[Sobek]

 DeeperThought, on Jan 20 2010, 06:14 PM, said:

The most likely explanation is that the FIRELASER is still emitting dynamic light, despite the code that is intended to stop it. What I do is have the SHOOTER with flag 256 set the corresponding bit on the htflag of the FIRELASER projectile right after firing it. This is supposed to prevent it from being a polymer light: http://wiki.eduke32.com/wiki/Htflags

Try setting up a simple situation where you have one SHOOTER shooting FIRELASER and there is a floor near the path of the projectile so you can easily see if it is giving off light (just let the shooter fire at the player and watch as it comes towards you). If it is giving off light, then that is your problem. I can think of no other reason why FIRELASERs would lower fps that much.

I took your advice and setup a small room to test out the shooters, and you were right - the FIRELASER shooter is still emitting dynamic lights. I must have buggered something up when I originally tested out the code you implemented, because I was sure they didn't... I tried just using an EXTRA of 256, and they emitted light, then I tried the EXTRA of 280 that I would normally use (no polymer lighting + random trajectory + variable speed of fire), and it was the same - still emitting polymer lighting.

I guess that explains that. I take it that's just an issue with the code? I do recall you didn't get the chance to test it out yourself originally.

[Danukem]

 Sobek, on Jan 20 2010, 04:41 PM, said:

I guess that explains that. I take it that's just an issue with the code? I do recall you didn't get the chance to test it out yourself originally.

This is what my code does:

ezshootvar peractor1 hitag
setactor[RETURN].ang position
ifvarand monstflags 256
{
	getactor[RETURN].htflags temp
	orvar temp 256
	setactor[RETURN].htflags temp
}

RETURN is the projectile being fired, and setting the 256 bit on htflags on that projectile is supposed to stop the light. I don't know what else I could do. For all I know, it's a bug in the source code which is preventing that flag from turning off the light.

[Stabs]

ahh ok cool

you mite also want to look at what happens with stationary cams, after 2 or 3 cam changes the shooter that would be shooting 5 chains for example would just stop shooting after that, i know i can use activation via cams, but my chain + shooter method can be very useful if you need something specific and may limit something down the line

the cutscnes without a cam that does not change seem to keep destroying the chain line and the shooter dosn't stop

oh and btw is that double activator mod feasible?

[Danukem]

 DanM, on Jan 21 2010, 01:08 AM, said:

ahh ok cool

you mite also want to look at what happens with stationary cams, after 2 or 3 cam changes the shooter that would be shooting 5 chains for example would just stop shooting after that, i know i can use activation via cams, but my chain + shooter method can be very useful if you need something specific and may limit something down the line

the cutscnes without a cam that does not change seem to keep destroying the chain line and the shooter dosn't stop

oh and btw is that double activator mod feasible?

I can probably add the double activator thing.

I just uploaded new cons (the only difference is the activation fix for moving cutscene cams).

I don't know what is going on with the shooter stopping, but I don't see how it could be related to the cam changes. Maybe you accidentally set the shooter to have a limited number of shots? At any rate, depending on those to fire at chains seems inherently risky and I would try to avoid it if I were you.

I need to get this 2.07 update done and official soon, I don't think I'll be changing much more.

[Micky C]

I've noticed a rare problem with early activation of cameras. I have a swinging door with an activatorlocked with the same lotag as the SE 90's hitag, and when I'm ontop of the door, it opens (even thought it's locked, but that's not the problem) and when it opens it triggers the camera instead of when it's meant to be triggered later on.

Did that make any sense? Anyway it's not really an issue since there are a few ways I can work around it, but I just thought I'd point it out.

[Sobek]

 DeeperThought, on Jan 21 2010, 11:44 AM, said:

This is what my code does:

ezshootvar peractor1 hitag
setactor[RETURN].ang position
ifvarand monstflags 256
{
	getactor[RETURN].htflags temp
	orvar temp 256
	setactor[RETURN].htflags temp
}

RETURN is the projectile being fired, and setting the 256 bit on htflags on that projectile is supposed to stop the light. I don't know what else I could do. For all I know, it's a bug in the source code which is preventing that flag from turning off the light.

That's ok, it's not too big a deal I suppose. I'm still working on it but before I left the office earlier I basically made a texture similar in look to the FIRELASER texture, and defined it as an animation in place of the COOLEXPLOSION1 textures. I did a real quick test and it looks like that's a perfect compromise... I can control what texture I want it to use, and it doesn't cast any polymer lights that I can tell so when I replace all of the shooters with that one, it should work wonders.

