[Danukem]

Sobek, on May 19 2010, 06:33 PM, said:

I had a quick question about the 3d skyboxes that are supposed to be introduced into Polymer one day... Will these skyboxes allow you to put models in them as permanent map objects? Think of the Source engine, how you can put low-poly simple objects in the 3d skybox and project it over the map area, allowing you to introduce buildings or objects that are permanent fixtures of the world.

I've had an idea for a level for a very long time now that pretty much requires the ability to do this, and since recently I've started making a lot of progress, it's come up again. I just wanted to know if I should scrap the idea, or if it would be possible... I'd essentially need to put a massively scaled model in the skybox, and use blocking sprites to build a level based around it. That seem feasible? Or am I just dreaming.

I think you may have gotten the wrong idea about how the trick works (either that or I'm going to tell you about something different which may work for you).

First of all, you don't need Polymer, and I'm not even sure if this would work with Polymer at the moment (although I'm sure it will work eventually). What you do is build a big room that contains the model, and a starfield above the model, and whatever else you need (maybe some little ships flying around the big model or docking with it?) to make the scene appear the way you want. Then you put a camera in the room looking up at the model (or you could have it looking across the room at the model with the starfield and whatnot projected on a wall behind it, but position things so that if someone saw the view from the camera it would appear to be looking up). Next you pick a special tile for the ceiling in the outdoor areas. In game, that tile will be replaced with a projection of what the camera in the big model room is seeing. It requires CON code to make it work, but it's quite possible to do right now.

[Sobek]

Definitely something different. That's really interesting, sounds like it would work perfectly. I've been reading up a lot on CON code recently (I was trying to create my own AI for my borg drones - it failed miserably but I learned a lot in the process), are there any examples available of this trick? I'd love to give it a whirl. Also, can it be used to 'scale' the projected camera view? And by that I mean take something relatively 'normal' sized that the camera is looking at and project it, say, double sized around you? That would be a good way of doing things without having to try and upscale models really big and - potentially - risk them hitting the clipping distance and starting to vanish.

*edit* I'm probably getting ahead of things here, but it's just nice to know

[The Commander]

Have a look at this Sobek.

http://forums.duke4....?showtopic=1560

[Sobek]

The Commander, on May 21 2010, 10:13 PM, said:

Have a look at this Sobek.

http://forums.duke4....?showtopic=1560

As we discussed, I could never quite get that to work right and, as far as I can tell, I believe there were some issues with the CON code used by that trick (I think it was linked to by another thread that mentioned the code had some issues that caused visual glitches).

Either way, what DT has suggested sounds just about perfect.

[Radar]

I've been trying to get Duke Zone 2 working with the newest snapshot of EDuke32. When it runs all I get is "Errors found in whatever.con. Would you like to use the internal defaults"? Whichever one I click, the game won't run. I tested it out with JFDuke though and it worked perfectly, so it's got to be an EDuke32 problem. I really want to play it with EDuke32. Anyone got any ideas?

[Danukem]

Radar1013, on May 24 2010, 12:32 PM, said:

I've been trying to get Duke Zone 2 working with the newest snapshot of EDuke32. When it runs all I get is "Errors found in whatever.con. Would you like to use the internal defaults"? Whichever one I click, the game won't run. I tested it out with JFDuke though and it worked perfectly, so it's got to be an EDuke32 problem. I really want to play it with EDuke32. Anyone got any ideas?

This thread is supposed to be about Polymer. There is a subforum for problem reports that you should use: http://forums.duke4....hp?showforum=27

And ALWAYS attach your eduke32.log when reporting a problem.

There could be any number of things going on, but my guess is that your CONs have errors that JFDuke is not sensitive to.

[Stabs]

something pretty cool i found the other day playing around in mapster, a kind of ror, how i suspect it will work for polymer by making the two sectors that are supposed to be ror like shadow warrior, and moving them on top of each other and then paralaxing the floors/ceilings on each ones opening and viewed it from noclip caused it to draw as ror, you could enter the lower sector and it would still draw as ror but the upper one wouldn't but would draw fine in noclip, saving and reloading the map caused corruption with the red sectors in the middle getting tangled perhaps thats a mapster bug that could be fixed, but still pretty cool stuff.

[TerminX]

Did anyone try the latest build and notice any improved load times or anything?

[The Commander]

I have noticed that trying to browse the tiles list in Mapster (the V key) and selecting a new texture etc is somewhat slow and unresponsive, although I don't know if this is something that you have done or helixhorned.

[Stabs]

Well i think loading by cache is slower, but i dont normally use that and loading times seem as quick as usual without

noticed that i can't complete shapes in mapster / loading more than 2 maps results in a CTD in the latest version

[TerminX]

Pushed a new version of the http://eduke32.com front page a bit ago.

[KillerBudgie]

Hey. That looks quite nice. Well done TX!

