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1

Technical forum / Re: Theora performance problem

« on: September 21, 2007, 12:01:08 PM »

in my experience with theora, downgrading the video quality also helps a lot on low end machines. if you use ffmpeg2theora and set a video quality to 10 then your frame rate will be much lower than if you set it to 9 or 8.

2

General Discussion / Re: Latest beta: WME 1.8 beta 3 (July 29, 2007)

« on: August 28, 2007, 02:01:27 PM »

thank you 

3

General Discussion / Re: Latest beta: WME 1.8 beta 3 (July 29, 2007)

« on: August 28, 2007, 11:44:00 AM »

oooooh nice! any chance we might get a copy of the window editing tool without installing 1.8 ? (we're still using 1.7.2)

4

Technical forum / Re: Confused about the animchannels

« on: August 28, 2007, 10:12:20 AM »

Ok. But thanks. Maybe adonF can help, he wrote that exporting wiki, right?

Hi, I just read this. Sorry but I can't help you. We've had trouble with animation channels and X files in a previous project too and we solved them by editing the (text version of) the X file manually. Hopefully it was a simple model with only two bones but it's definitely not something I want to do again or I recommend doing on a complex model like a character.

IIRC I had to remove from each animation the keys that I didn't want it to influence. For example on the animation that only applied to 'Bone2' I removed all the keys for all other bones. It worked because each animation only influenced its own set of bones. Let me know if that's not clear ad I'll give you more details.

5

General Discussion / Re: WME 1.7.3 (Jun 2 2007)

« on: June 27, 2007, 03:40:36 PM »

Well... not exactly! I just figured out that ChangeScene takes two default parameters FadeIn and FadeOut that are true by default, so this piece of code will print out a few lines depending on the computer's speed. If we change it to

Game.ChangeScene("blah", false, false);

then it works as you say, ie. exactly one line is printed before the script yields.

We were doing a bit or processing after the ChangeScene (hiding the actor, etc.) but I guess that it's a bad idea since the time we have to do it depends on the processor speed.

Once again, thanks for the quick answer.

6

General Discussion / Re: WME 1.7.3 (Jun 2 2007)

« on: June 27, 2007, 03:07:42 PM »

Game.ChangingScene - specifies whether a scene change is currently in progress.

I just saw this. Could you please explain how it works ? I always assumed that scripts were suspended during scene changes and that the old scene and its entities' scripts were killed when the new scene is loaded but apparently I was wrong...

Does this mean we can put some code in an entity's script after a call to Game.ChangeScene() and expect to see it run ? Under what conditions ?

Actually we did some tests and put a line like this

Code: [Select]

while (true) { Game.Msg("still running"); Sleep(1);}after a ChangeScene and it did print "still running" a few times but I don't understand what makes it stop. timers ? Garbage collection ?

Thanks.

7

Scripts, plugins, utilities, goodies / Re: Flashlight script

« on: May 23, 2007, 09:47:08 AM »

Well on the DC version (which served as a basis for the PS2 and PC versions) the characters' and monsters' shadows are projected to the simplified model for the background. Or maybe on a separate model ? I can't remember, it's been quite a while. But WME is getting close to the techniques that were used in AITD4 now that you can define "shadow" planes in the 3DS collision files and have simplified models for actor shadows.

8

Scripts, plugins, utilities, goodies / Re: Flashlight script

« on: May 22, 2007, 11:11:37 AM »

There are two background pictures for each scene in AITD4: a dark version and a lit version. The light cone is projected on a simplified version of the scene and the resulting image is used as a blend factor between the lit and unlit version. (Well, that's the basic idea but it couldn't work exactly like that on the PS1). The characters and monsters have simple shadows but on the PS1 and on the Dreamcast version they have stencil buffer-type shadows. I don't remember what light source is used for these stencil shadows, though.

But I remember seeing a trailer for this game in early 2000 where the light cone intersects with a pillar in a room and the pillar projects a shadow onto the environment. This was all done in 3DS MAX but rendered with no texture filtering so as to look like PS1 real-time rendering... Maybe that's what confused you

Anyway, the main difference here is that the light cone is projected in 3D, and I don't think that's the case in this flashlight demo, unless I missed something.

