The Temple: an arena inspired by samuncle's next-gen track

[konstin]

Wow, It looks really great. Are you going to upload it to stkaddons?

[Anon]

To be perfectly honest (and a bit arrogant, sorry), I'm hoping that it will be good enough to go into the game itself. If it's not though, then I'll probably upload it to stkaddons as soon as 0.8.2 comes out, since it uses the new engine.

Come to think of it though, it might not look that bad ported backwards to use 0.8.1.

[vlj]

The engine does not produce grass per se, you have to do the grass mesh yourself and the engine will only move it according to wind.
To ensure it's properly instancied you should use a library object, with some empty mesh for LOD in the distance.

[Auria]

The engine does not produce grass per se, you have to do the grass mesh yourself and the engine will only move it according to wind.
To ensure it's properly instancied you should use a library object, with some empty mesh for LOD in the distance.

You don't need to create an "empty mesh", you just set it to be LOD with a distance and past that distance nothing will be shown

[Anon]

I'm done overhauling the village (for now) and I've added roots to all the trees now.

You can test the new version by downloading it here.

[Anon]

@samuncle: You've mentioned including this track a few times on IRC, and I think one of the other devs also said something about it once. With the beta release coming up, should I try and get a final version of this track done and uploaded?

[Anon]

Alright, so I think I'm pretty much done this track. It's not perfect, but the two main bugs with it seem like they're engine-related and not exactly trivial to fix. I'd also like to just be able to say I'm done with it, and put it down for the time being.

Youtube video showing the arena in its final state:

youtu.be/u_21B62DuFg

Known issues:
-lava doesn't always trigger rescue
-fog (and thus volumetric lighting) doesn't always work
-rain might be silent (not sure)

Suggested future improvements:
-adding ReedBoat object to float around during the flood (implemented once, but before animated library objects were enabled in the engine)
-adding sound to waterfall (tried doing this, but it seems like (1) the distance cutoff is hard and (2) the audio isn't positional)
-remake with more robust flood system capable of handling more interesting and varied terrain???

Downloads coming soon (source archive is still uploading).

[Anon]

Track and library files

Source files

[Auria]

Hi Anon, thanks for the nice work! This arena should be added to the main game. Just one little issue, you did not include licensing information. We will need to know who made what and under what licenses they are released ( http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/Licensing ). This is annoying but is also mandatory before we include anything in the main game

Also, I see you used in your skybox a placeholder that samuncle had used temporarily until the final sky was done, this image (the one with a tarzan-like man) came from google images and we don't have the right to use this image

[Anon]

Would it be okay if I just gave a catch-all for licensing? Something like "where legally possible, I hereby release any and all files to which I have linked from this thread under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International". Unless I've forgotten about something, all the files I've used in this track either came from the STK repositories or are my own work.

The placeholder skybox can just be deleted. It's only in the source archive (right?), and only there because I forgot to clean up my textures directory before uploading.

[Auria]

A global license is okay, as long as you are truly the author of every single file. If some files are based on images that come from the internet, for instance, or are derived from other STK tracks, it should be mentionned

[Anon]

Okay, here I go:

The content in this quote block defines the license and ownership for files that can be extracted from the archive "templesource1_53.zip"

Files located under the following directories are from the Supertuxkart source and asset repositories. In the case that I am their creator and copyright holder, they are licensed as specified at this location.

• mediarepo
• temple 14_8_21/textures/raw

Files located under the following directories are my own work and are licensed under both Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

• temple 14_8_21/textures/draft

Exceptions to the section immediately above are listed below, along with their source.

• skybox1_1.xcf
-Derived from content found in the Supertuxkart repositories. Licensed under both Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

• skybox1_2.xcf
-Derived from content found in the Supertuxkart repositories. Licensed under both Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

• skybox31_1.xcf
-Derived from content found in the Supertuxkart repositories. Original copyright holder unknown.

• skybox31_2.xcf
-Derived from content found in the Supertuxkart repositories. Original copyright holder unknown.

• skybox31_1.xcf
-Derived from content found in the Supertuxkart repositories. Licensed under both Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

Files located under the following directory that do not fall into any of the above categories are my own work and are licensed under both Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

• temple 14_8_21

The content in this quote block defines the license and ownership for files that can be extracted from the archive "temple1_53.zip"

Files located under the following directories are my own work and are licensed under both Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

• stklib_lowAnimGrass_a
• temple

Exceptions to the section immediately above are listed below, along with their source.