[Night Wolf]

I'm having this problem with switching to software mode in eduke... the screen goes black and the game freezes ..

any thought on this?

[Night Wolf]

I can however get software mode to work when not in full screen mode

[LeoD]

TX, on May 26 2010, 10:55 AM, said:

Pushed a new version of the http://eduke32.com front page a bit ago.

"Duke community leader TX"

What did you smoke?

[TerminX]

The page has said that for years, probably because for years I've been working on EDuke32 and doing stuff like moderating the 3DR forums. Calling the moderator of the biggest Duke forums that are still around seems pretty accurate to me, so what's your problem?

[Danukem]

Yes, TX is definitely a community leader. He started EDuke32 and has been its chief developer. Without EDuke32, none of the current mods would be possible, and there probably wouldn't be much of a community left.

[Yatta]

LeoD, on May 26 2010, 04:38 AM, said:

"Duke community leader TX"

What did you smoke?

When you've done as much or more than TX has in the Duke Nukem fan field, you may rightfully contest his notion.

Until then, whatever he has smoked is not relevant to his status here as community leader.

[Hendricks266]

Besides, it's not a monarchy. There are plenty of other community leaders. Yatta, Parkar, me.

[High Treason]

Ah, I saw that page a while ago, it's good. Community Leader? Well, there's only one way from the top, and as I'm slowly climbing the ladder I shall try to throw you a rope as you fall past me

[TerminX]

Anyway, everyone should "like" EDuke32 on facebook, and remember to tag "eduke32" in your Duke videos on YouTube so I can find the things and add them to the playlist on the site without having to search for a bunch of different crap.

[The Commander]

Also people, don't forget about EDuke32 on moddb.com

http://www.moddb.com/engines/eduke32

You can add pictures, videos etc to it.

EDIT: I will make some changes to the summary to reflect the changes on eduke32.com
EDIT 2: Done

[RPD Guy]

before you get discussing about mods (not that bad), you should see
why the "hud" is not affected by lights!
: /

[The Commander]

Dk2, on May 27 2010, 01:50 PM, said:

before you get discussing about mods (not that bad), you should see
why the "hud" is not affected by lights!
: /

wtf, no one is talking about mods, we are talking about the community and we know why the hud is not effected by lighting.

[Stabs]

the hud is not affected because it makes baby jesus cry

New page looks good, ill have to update my vids with eduke as keywords, probably use eduke32 aswell

[Helixhorned]

DanM, on May 26 2010, 09:55 AM, said:

noticed that i can't complete shapes in mapster / loading more than 2 maps results in a CTD in the latest version

Oops, that's pretty bad. Please use an older version meanwhile.

[Helixhorned]

TX, on May 26 2010, 06:38 AM, said:

Did anyone try the latest build and notice any improved load times or anything?

Slightly improved. I did two experiments, one was loading levels E1-4, L1-2 with clean cache each time. Speedup was about 1.5%. In the other one, I loaded one map with the cache cleaned and changed to 7 different maps in sequence to simulate loading different maps in-game. Here, loading times were about 5% shorter.

Optimizing loading times is quite hard: the bulk of the time goes to the transferring of the rendered texture to the GPU. For comparison, the 0024_freezer.jpg texture needs 30 ms for that on my PC, and there are 4 pals, each of which take this long. The coolest thing would be if only the base pal of each texture needed to be transferred, and would be copied and colorized on the GPU for the different pals (using a textual definition of regions that needed their hue changed). Plagman, would such a thing be feasible?

[TerminX]

Hmm... do you have an SSD or something? There should be more of an improvement than that, since we're foregoing the whole "lseek then read then copy memory buffer then decompress" chain of events for every texture load in favor of just decompressing straight from memory. There isn't supposed to be any speedup based on a clean cache though... this is all for speeding up future load times after the cache has been generated.

On my systems, I'm seeing a cached PHRP E1L1 load in 3-4 seconds instead of the typical 7-8 I was getting before the changes. The hit from trying to utilize a cached but not loaded texture (something picked up in a previous game run but not by the texcache system at level load time) should also be reduced for the reasons in the second sentence of this post. I also got rid of the cache flush and renderer reset in between maps which should be highly beneficial if anyone ever utilizes that saved map state stuff I implemented and uses it to make a multi-part level.

[Helixhorned]

Helixhorned, on May 27 2010, 10:58 PM, said:

Oops, that's pretty bad. Please use an older version meanwhile.

Drawing walls should be ok now. But DanM, that sounded as if you were pretty close to the wall limit. Strange things may happen there so it's better to keep some distance to it.
edit: TX: no, it's a good old rotating one

[Stabs]

nah it was more related to drawing lines in an exsisting map, i was playing around with the ROR example map and was using the ror maps SEs so i didnt need to make my own and it just wouldnt complete shapes.