New Track : "Green Valley"

[Kinsu]

I've just noticed I have an error while opening the file : "can't find lib '/home/wolfs/[...]/track.blend'" (Blender 2.58)
Could you make all paths relative please ? (I don't understand why it's not by default -_-')

[Wolfs]

I'm sorry, it seems that I only linked to the sheep instead of copying it . I've attached a new file (which is basically a Scotland track without everything but one sheep ), which will hopefully work.

[Auria]

Auria & Hiker, would it be possible to add some STK property to the blender object so they can randomly play a sound (eventually from a little "baa" sound collection), when players drive around ? This could then be added to the river & the waterfall, with water flowing sounds...

Actually this is already possible, check the Scotland track in SVN trunk

@DJ Helium : I like your (music) track, it fits well the (race) track (haha). If you have the time & the will, the zen garden needs a japanese-like music (you know, traditional but not too calm either as it's a race... a kind of difficult balance to find, a little challenging ).

Well I like a lot your garden music, so I would personally just reuse the same garden music

[STKRudy85]

http://opengameart.org/content/sheep-ri ... d-animated

[Auria]

These sheeps are nice but they appear quite high-poly, so unless their poly count can be reduced I don't think we can include them

[Arthur]

Why not, when we have LOD?

[Kinsu]

Thank you Wolfs, it's OK now. I'll see what I can do for this sheep (it's currently 574 triangles, I think I can at least reduce the tri number by 30%).

Actually this is already possible, check the Scotland track in SVN trunk

Great ! Wolfs, I really think this can be used to greatly improve the track !

Why not, when we have LOD?

Even if we have LOD, it's not adapted to use a hi-poly model in this context. It's just like using a Ferrari as a trolley...

[DJHelium]

@DJ Helium : I like your (music) track, it fits well the (race) track (haha). If you have the time & the will, the zen garden needs a japanese-like music (you know, traditional but not too calm either as it's a race... a kind of difficult balance to find, a little challenging ).

Well I like a lot your garden music, so I would personally just reuse the same garden music

Okay, I thought about it and I will try to take the secret garden music and change the athmosphere a bit to create the "zen" ambience

[Kinsu]

I've worked on the sheep :

- triangle count : 574 -> 354 (around 40% of triangles removed)
- quality loss : very low, a little more angular model but this will not be seen in game (except for very curious players like me who get very close of the model to see the details ).
- made 4 little animations : step forward, turn left, turn right, eat grass. Very basic, but that should be fine for decor elements.

I don't really know how it will be possible to chain these animations in STK... I see 2 possible problems to fix :
- What Wolfs said : the 4 anims should be played randomly, otherwise all the present sheeps will be synchronized,
- The ending pose of the sheep on the animations I made is the same than the beginning one, but the sheep is translated (or rotated). How will Irrlicht handle the animation chaining : will it reset the sheep transformations at each new animation (as the beginning transfo of the current anim are not the same than the ending transfo of the previous anim), as I fear ? and if yes, how to avoid this, so that the sheep can really move with the animation chaining ?

[Wolfs]

Auria & Hiker, would it be possible to add some STK property to the blender object so they can randomly play a sound (eventually from a little "baa" sound collection), when players drive around ? This could then be added to the river & the waterfall, with water flowing sounds...

Actually this is already possible, check the Scotland track in SVN trunk

How can I add such a sound in Blender? I couldn't find anything in the Scotland track blend-file

I've worked on the sheep :

- triangle count : 574 -> 354 (around 40% of triangles removed)
- quality loss : very low, a little more angular model but this will not be seen in game (except for very curious players like me who get very close of the model to see the details ).
- made 4 little animations : step forward, turn left, turn right, eat grass. Very basic, but that should be fine for decor elements.

