"...There you will find everything you need to get settled into your new identity. The name of the town is Estobia Narseik. It is a 'rest stop' of sorts for long haul freighters through the 'Desolate Cluster'. This is as far as I can take you. Good luck."

WIP. The URPG project has first rights to this level. However, if it's not used for that project, I'll release it to the community to use. It's designed to be used as an RPG level. It should be completed by the end of this week...the end of next week at the absolute latest.




Suggestions and comments welcomed, but obviously since this is a WIP, don't expect to see very much results from "critique" on this level. I have a "Look and Feel" for this level and I'm going to stick to it. I don't want to drag the development of this level for longer then what is needed. Thank you in advance for your understanding.

That looks good. I wish you had made it for MotS, though.

Well considering everything you see are 3do's, all you'd have to do is copy and paste.

Purdy, not much more needs to be said.

This is a few shots from inside the Droid Shop which is pretty much done.

It's ALL 3dos? Coool

3do's are the best and only way to go. They practically beat any sector editing when it comes to stuff like what you are doing.

Nice work on the level, can't wait for more shots.

Except for lighting.

Looks very nice, the first shot is my favorite.

Looks neat! Would this mod allow players to have their own apartment? The big building in the second sceenie reminds me of an apartment complex.

Unless you're using the bin loader and can save MP data, though, what significance would having an apartment have?

It's always fun to be like "This one is my house" or "This is MY office." It's been a long time since I played JK rpg, though.

Actually, if released to the community, there will be a cog that's released with it. It's a "Trigger Zone" cog. Basically, it creates a 3-Dimensional Star Craft esque trigger zone. The cog allows you to alter sector and global variables (such as +Tint, Gravity, etc.) locally on your system. It also allows you to "trigger" up to three cogs. In it's most basic form, it esentially creates a 'virtual sector.'

To answer your question, you could have one of these "trigger zones" set up for each room and then when a player 'purchases' the room, they are assigned the corosponding trigger zone for their room. This can then be linked to a TCS (Thing Creation System) cog that would store your information and recall (generate) it each time you entered the room. This system performs two great things in one. First, it only creates the 3do's when you (or someone you've given permission to) is in the room, thus they are not always being rendered, thus you save on performance. Secondly, it provides a way of saving and retreiving the data between sessions (so long as the server stays up). SWG works almost exactly in this fassion (except their engine still uses sectors so it's more optimized).

My only misgiving about 3do maps: How would you do glass?

Animated 3do cog? Or you could replace the glass 3do with a "shattered" copy that had an animation key file.

i think he was reffering to the fact that a 3do behind a translucent 3do doesnt show up.

So any part of your 3do terrian behind a translucent window wouldnt show up, and you may get some nasty HOMage.

Though a-I'm sure there are ways around it

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

Archetecture, Pre-lit, Extra Light = 0.1 (on every surface), and every +Adjoin Surface value on every 3do flagged to 'Blocks Light' seems to work nicely. I first noticed this with the 'Blocks Light' flag. For some reason if the engine has to run extra data on a surface, it tends to more reliably render it behind a transparent surface. I've also noticed that 3do's render more reliably behind 3do transparent surfaces then an architectured transparent surface...

Unfortunately, I only completed one more building exterior today (The specialty Droid Shop). However, I did play around with my Day/Night idea a bit to see how it would look and, well, take a look for yourself...


In shot 1, the only thing that was altered was sector tint and the "Sun" dynamic light intensity was reduced (from 25 to 10).
In shot 2, the sector tint was changed once again, the "Sun" intensity was reduced to 5 and the skydome 3do was replaced by a translucent duplicate of itself revealing the stary skybox behind it.

To make this work, all you need is a cog that moves the dynamic light ("Sun") around the level on a reseting/looping timer. In the cog you'd have "Scheduled Events" such as changing sector tint, intensity, sun to moon/skydome 3do changes, ambient sound to reflect "time of day" and perhaps even to trigger the street lamps to come "on." It'd probably need to be written in such a way that the timer varible can be retrieved by other cogs so that all of this doesn't have to be done in one cog AND it would allow the editor to chedule RP events such as Raids, etc. depending on what time of the day it was. It would also allow for the creation of in-game clocks that would track the time of day and display it in game.

That looks awesome, too.

Happy SotD! Damn.

Wow, thank you! And here I was depressed because I didn't make much progress today...

Shibby!

Make a DM version too. I hate RPG games unless it involves killing, like that Baron's Hed RPG thing. Because that's sorta the point of an FPS... the S bit.

Baron's Hed RPG was great because it was, at the core, Team based DM with some interesting twists and a good money system for buying stuff. Although whoever coded the money system could have done better (isn't there some thing where you can end up with a free credit in some scenarios by depositing and withdrawing or something?).