Thanks for looking into that though, I might try lining up a bunch of shooters that I know cast polymer lights and see if that 256 EXTRA works on ANY of them

[Merlijn]

If this has been brought up before, my apolegies.

Anyway, I'm constructing a sequence for the Imperium episode with bot-allies and newbeasts. And for some reason all of the newbeasts only move to attack the bots and they never attack me. I should mention that I gave the newbeasts the 'melee attack only' tag. Is this how all monsters behave when there are botallies in the game? If so, is there a way to fix this behavior? To be honest, I never really noticed this before..

[Danukem]

 Merlijn, on Jan 21 2010, 09:52 AM, said:

If this has been brought up before, my apolegies.

Anyway, I'm constructing a sequence for the Imperium episode with bot-allies and newbeasts. And for some reason all of the newbeasts only move to attack the bots and they never attack me. I should mention that I gave the newbeasts the 'melee attack only' tag. Is this how all monsters behave when there are botallies in the game? If so, is there a way to fix this behavior? To be honest, I never really noticed this before..

I have changed the code so it should be fixed as of the next update.

Here's an explanation of what was happening (which admittedly may not interest anyone). By default, monsters don't have a designated target sprite; they automatically treat the nearest player as the target. To make them shoot at a bot or other player ally, I must make them find a suitable target sprite. When they have a target, it overrides their normal behavior and they attack it instead of the player. Here's where the bug comes in. If the monster does not have a target sprite, and it knows that there are nonplayer targets around, it will look for one. Once it finds one, it stays on that target until there is some reason not to. This means that if there are nonplayer targets around, the monsters will quickly find them and stay on them, overriding their normal behavior to attack them instead of the player.

One solution would have been to treat the player as another possible target sprite, so the monsters would be as likely to find the player when looking for targets as any other enemy. The problem is that would change and in some ways simplify the monster AI, because the player would be treated in the way that nonplayer targets are normally treated (all of the commands normally directed towards the player, such as faceplayerslow, ifcanshoottarget, etc. would become irrelevant). So instead of doing that, I simply made it so that if the player is visible, shootable and nearby, then there is a large probability that the monsters will not search for a target (and if they already have one, there is a large probability that they will drop it to go after the player after a few seconds).

[Danukem]

 DanM, on Jan 18 2010, 08:36 PM, said:

just for example, as this could be a mod for normal dp activators

if xvel is set on an Activator, its yvel cannot be activated untill the xvel has been first

when going through areas twice i could make it activate something different the 2nd time around

There's something I still don't get. How would this add something that you couldn't do already? Also, I don't know what you mean by "normal dp activator"; there are no dp activators, only dp touchplates. I am not going to mess with the hardcoded activators, because it might be buggy or dangerous and I don't want to deal with the consequences.

[Stabs]

yeh the dp touchplates, so if i make the player go back through an area they have been through i can get them to activate new stuff on the second trip around

if xvel is set on the dp touchplate you can enter the sector and its yvel will not activate anything untill the xvel has been activated first

1st dp touchplate

x = 0
y = 101
z = 0

2nd dp touchplate

x = 101
y = 102
z = 0

1st one makes the 2nd one active, 2nd one activates new effects in areas you have already been through

this would make it so on the 2nd trip around the level it could activate new cutscnes and spawns anywhere i wanted, at anytime, i could put stuff on timers for a 2nd trip but there is no gurantee the player will be there to see it or it may seem out of place if its a cutscene.

[Danukem]

Ok I understand now. What you want is the ability to make a touchplate dormant, so that entering its sector does not activate it unless the it has been made active. Yes, I can do that. And then I will release 2.07

[Sobek]

Nice to see everything coming together.

FYI, I did as I said and fixed up the COOLEXPLOSION1 animation with one of my own, and that's worked perfectly. As an interesting side note on that, it turned out that a COOLEXPLOSION1 shooter shots will only travel for as long as the animation plays a single loop. It just so happened that this specific distance was pretty much exactly what I needed anyway, so everything worked out great.

With the shooters modified, the framerate is happily sitting up around 150-170 without issue even on my average little work PC... It opens up a whole lot of options for adding more detail to the scene

[Danukem]

I just released Duke Plus version 2.07. It's a big update, with stuff for both players and mappers to have fun with. Go to the site if you want to see the changelog or download it.

