WOOT!!!!!

Hey everybody! I have figured out how to position/aim Cameras and Lights... the EASY WAY. Yes, it's another one of those, "gee, why didn't we think of this years ago" things.

It's so simple.... take HardCMP... open up your Room... and position/angle a HP on the vector you want your Camera/Light... then open with UTFEdit and copy the values! No sitting with a calculator required- let the software do the math for you

DOH!!! *slaps his own head after suffering many vector related headaches*

I knew that there had to be an easier way of doing things. Good thinking Argh.

Hehe... I'm just glad I've finally gotten over my fear of THNs. BTW, check your email Aldebaran, I've sent you some code chunks that illustrate just how little code it takes to make a fully-functional ShipDealer Room- you can remove a LOT of junk

Ooh... and you can ALSO use HardCMP to do the rotation settings for NPCs and other objects that you want to reference, effectively blocking out your entire scene before coding anything! Woot (does the Coder Shuffle).

Edited by - Argh on 5/4/2005 6:04:39 PM

Yeah, I got those thanks, you can really streamline those THN's right down it seems. Wonder how much can be stripped out of a bar THN... hmmmm. And with your ideas, it is going to make things so much easier in future.

With the Bars, it's probably going to be harder, all the way around. There, you have all of those dynamic Camera tricks to consider- one set of tricks for each Trent/NPC position

But, hey... come to think of it, didn't somebody come up with a method to get rid of the CutScene stuff in Bars? Hmm yeah... I've got it... Stone-D made a mod that removed those... which would be a good way to reconstruct the Bar code for custom Bars with perfect safety... and then try to construct some dynamic Camera stuff. Can't say I'm super-eager to try that out, myself- it looks too much like work

Man, Cameras are tricky widgets. They really, really, REALLY are a pain to rotate correctly, and HardCMP's vector results are basically the inverse of what you want- apparantly, they used a right-handed system for one... and a left-handed system for the other. Once I got that... I just set up a 4-light lightset at 45 degree angles opposite one another... and I can just vary their color and brightness depending on the scene. So bye-bye, DA lightsets (thank goodness).

My final results for the evening- 3 fully-functional Room THNs featuring the Bretonian Battleship ShipDealer and 2 of the Liberty ShipDealer Decks. It's all pretty cool, but I'm leaning more and more towards just building new things... easier to manage. The problem with DA's stuff is that they purpose-built many of the fancier ones, and only a couple of views really work well- this has to do with the way that their artist was working with light- the Bretonian stuff is very hard to work with, because so few of the views are well-lit enough to put a ship against with some lighting without the whole thing looking off- the Bretonians must have magical infra-red vision or something, because their spaces don't feel practical. The Liberty stuff, being well-lit throughout, is really pretty easy to work with, and I imagine that the Kusari material will also be pretty simple. Rheinland has the same problems as the Bretonian stuff, though.

I think I can build some that are built for a wider range of camera positions... and much, much larger. Think about it... wouldn't it be cool if we finally had "hangars" large enough for really big ships? I think Aldebaran might have the right idea here... now I've just gotta decide if I really, really REALLY feel like making CMPs that complex- texturing them is going to be painful, if I want to match FL's standards

I'll keep thinking about this, and see if I have any practical alternatives... right now, though, I'm thinking that I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and make some really complicated CMPs, if I want something a little easier to work with. At least then I'll have total control over issues like where the ceiling is, or whether there is one- it's so much easier if you can just extend the walls to silly heights, and never reveal it to people by keeping the camera angled appropriately...

@Aldebaran28 - as always, I love the work you guys doing. No trumpets, no fanfairs, no bragging - just solid, good old fashioned talent, modding, and implementing new ideas/methods that others then attempt to nick and display as their own.

Always a fan.

@Argh - that room looked great - nice one

@ Argh: Don't give upon those different angles of the vanilla Freelancer rooms. Though complete custom rooms are cool, the vanilla freelancer rooms are incredible detailed beyond what most players will ever see, so different angles will show things that players will have never seen but DA had designed and built. That said, custom docks will be cool.

On the topic of big ship rooms, an idea that had occured to me was to build a corridor THN simalar to the HoloNet corridor I had designed (see below) but with a window built in the set and a distant space backdrop and then putting the ship display point in between. This could be used with things like mooring stations for capital stations where only Capital ships could dock at yet you would see your ship hovering outside of the station in the background. On the reverse side of the dock would then be the capital ships for sale at that dock (once again, an all in one scene). It is easy enough to remove the ship cushion from a scene as I did this from the Shipdealers on my ISD scenes (however the only problem is the ships shadow is not removed, but if viewed from a window, the shadow wouldn't be noticeable).