• temple/screenshot.png
-Derived from content found in the Supertuxkart repositories. Licensed under both Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

• temple/skybox_bottom.png
-Derived from content found in the Supertuxkart repositories. Licensed under both Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

• temple/skybox_side.png
-Derived from content found in the Supertuxkart repositories. Licensed under both Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

• waterfall.ogg
-By LX.70. In the public domain (Creative Commons 0).

Whew, that was a lot of typing.

[Auria]

Hi,

thanks a lot! Just one more thing though, I have been looking through the files are there are a few issues there, for instance there are some 4K textures in there! (a few 2048 too) 1024x1024 should be amply enough and 4K is way way way overkill for STK. Another example, you also used a 1.5 MB texture for the bottom of the skybox - which is basically never visible. I was thinking maybe you could provide the track in a more reasonable format? Also the sources are 600 MB large, that's huge - this seems to include drafts and unused materials. It would be preferable if you could please provide a cleaned up version with only the final files in reasonable formats. We certainly want to integrate your track, though it would be preferable if you made our life easier by providing a package that's ready to integrate and a bit more optimised

thanks

[samuncle]

Also all generic textures should have a path (in blender) like "../texture/[category of the texture]/stk_texturename.png".

Because if we update them they should be automatically updated in all tracks without any work (it's saving time for the future) and it's VERY important to respect that.

Also a small detail, you seem to use 4k textures, not only it's overkill for stk but it's also consuming a lot of resources. Textures need more computing power compared to a few polygons. You wasn't sure when you made the fighter jet but here you have an example .

Otherwise the arena is very interesting, well done. Once it's cleaned up we will include it in stk

[Anon]

Okay, I'll change the paths for the blend file, downsample textures, etc. I really shouldn't spend too much time on this before the weekend comes though, so would it be okay if you downsampled any massive textures and included this track in the beta if that arrives before I'm done? I'd like for this arena to receive more testing.

[GunChleoc]

This looks great

[Anon]

The new source archive is now ready. It's only 10 MB big this time, and integration should be as simple as merging its contents with the media repo, overwriting one file (2048 res to 1024).

One thing that still isn't ideal is that it uses three library objects linked from files outside the media repo's library folder. One of them (lowGrassAnim or something) should be easy to fix by moving the file and changing the path in Blender (possible since it's a custom object I made for this track), but the other two would conflict with files that are already in the repo (they're placeholders that I made when the actual models were in stk-assets but not the media repo).

Download

[Auria]

Hi, thanks a lot, that's MUCH better

Now I'm experiencing an issue with library object paths, as you feared :/ Unfortunately blender doesn't seem very helpful with providing tools to fix library missing references. Do you have any idea how we could fix that?

So far, I am able to export your track, and I have committed it However there were a lot of parts here and there in your various files to assemble, and they were not always on the right path, so I probably got some of them wrong. Could you perhaps try the version from latest SVN and tell me if it's right, or what is missing? Thanks

[Anon]

Now I'm experiencing an issue with library object paths, as you feared :/ Unfortunately blender doesn't seem very helpful with providing tools to fix library missing references. Do you have any idea how we could fix that?

I actually had to look this up myself when I repackaged the source. If you go to the Outliner window, you can change "All Scenes" to "Blender File" to list out all library links. Then you can edit any path by double-clicking it.

This apparently doesn't work when the library is already missing though, so you might have to extract "tracks/20_temple/library" into the temple track source directory briefly.

So far, I am able to export your track, and I have committed it However there were a lot of parts here and there in your various files to assemble, and they were not always on the right path, so I probably got some of them wrong. Could you perhaps try the version from latest SVN and tell me if it's right, or what is missing? Thanks

Great! And from what I can tell, there's nothing wrong with or missing from either the files or the track. However, the files "skybox5.jpg" and "skybox6.png" aren't used by the track anymore and can be removed. I'm also not sure what "lianavines.b3d" is or whether or not it's even needed/used. "waterfall.ogg" isn't used yet either, but it might be good to keep around for adding a sound effect later.

[Anon]

And oh yeah, volumetric lighting/fog and rescuing on contact with the lava still don't work for me, but I have no idea what's going on there.

[Auria]

Thanks, glad to know there seems to be nothing missing

[vlj]

Normally volumetric lighting should be fixed, however I'll retest it

[ArDanWol]

Hi Anon! This is a really nice arena! It's rather demanding on my computer, but it looks awesome!

[Anon]

Hi ardenwol! Thanks, that's really nice to hear (read?)!