I don't really know how it will be possible to chain these animations in STK... I see 2 possible problems to fix :
- What Wolfs said : the 4 anims should be played randomly, otherwise all the present sheeps will be synchronized,
- The ending pose of the sheep on the animations I made is the same than the beginning one, but the sheep is translated (or rotated). How will Irrlicht handle the animation chaining : will it reset the sheep transformations at each new animation (as the beginning transfo of the current anim are not the same than the ending transfo of the previous anim), as I fear ? and if yes, how to avoid this, so that the sheep can really move with the animation chaining ?

The sheep looks really promising, good work . Unfortunately I cannot help you solving the two problems, because I have absolutely no experience in animating objects in Blender .

[Auria]

I don't really know how it will be possible to chain these animations in STK... I see 2 possible problems to fix :
- What Wolfs said : the 4 anims should be played randomly, otherwise all the present sheeps will be synchronized,
- The ending pose of the sheep on the animations I made is the same than the beginning one, but the sheep is translated (or rotated). How will Irrlicht handle the animation chaining : will it reset the sheep transformations at each new animation (as the beginning transfo of the current anim are not the same than the ending transfo of the previous anim), as I fear ? and if yes, how to avoid this, so that the sheep can really move with the animation chaining ?

Nice work, Kinsu unfortunately at this time we have no support for chaining animations, at this time there is only support for playing a single animation in a loop. Maybe though you could file an improvement request ticket for this (but I don't know if it would be given high priority)

How can I add such a sound in Blender? I couldn't find anything in the Scotland track blend-file

See http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/Tra ... s_overview , there is a "sound emitter" type. Note that this type is only available in Blender 2.5, so if you've been looking at the 2.4 blend you won't see it

[Kinsu]

I've forgotten to link the sheep >'(

[Auria]

Nice animation just unfortunate that we don't have any support for chaining animations. Maybe you can manually chain them to make some kind of loop? it would be rather easy for us to make it so that each sheep starts at a random frame of the loop

[Kinsu]

Yes, this is simpler for now, as adding the chaining animation feature is prioritary for STK... and it could make it too complicated to make the decor.
I'll give it a try... but I don't know how to avoid the location reset at each new animation. Maybe trying blender automatic transitions... If someone knows something about it, please tell

[hiker]

Yes, this is simpler for now, as adding the chaining animation feature is prioritary for STK... and it could make it too complicated to make the decor.
I'll give it a try... but I don't know how to avoid the location reset at each new animation. Maybe trying blender automatic transitions... If someone knows something about it, please tell

Iirc it is possible to 'apply' an animation with irrlicht, but I can't remember if this was only for a certain format. It needed at least some bone names iirc. There are of course two different approaches: we could do it in the exporter (still creating normal b3d files, just repeating the animation information), or export this in the xml data, and handle all of this in stk. The first case might be inefficient (I am not really sure how much information is stored for animations, and since it is repeated, we might repeat a lot of unnecessary information). The other approach sounds like the better one: you could give names to frame ranges of the animation (walking: 10-100; eating: 101-130). And then apply this to an IPO (walking, walking, walking, eating, eating, walking) - which then gets loop. This would be easy enough to implement in stk.

But the timing would be difficult to achieve: in the above example three times walking must exactly take the sheep along the IPO to the place where it is supposed to eat. Then the IPO must keep the sheep at the same spot, before it walks again (back to the original place so that everything can be looped). First question we have to ask: how are you supposed to do this in blender? Copy&paste the animation data several time? Or is there a better mechanism? I think ideally we should work as close as possible to blender.

But timeline: I would hope that some of the new contributors we recently gathered would be interested to work on that - sounds like a nice project

Cheers,
Joerg

[Kinsu]

I think I can handle this using blender only. I'll try to remove the current action translation, so the sheep's global localization will not be modified. I will save the relative transformation for each action in a text file, and apply it manually in new actions that I'll parallelize with the current ones. So the global translation is independent from the animation. For now it should do it...

But if this problem is met again in the future, it might be worth trying to make it easier with the solutions you evoked.