This is the corridor type scene I was envisoning with the camera angle changed and with a window to open space added


An example of a ship dealer without a 'tractor cushion' showing it can be done. The ship on the rack above is added to the scene direct from the shipdealer available ships without the cushion but note the odd shadow that appears just beneath it.

@Chips: Thanks for the kind words. We try our best here and I am proud to be a part of the team that will be bringing 1.66 to the community.

Check this out... this enough variety, Chips?

@Aldebaran: Now that I have 3 good light/camera setups (one's not on display here- I made it for the Bretonian stuff, which I'll save as a fun surprise)... I think I may just try for a few custom Rooms. I'm sure I can handle the detail levels... it's the time commitment. But I need to make at least one for Warriors of the Sky anyhow- the default stuff in there looks... um... out've place... and has been a major goal since I started on this mod. Thanks again for helping me unravel this, and feel free to mail me if you want to see all of the scripts that did these

Aye, that variety means that you won't just immediately recognise the same place again and again etc. Those that don't pay particular attention will actually not know they are the same as other places... its been very well done. They all look awesome!

If you wanted some extra change - just change the lighting colour. A slightly greenish cast over the blue bretonian or bluey white civilian look would yield a more kusari, and different view of the base scenes as well...

As always, I love seeing others work - especially in newer areas of modding




Edited by - Chips on 5/8/2005 3:16:43 AM

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On the topic of big ship rooms, an idea that had occured to me was to build a corridor THN simalar to the HoloNet corridor I had designed (see below) but with a window built in the set and a distant space backdrop and then putting the ship display point in between. This could be used with things like mooring stations for capital stations where only Capital ships could dock at yet you would see your ship hovering outside of the station in the background.

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This could be very useful, as when confronted with placing a VSD in a station, FL decided to do this:

On the subject of scene lighting, you can group entities into "Light groups" to get more realistic lighting. A light will only illuminate entities if it has a matching "lt_group" property. This comes in useful when using several lights of different colours, since FL's approach to light blending seems to be "illuminate objects with any random colour other than the desired one"...

Don't know if you've already discovered this - it's also the cause of many "why the hell won't my light work!?!"-type errors if the objects have different light groups.

Do you have a bog standard set of lighting positions (say 3 or 4 lights) that you just move into position by any chance. I didn't realise that about lighing groups and objects, I shall have to go back over one of my THN's with that info. Like I said, my lighting knowledge for the ambi side of the THN's is pretty poor.

@Aldebaran:

Yes, I have developed a standard set of 10 lights - 5 for the ship/station (more in a second) and 5 for the NPCs. The code for this light set can be downloaded here.

Before you download them, though, here are some additional things I've found out:

Light groups (lt_grp) appear to be very special, hardcoded designations for lights in a set. They are not interchangable . After doing some exhaustive testing (following a "oops, my ship is black but nothing else is wrong" problem), I have determined that FL uses the groups 0, 3, 9 for very specific purposes.

I do not (yet) know what 9 is for, but 3 lights Ship CMPs, but will not light NPCs. Group 0 will light up the Room's CMP and any NPCs. So you have to create doubled sets to make a global light set act consistantly.

I have a feeling that 9 will light up additional fixtures, such as Crates, but I haven't tested this assumption yet.

Lastly, the parameters for Lights are rather... funky. If you wish to change the real color displayed, you need to alter the diffuse channel, not the color channel. I think that the color channel specifies absolute brightness (i.e., for specular highlights), but if you want funky colored lights or dark lighting, you need to work with the diffuse channel. For example:

color={
255,
255,
255
},
diffuse={
0.5,
0.5,
1
},

The code above will produce a very strongly blue hue to the lighting in the Room. Dropping the last number of the diffuse channel (it's RGB, thank goodness, not something really weird) will result in a more gray-blue... dropping it to 0.5 will produce a medium gray light. I think you can figure out the rest

Oh yeah... and Outcast... that Star Destroyer's in a funky spot because it has a HpMount in a strange place (probably somebody's attempt to deal with docking issues). That's all that's going on there

Edited by - Argh on 5/8/2005 10:49:25 PM