[Stabs]

thank you so much for all your work deeperthought

the stuff you have incorporated into dukeplus over the past few weeks is great and its totally changed my mod in a good way

[Danukem]

Based on what I've seen and your previous work, I'm sure that DNE will be awesome. But I'm worried that my computer won't be able to handle it. Polymer is a huge resource hog and it is required for DNE, right? (Of course one could play it in Polymost, but all of your lighting is done with Polymer so it would be kind of pointless). I'm afraid that not many people are going to be able to play DNE, because of the system requirements. I would like to get a beta of DNE so I can see what we are up against.

[Stabs]

the big bad question, can i run dne?

now i did start development of dne on polymer 1430, with hopes it would run better in the future, it has been running better of recent, and i have done things like change as many unseen walls to blank tiles, and gotten a slight improvement, went through the resources and downsized some stupidly large textures.

now polymer is an amazing lighting engine with the way it can wrap light around a model in particular, has a good intensity and a great vibrancy of colour, so in future version perhaps lighting quality slider should be developed, i think this could boost the fps a lot on older systems, another option to disable fire flickering would probably also net some fps gains.

but still DNE will have higher than normal system requirements than the average duke mod, although like i mentioned before, time will tell with how many quality settings polymer will get.

as for a beta ill see what i can put together, but i still think its very much alpha, the new duke bike and these new effects are going to change how i can do the levels quite a bit, but ill see what i can do

[Danukem]

DanM, on Jan 22 2010, 09:16 AM, said:

as for a beta ill see what i can put together, but i still think its very much alpha, the new duke bike and these new effects are going to change how i can do the levels quite a bit, but ill see what i can do

There's no hurry. Don't take time away from development to put together a package, because I won't have much time to look at it anyway. I thought maybe you had something ready to go, and I could just run it and check the fps...but since that's not the case, just keep up the good work.

[Stabs]

a month or two i reckon, all these new effects have really sucked me back into it and i have been powering through stuff, but on the bright side, check your email

[chicken]

I really love the new version.
The explosion sprites are really awesome.
But one little thing bothered me.
The edges of the new highres bloodpools look kinda blocky like they've been upscaled in Photoshop.

I played around with those tiles a little and blurred the edges and added some splatters.

[Danukem]

chicken, on Jan 22 2010, 12:21 PM, said:

I really love the new version.
The explosion sprites are really awesome.
But one little thing bothered me.
The edges of the new highres bloodpools look kinda blocky like they've been upscaled in Photoshop.

I played around with those tiles a little and blurred the edges and added some splatters.

Thank you! I was going to ask for help with those, but I never got around to it. Let's look at the progression:

Original 8-bit sprite (source unknown)


My upsized/filtered shit version


Your new and improved version


Screenshot with your version

[supergoofy]

Download mirror for the new dpblood1.png and dpblood2.png files by chicken:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/6qg8k5

Unpack the zip to DukePlus folder and overwrite old files

[Stabs]

sorry to do this, but i thought it was more on my part, but after cleaning up and refining cut scenes more, the quotes related to them when using multiple cameras seem to disappear a bit early as you may have seen in that vid, these quotes are activated via the camera changes themselves.

the one i did earlier was just a single camera with a shooter and chain driving those quotes and they seem to stay up fine.

perhaps some kind of tweak to the quoters so they stay up and wont go down for anything but another quoter

sorry as i know you just put dp2.07 up.

[Danukem]

DanM, on Jan 22 2010, 11:30 PM, said:

sorry to do this, but i thought it was more on my part, but after cleaning up and refining cut scenes more, the quotes related to them when using multiple cameras seem to disappear a bit early as you may have seen in that vid, these quotes are activated via the camera changes themselves.

the one i did earlier was just a single camera with a shooter and chain driving those quotes and they seem to stay up fine.

perhaps some kind of tweak to the quoters so they stay up and wont go down for anything but another quoter

sorry as i know you just put dp2.07 up.

I've looked at the code, and I don't understand why that is happening. Once the quoter is activated (and we know that it is activating, because the quote does appear for a moment), the only way that it can be stopped is if (i) it has displayed for more tics than the quoter had EXTRA, or (ii) another quoter has been activated.

Please send me a little map that demonstrates the problem. It could be a one room map with texture 0 for all I care, but I need to have the bug happening on my computer so I can find out what is going on.