9

Technical forum / Re: How do I use 3DS Max 9 with WME?

« on: May 22, 2007, 10:41:02 AM »

Mnemonic, "physique" is a skinning technique in MAX, not an animation one

10

Technical forum / Re: Saving and loading takes too looooong

« on: May 02, 2007, 10:03:21 AM »

and thanks to you for fixing it 

11

Technical forum / Re: Saving and loading takes too looooong

« on: April 26, 2007, 11:37:00 AM »

So we wrote some code that increases the saving time from a handful of seconds to one minute after it's run:
(scroll down, the interesting part is at the end)

Code: [Select]

var rand;
var ar = new Array();
// initialize string randomly
for (var k = 0; k <= 20; k = k + 1)
{
            rand = Random(1,3);     
            switch(rand)
            {
                        case 1:
                                    ar[k] = "G/500";
                                    break;
                        case 2:
                                    ar[k] = "B/1000";
                                    break;
                        case 3:
                                    ar[k] = "R/100";
                                    break;             
            }
}
 
// Change i to change the save time
// i = 500  --> 1mn
// i = 1000  --> 3mn
for (var i = 1; i <= 500; i = i + 1)
{
            for (var j = 0; j < ar.Length; j = j + 1)
            {
                        var ch = new String(ar[j]);
                        var tab = ch.Split("/");
            }
}
Game.Msg("GO SAVE!!!");
Game.LOG("FINISH!!");
If we comment out the lines with new String and Split the saving time does not change.

We're going to work around these functions but I hope this can help you track these leaks. Oh and we did the same kinda thing with dynamic entities and it didn't change a thing.

Cheers,
Olivier

12

Technical forum / Re: Saving and loading takes too looooong

« on: April 26, 2007, 09:30:27 AM »

Yes, that would be very useful.

By the way, we found more problems since my previous, optimistic post. we'll be doing some tests today but I suspect that dynamic creation of entities is causing some problems.

13

Technical forum / Re: Saving and loading takes too looooong

« on: April 24, 2007, 05:42:17 PM »

Thanks to your suggestions we managed to bring the save time from 7 minutes down to 3 or 40 seconds (depending on whether we saved before or after playing a given minigame): we were creating a window on each line of speech and never released it, that was easy to solve once we knew where to look.

The 40 seconds saving time was a little more tricky: some scene entities are created dynamically in this minigame. Originally we used Scene.CreateEntity, when we switched those calles to Layer.AddEntity the saving time went down to 20 seconds

And then we managed to go down to 4 seconds after the minigame by replacings calls like this:

Code: [Select]

layer.AddEntity(ar[k] + "node" + nodeindex);to this

Code: [Select]

var name=ar[k] + "node" + nodeindex
layer.AddEntity(name);where ar is an array of Strings created by the String.Split() function.

I'm giving you all these details not to show off but to let you know about possible leaks in the scripting system.

Now we're very satisfied with our 150 times improvement in saving time.
Thanks again for your help.

Olivier

14

Technical forum / Re: Saving and loading takes too looooong

« on: April 24, 2007, 10:37:18 AM »

Oh wait, we are using Array. 

Does this still create leaks ?

15

Technical forum / Re: Saving and loading takes too looooong

« on: April 23, 2007, 03:43:58 PM »

Hi

We're having the same problem, except that saving "only" takes 7 minutes, but it could be because we have more powerful PCs nowadays

We dont' use the Array class or the WeatherGod script. It takes longer and longer to save as the player progresses in the game, this 7 mn figure I gave was after playing though 30 scenes or so. The first half of the saving bar goes very fast, and the last half takes most of those 7 minutes (divided into 3 steps)

There are two reasons I can think of :

Maybe we have too many game states in script that are never freed (all our states are grouped as member variables of several global variables, these members are initialized only when we need to so their number goes up as the player progresses)
Or maybe we shouldn't save every entity's state automatically (in Scene Edit we check "Remember nodes states" and "Including sprites" in all scenes) but save only the states that we need in script variables.

I'd like to have your opinion if we're on the right track before we start making major changes to our scripts.

Thanks,
 Olivier