widescreen native resolution but we were able to set the windows desktop to 1024x768 (same as our game's resolution), so it should be supported.

Do you know what is going on ?

Thanks,
  Olivier

9

Technical forum / How do I *not* project shadows on some areas ?

« on: June 02, 2006, 10:47:58 AM »

Hi,

On what plane are the 3D shadows projected ? I made a couple of tests and it doesn't seem like it's the walk plane, or at least it's not limited to the walk area.

We have a scene where the character walks on a narrow peer and there are places where the main actor's shadow is floating above the water. Here's an example:


I think that in this case I can put a mask above the areas where the shadow shouldn't be projected, but there could be a more elegant solution that works in all cases...

Also, in another scenes we have shadows from trees that are draw in the backgound picture and the character's shadow doesn't blend well with those shadows. Can I put alpha information in the background picture so that the shadow only blends in some area of the picture but not all (that might be a solution to the problem in the other scene too) ?

Thanks,
  Olivier

10

Technical forum / Interrupting an action

« on: May 30, 2006, 11:46:41 AM »

Hi

Has anyone got a nice way to override an action by another action ? Most of my code for interactive scene objects look like this:

Code: [Select]

on "Take"
{
actor.GoToObject(this);
actor.PlayAnimation("pick_up");
actor.Talk("blah blah");
}
but with that code, if the user clicks on anything while the actor is moving it doesn't stop the current action, it only cancels the movement and the animation is played where the actor is standing when the user clicks.

Enclosing this code between

Code: [Select]

Game.Interactive = false;
[...]
Game.Interactive = true;
won't work either because I want the user to be able to override the action while the actor is moving.

My first idea is to use a global variable that tells the first script that the order was overriden but since script are executed in parallel I can't tell which script will be executed first and receive the order to stop so it's a bit risky, not to mention ugly.

I'm sure there's a simple and elegant solution to do that. Any ideas ?

Thanks,
  Olivier

11

Feature requests, suggestions / Drag & drop from Project Manager

« on: May 24, 2006, 12:10:36 PM »

Hi,

I keep trying to drag files from the Project Manager's explorer bar into my source control window and into editors, and...  well it just doesn't work.

Would this be hard to implement ? Dragging multiple files would be fine too

12

Technical forum / Subtitles and 3D actors

« on: May 23, 2006, 05:22:46 PM »

Hi,

Are there known issues with subtitles and 3D actors ?

Our game runs in 1024x768, we have 3D actors in .X format and we haven't changed anything to the default subtitles settings, yet the dialogues are always displayed in the centre of the screen, regardless of the position of the actor in Y, except in rare occasions where they are shown at the bottom or the top of the screen.

I haven't been able to figure out what can be causing this. Any ideas ?

Thanks,
  Olivier

13

Technical forum / Background for responses

« on: May 19, 2006, 04:11:05 PM »

Hi,

I just added a tiled background image to the dialogue response area, and I noticed that the responses are aligned to the bottom of the response area.

Is there a way to display the responses from the top of the area. Or maybe to dynamically scale the window to the size of the buttons ?

Thanks
  Olivier

14

Feature requests, suggestions / Custom materials with X and FX files

« on: May 16, 2006, 04:31:40 PM »

Hi,

I believe that .X files can contain some material definitions in .FX format (basically high level vertex and pixel programs)

Does WME support that feature ? We'd like to try a cartoon rendering and maybe other effects on our main character.

Additionally, has anyone here managed to export these effects from 3DS MAx with Pandasoft Exporter ? Everytime I open the resulting .X file in Direct X's viewer it says "No effect instance specified. Reverting to the default effect."

Thanks,
 Olivier

15

Technical forum / 3d Lights

« on: May 11, 2006, 03:51:57 PM »

Hi,

I'd like to know which light types and which parameters from 3DS MAX are used by WME when using 3D geometry and 3D actors.

Our first scenes take place in broad daylight and we had to put a lot of light sources to get a realistic look (almost 30 lights, no kidding). Is there a smarter way to do this. The multiplier parameter doesn't seem to do anything, are there other things we should know about other settings ? What about attenuation and decay, do those work ?

Thanks,
  Adonf