[Stabs]

i think i may have solved it

i usually have all quoters at a default tic of 500, now 3 or 4 could play and then the 1st ones cancel kicks in and clears whatever is on the screen killing a quote that had just appeared on screen, my solution is to just make all tics really high, 20000, and the last only 500, so there is no real need to fix that

does anyone know a mapster script that would change all the red Q tiles extra to 20,000?

[Danukem]

DanM, on Jan 23 2010, 01:41 AM, said:

does anyone know a mapster script that would change all the red Q tiles extra to 20,000?

Make a text file with this script:

gamevar i 0 0

include names.h
defstate quoters
for i allsprites ifactor QUOTER ifge .lotag 1 set .extra 20000
ends

Save it as dukeplus.m32

Now make sure that the names.h that comes with Duke Plus is in your mapster folder.

Run mapster and load the map. Open the console and type "include dukeplus". Then type "do state quoters". That will give them all 20000 extra.

We can add more states to dukeplus.m32 as needed. Maybe some day I'll make one big state that runs in a loop and allows mappers to do a lot of cool stuff, but for now we'll just keep it ad hoc.

[Lukaso]

Hi great work with latest Duke Plus but i have one question.

Is it possible to do set option into duke plus menu for selecting between old model and new model of alien laser pistol?
I dont like new model of alien laser pistol, oldest was more realistic and nicely.


Thanks

[LeoD]

Lukaso, on Jan 23 2010, 09:30 PM, said:

Is it possible to do set option into duke plus menu for selecting between old model and new model of alien laser pistol?
I dont like new model of alien laser pistol, oldest was more realistic and nicely.

I also don't like the new model because it fits more to a fifties-style SF environment rather than the mid-nineties of Duke.

But configuring this kind of stuff by menues would open a can of worms because everyone has his own opinion about what fits and what not. You will be better off configuring that yourself in your own installation. Putting the right .jpg/.png in place and maybe some .def editing should do the trick.

AT least this is what I did with the XXX-[lite]-pack and the DNF3D Community Pack
[http://forums.duke4....ic=1087&st=210]
and it worked out quite well. (Plus I deleted DukePlus' annoying jump voices)

By the way - the new BFG is GREAT.

[Stabs]

that worked very well, this script thing has potential, perhaps / MAYBE even randomly generated levels one day

made one myself with that bit of info

gamevar i 0 0

include names.h
defstate hitboxs
for i allsprites ifactor HITBOX ifge .lotag 0 set .lotag 1
ends

makes all the 508 lotag 1 so my hitboxes will never be seen

now a cool script would be the dukebots waypoint with incremental lotags

[Lukaso]

LeoD, on Jan 23 2010, 09:53 PM, said:

I also don't like the new model because it fits more to a fifties-style SF environment rather than the mid-nineties of Duke.

But configuring this kind of stuff by menues would open a can of worms because everyone has his own opinion about what fits and what not. You will be better off configuring that yourself in your own installation. Putting the right .jpg/.png in place and maybe some .def editing should do the trick.

AT least this is what I did with the XXX-[lite]-pack and the DNF3D Community Pack
[http://forums.duke4....ic=1087&st=210]
and it worked out quite well. (Plus I deleted DukePlus' annoying jump voices)

By the way - the new BFG is GREAT.

I tried it but i think that need to be done more then rename right jpgs or pngs, im not good in programming but if i changed needed pictures i got old model of pistol (in original resolution) or new pistol with skin of alien lasergun.

I dont know what next is need to change, i cannt change md2 and md3 files.

But I think that set option between that 2 guns into duke plus menu cannt be so hard for autor, he did it for example with mp5 and it is very good. Sometimes i like to play with mp5, sometimes with hand cannon. Same with shotgun.

But if DeeperThought cannt programing this option I will be like if someone help me with manual changing of that weapon, like I said Im not good programmer.
Thank you.

(sorry for my bad english)

[Stabs]

Can i get a little help writing this, iam not sure what i do but i think ive got a way to do it

every quoter i have has a matching picture, they share the same lotag, now if the picture quoter is pal 47 i want it to make its matching quote a pal 12, how would i write this up?

all my quote pics are just on hitag 10899 with pal variations.

gamevar i 0 0

include names.h
defstate quoters
for i allsprites ifactor QUOTER ifge .hitag 10899 & pal 47 & lotag is the same
make the sprite with a matching lotag pal 12
ends