Help porting addon track to the new engine

[MTres19]

Hello.

I have a bit of a dilemma. There's an old addon track I'd like to play in SuperTuxKart ≥ 0.9—Subterranean Cave (http://stkaddons.net/tracks/medieval-cave). The problems are twofold: one, there's unfortunately no license specified for the track model itself, only the textures, though it's marked as DFSG-compliant on stkaddons.net, and two, I'm not familiar with making SuperTuxKart tracks (and still learning Blender, for that matter).

Anyway, regardless of the licensing, I managed to get the track working in the git version of STK from several days ago. This was slightly inconvenient, because there weren't any source files, so I had to first convert the B3D files to OBJ with Assimp, then import them in Blender, which may have caused the loss of the lighting information or something (see below). Anyway, the track is now playable (I renamed it Lost Chasm, which seemed more fitting), and I got the items in the right places from scene.xml. The problems now are mostly cosmetic; perhaps someone would know how to help. Here are the problems I seem to have:

-- Textures seem more saturated in STK ≥ 0.9 than in 0.8.1, but this might be something with the lighting. The original track used lightmaps for most of the objects, but there's no longer mention of them in the Track Maker's Guide, and the older version of the guide I found on archive.org doesn't mention using already-baked images. I might be able to redo the lighting, but I don't know where the lights were originally anyway, so that might be difficult. Possibly related to the textures: I had to make the textures for the light beams more transparent for them to be tolerable. Perhaps this is to be expected?

-- The original track used billboards for halos around the lamps, but when I tried to recreate those they didn't export correctly—the width is set to 2 and height is set to 0 in scene.xml, even though I set dimensions for the plane to 6×6 in Blender. However, for some reason in Blender that's x=6 y=6 z=0 for dimensions, even though the plane is perpendicular to the ground. Shouldn't that mean that it would be x=6 y=0 z=6...? (EDIT: the plane could have been created horizontally. That could explain this. I'll have to check.) Of course, I could just use fog to create a halo, but I don't want too dense of fog just to have a halo around the lights. However, if I edit scene.xml manually to properly set the width and height, the halo (I only did one so far) shows up fine.

Any help is much appreciated, but I understand if you don't have time, since I'm still new to Blender.

Here's a link to the track source and exported version in 7z format, since attaching it didn't seem to work. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_iE50uqUIIbclVQeHM5LVZMT00
Thanks,
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[Auria]

Hi,

thanks for your interest and your work

1) Indeed the new engine uses an HDR renderer with tone mapping that provides more contrast in the rendering, so textures that were not neutral enough to begin with may need to be adapter (textures should be mostly neutral, not too light or too dark, the engine will handle the lighting)

2) Light maps are no longer supported, as we have moved on to newer tech where lights and shadows are rendered in real-time. So lightmaps/shadowmaps should be removed, and instead just add lights to the map and let the engine do its work. There is no automatic conversion here, you will just need to play around with lights and find something that looks good

3) Regarding billboards, we usually no longer use billboards for lights and just let the engine render halos using fog (even very slight fog usually does the job, so maybe try experimenting with that?). As to why billboards have an improper height, indeed they appear to have been created horizontal, then rotated. They should be vertical in their "rest" position in order to work correctly

hope this helps

[MTres19]

Thanks for your help. I was able to make the track look quite acceptable—in fact, it should be about done now. What should be done about the license (or rather, lack thereof) though? It doesn't seem like a good idea to submit it to the add-on repository until it's known...

Thanks.

[Auria]

I have just sent an email to the author of the track about licensing, let's see what happens

[rubberduck]

i created the track some time ago and can be released under cc-by 3.0.

[MTres19]

Okay, thanks.