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[adonf]

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

[Mnemonic]

Umm, make sure the dimensions of the main layer of the scene match the resolution. Other than that... no idea.

[adonf]

Yes they match.

I'm using 3D walk planes and collisions, maybe this has something to do with it ?

[Mnemonic]

When you say "in the centre of the screen", do you mean in both x and y coordinates, or just y?

[adonf]

I mean in Y only, the position in X is fine.

I just tried with another 3D model of the same scale and I didn't see that problem. There could be something wrong with my main character's model, what do you use to calculate the top of the model ?

[Mnemonic]

WME computes a bounding box for the actor, then the bounding box is projected into 2D resulting in rectangle on screen. This rectangle is used to determine the height of the actor.

If you make the actor Interactive and enable manual highlighting of active areas in the Accessibility options, you'll be able to see the computed rectangle.

[adonf]

Wow this is getting weirder: I can't highlight the main character.

When I cycle through the interactive items, there is one step where nothing is highlighted. If I use the other 3D model that worked earlier, with the same ACT3D file and in the same scene, then the actor is highlighted at the same position in the cycle as the formerly empty step (making any sense  ?)

I also tried to set the actor's scale to 1 (normal scale is 70), still no bounding box but the subtitles are always in the bottom of the screen.

And one last thing, even though my main actor is clearly interactive (set in the .ACT3D file and in game.script), her name doesn't appear when i move the mouse pointer over her, unless I change the model...

Well, it looks like something is wrong with my main actor, but what ? Everything else is fine, even projected shadows...

[Mnemonic]

Apparently the bounding rectangle is computed wrong for some reason, I cannot tell why, though..
The mouse-over detection is indeed also dependant on the rectangle.

[adonf]

Ok, it's fixed. I had to re-export the model with the 'optimize mesh' option set to 'none' in pandasoft. I don't know if the other model that works had any optimizations. Oh, well...

[Mnemonic]

I'm glad you managed to make it work, but it's still strange. I'd expect if the model is rendered correctly, the bounding box should be computed correctly as well.. If there's any chance I could take a look at that problematic model, it would be helpful.

[adonf]

Sure, check your MPs for the address where you can download the .X file.

[adonf]

If anyone else is following this thread: Mnemonic found out that the problem was caused by bad vertices positions in the .X file (illegal floating point values), something caused by the Pandasoft exporter.


So, the non-optimized mesh that works slows down the game quite a bit (frame rate drops from ~150 FPS to ~30). It's not really an issue right now because I found a way to use the optimized one but I though that you'd want to know about the performance problem...

I used Fragmotion to repair the broken, optimized file (a simple import and export did the trick, and doubled the file size too...)

Cheers,
  Olivier

[Mnemonic]

And I modified the relevant parts of WME so that they cope with the invalid vertices (for the price of a very small performance loss).

[adonf]

Hi Mnemonic,

I just noticed that the bounding boxes can grow but they never shrink. I don't know if it's a bug or if it's by design but I thought that I should let you know.

We have an animation where a character climbs up a tree and plays several animations at the top of the tree. All this time the root dummy for the character stays on the floor. I did the red boxes trick, the box grows a lot as the actor climbs, which is normal if it includes the dummy, but it stays big when the actor climbs down and its main body goes back to the dummy's position.

After playing this set of animations the dialog lines for the actor are stuck in the top of the screen. It's not a big deal for me because this actor only speaks once and I'll hard code the dialog position or something but, again, maybe it's a bug.

Cheers,
Adonf

[Mnemonic]

Okay, I'll look into it.