It will also be necessary to tell the graphists who use the sheep to keep a "security distance" between 2 sheeps, so that they can't collide ... aww, headache, headache !

[Wolfs]

How can I add such a sound in Blender? I couldn't find anything in the Scotland track blend-file

See http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/Tra ... s_overview , there is a "sound emitter" type. Note that this type is only available in Blender 2.5, so if you've been looking at the 2.4 blend you won't see it

Since level of detail is also no longer working for me, I think I have to convert the track to Blender 2.5. I found a script called "convert_24_to_25.py" in the media repository, which exits with the error message
"Traceback (most recent call last):
File "convert_24_to_25.py", line 1, in <module>
import bpy
ImportError: No module named bpy"
when I start it within a terminal however. How can I use this script? And is it able to convert the LOD-Trees in my track?

[Auria]

Since level of detail is also no longer working for me, I think I have to convert the track to Blender 2.5. I found a script called "convert_24_to_25.py" in the media repository, which exits with the error message
"Traceback (most recent call last):
File "convert_24_to_25.py", line 1, in <module>
import bpy
ImportError: No module named bpy"
when I start it within a terminal however. How can I use this script? And is it able to convert the LOD-Trees in my track?

Indeed LOD was recently changed and will no more work with blender 2.4, sorry about that.

Regarding the convert_24_to_25.py script, you can't run in it a terminal, you need to actually open yoru blend file in blender 2.5, open a text editor inside blender and run the script from there

SuperTuxKart 0.7.3 will officially mark our switch to blender 2.5 so the switch will need to happen

[Wolfs]

I'm currently trying to convert the track to Blender 2.5 with the conversion script. The new Blender scripts seem to work mostly well (and I like them better than the old ones btw ), but there are several problems I cannot solve myself

First of all, suddenly it seems no longer to be possible to use textures with transparency. All transparent regions of the textures are now painted black, though I selected "alpha blend". The sky box seems not to work, too. The whole sky and the "floor" is black. In the menu I can also only enter the top texture and the north texture. However, I don't know whether this is intended . Although the track is playable after the export, the exporter prints an error message:

==BRUS STACK== [[0]]
NODE: 1 / 1
Exported in 0.23085498809814453
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/wolfs/.blender/2.59/scripts/addons/stk_track.py", line 1991, in execute
savescene_callback(self.filepath)
File "/home/wolfs/.blender/2.59/scripts/addons/stk_track.py", line 1936, in savescene_callback
exporter = TrackExport(sFilename)
File "/home/wolfs/.blender/2.59/scripts/addons/stk_track.py", line 1909, in __init__
lDrivelines[0], lStart, lEndCameras, lCameraCurves)
File "/home/wolfs/.blender/2.59/scripts/addons/stk_track.py", line 1699, in writeSceneFile
self.writeChecks(f, lChecks, mainDriveline)
File "/home/wolfs/.blender/2.59/scripts/addons/stk_track.py", line 1312, in writeChecks
(lap[0][0], lap[0][1],
TypeError: 'int' object is not subscriptable

location:<unknown location>:-1

location:<unknown location>:-1

[Auria]

Hi Wolfs, could you upload your 2.5 blender file so I can debug the problem?

[Wolfs]

Hi Wolfs, could you upload your 2.5 blender file so I can debug the problem?

Sorry, I forgot that

[Auria]

Thanks Wolfs, should be fixed as of r9732.

[Wolfs]

Thanks Wolfs, should be fixed as of r9732.

Yes, it works now, thanks

[Kinsu]

Here is a version of the sheep with a loopable action sequence, marked by the "loop-start" & "loop-end" markers. I bypassed the problem by using only animations which initial state is the same than the final one.

[Wolfs]

Here is a version of the sheep with a loopable action sequence, marked by the "loop-start" & "loop-end" markers. I bypassed the problem by using only animations which initial state is the same than the final one.

The sheep is great! I will add it as soon as I have converted the track entirely to Blender 2.5.