If I want to stand around and socialize, I can go one building over to the student center.

Anyways... that level looks great.

That's an easy enough of a request.

Okay, if released, it'll come in 2 versions:
1.) Developer Version
2.) Death Match Version

That's awesome! I did a day/night system in my level Phoenix Suburban City, but it looks like you did it a lot better. I like the tints during the different times of day. I will definitely download this... remember, beauty is in the details.

[QUOTE=The Mega-ZZTer]Baron's Hed RPG was great [/QUOTE]

Thanks (from me and the rest of the ol' team i guess :P)

*sniff* seeing that time of day cog brings a tear to my eye.

I was one of the first to design and implement such a system.

Note: I do not have a day/night cog. I was mearly testing the effects.

oh. Well in THAT case... hahahaha- GET ONE

Very nice, easy effect and I'm surprised noone else has come up with it.

I attempted this but gave up half way in the details. I hope you can finish it :D, would be pretty dang sweet.

Sorry, this is the only form of an update that ya'll get today:



I pretty much finished all of the building exteriors. I'm going to make a "Polishing" pass on the exteriors tomorrow. I'm still shooting for Saturday on releasing this thing if I haven't heard anything from SM Sith Lord on rather or not he defenitely wants to use this level or not for his project.

He was mentioning no... even though when I read the URPG thread, your idea sounded really good. Which team(s) were you on before this?

wow looks great! how did you get the lighting to look so good on 3do's? whenever i have a large amount of 3do's in a level they always light strangely...

This was the update scheduled for yesterday (before I got sick). I'll try to make up for it tonight:




Shot 2 shows off the recreation center/starport. Both have two levels. The lower starport is where characters enter the level. The upper starport is where character leave the level once they have access.

Obviously I haven't created a "backdrop" for the level yet. It's still a low priority right now...

I think the taller building needs more light on it in the day shots. Otherwise, not bad I was just never a big fan of levels built out of 3do's.

Looking very nice Capt. I was thinking about your TriggerZone idea, and if you are planning on making more levels using this 3do-only method (and you've put so much thought into it, i don't see why you'd stop at one), somebody should write a plug-in for JED that inputs the 6 verts of the selected square sector into a placed cog with the click of a button!

Btw, from my understanding, the trigger zones work off a min dist from a point to be considered in the "zone". this means the zones, as of now, are spherical, correct?

Keep up the good work man. If you want to save some time adding in a high-res skybox, I have a sector with the UV's already correctly scaled I can send you. Can be used as a sector or as a 3do.

The lighting is temporary.



I really want to try my hand at Coruscant after this...

At any rate, you'd need 8 verts to define a box in a 3-dimensional space. The current state of the TriggerZone cog is setup so that you enter the min and max JED x, y, and z limits of the bounded box area (in other words, it only defines the min and max Planes for which defines the bounded box area (which is only 6 total values)). IE. If you wanted a box defined in the cog where their verts were (-1,1,-1)(-1,1,1)/(1,1,-1)(1,1,1)/(-1,-1,-1)(-1,-1,1)/(1,-1,-1)(1,-1,1), then all you'd have to enter into the cog is minX= -1, maxX= 1, minY= -1, maxY= 1, minZ= -1, maxZ= 1. While this is more intuitive and requires less calculations (thus, less taxing) it limits you to a Cubed area. If you could define all 8 verts, then you could have a bit more flexibility. I'll admit, however, that the TriggerZone cog still needs some more dedicated cogger loving. The code was posted in that same thread in your project forum on the HUB.



I believe this is where much of the confusion came from in the other thread. The triggerZone cog works off of the limits described above. All it does is constantly check to see if the character is in that area or not. While a spherical area would be a lot easier to calculate, it is far less percise then an actual box.

The RVTCS or RVTLS (Ranged Vector Thing LOD System) is simply checks to see if a character is within a certain range (a sphere check, of sorts). These are two entirely different beast and two entirely defferent cogs.



Is that the one that uses 1024x textures?

I haven't solidified my plans for the backdrop yet. I know that I'm going to be expanding on the 3D terrain to rid the "cut-off" look and that I'll be adding a skybox/skydome of some kind...but I'm still working out the forseable bugs in my head...

Okay, the Friday update. I still have quite a bit left to go, so it'll be the end of next week before it is completed. Here is what I have so far (and yes, the lighting is still temporary and I'm still playing with surface lighting):







You won't see another update until Monday evening. I hope you all have a great weekend!

Manbabies now plz kthx.

if you were to replace some default 3do's and textures with new ones, you will truly have something inspiring here.

Milkshape yourself some new stuff.

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

I'm using JK textures in place of Dflt textures because it A) gives something to showcase B) Every editor has those textures and C) presets the texture alignment so all an editor has to do is replace them with their version of the same sized texture.