Some bug fixes and improvements

Re: Some bug fixes and improvements

Postby LiamM32 » 21 Sep 2016, 08:28

:D Thank you! :D Thank you! :D Thank you, Xenodora! I'm very excited to see someone finally pick this project up.
xenodora {l Wrote}:I don't know if any still follows this project, but ...

Thank you! I first discovered this project just slightly before Amuzen left forever. There have been some times when I have attempted to pick-up on this project, but I have very little programming skills (Arduino is all that I can do without being confused on every step).
I would go through the Lua tutorials at Tutorials Point to try to learn to write in Lua. Then I would spend hours just staring at the code in this game trying to figure it out. There were 2 or 3 periods when I would spend hours of my time just trying to do this. But after all that, I never managed to make any real programming change. The most advanced thing that I managed to do was to add a spec for explosive weapons (grenades); the explosion radius.
However, I was much more successful at making little edits in Python. By reading the plugin API changes on the Blender wiki and looking over the Python tutorials at Tutorials Point, it took less than an hour for me to update the LoS Blender exporter for newer Blender versions. Do you want me to go get it, or did you already do that yourself?

While I never managed to revive this project myself, I have occassionally checked back on it, waiting for some god to come down and make miracles happen. And that god is YOU, Xenodora. Thank you! You are my hero!

Julius {l Wrote}:... most people didn't really like the "new" extreme cell-shaded look.

Did they not like it? Who said that? Where? I know that I didn't like it so much, but I don't recall seeing anyone else say that.
I've been playing around a little with 0.5.0 and see how in some ways it's better. ... Fully modelled face: 0.8.0's face is simply painted on, which results in it looking rather flat when you get the camera in close.

Definately. When I first discovered Lips of Suna it was 0.8.0 that I was playing, and I was thinking of ideas of how it could change in the future.
Then I found a video of 0.5.0. :?
I was shocked; it looked exactly like my vision of how Lips of Suna would appear in the future. And this is the old version?
They had real 3d eyes, the menu's were better. I even [url]started a topic[/url] to express what I thought, which has never gotten a single reply to this day. If they had it so good, then why would they want to go backwards?
Can anyone please enlighten me on this?

I unfortunately never got to play 0.5.0, as I never managed to successfully compile it. I think it required old packages for old Ubuntu versions.
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Re: Some bug fixes and improvements

Postby xenodora » 25 Sep 2016, 16:04

LiamM32 {l Wrote}::D Thank you! :D Thank you! :D Thank you, Xenodora! I'm very excited to see someone finally pick this project up.
...
While I never managed to revive this project myself, I have occassionally checked back on it, waiting for some god to come down and make miracles happen. And that god is YOU, Xenodora.

Goddess actually, but that's not important. And thank you for the praise, however, I'm hesitant to describe it as revived, as I know real life can suck up all my free time to point I'm not able to continue side projects, but for now I'm sticking with it.

LiamM32 {l Wrote}:However, I was much more successful at making little edits in Python. By reading the plugin API changes on the Blender wiki and looking over the Python tutorials at Tutorials Point, it took less than an hour for me to update the LoS Blender exporter for newer Blender versions. Do you want me to go get it, or did you already do that yourself?

I would like to see your patch for getting the exporter working under newer versions of Blender. I've only been using Blender 2.69 for doing model exports, so I haven't run into problems and thus had no need to fix things.

LiamM32 {l Wrote}:There have been some times when I have attempted to pick-up on this project, but I have very little programming skills (Arduino is all that I can do without being confused on every step).
I would go through the Lua tutorials at Tutorials Point to try to learn to write in Lua. Then I would spend hours just staring at the code in this game trying to figure it out. There were 2 or 3 periods when I would spend hours of my time just trying to do this. But after all that, I never managed to make any real programming change. The most advanced thing that I managed to do was to add a spec for explosive weapons (grenades); the explosion radius.

Amuzen has written a lot of good code, but it can be hard to fathom how all the modular pieces work together to produce certain results. There probably needs to be tutorials or primers to better prepare people on how to mod or develop the game.
You're welcome to write additional features or add assets for the game. If you need help figuring out where changes should go or where something happens, I can try and do some spelunking on the code and figure out it out.

LiamM32 {l Wrote}:I unfortunately never got to play 0.5.0, as I never managed to successfully compile it. I think it required old packages for old Ubuntu versions.

I tried to compile 0.5.0, but I ran into compatibility problems with the Bullet physics library, and my quick attempts to patch it didn't work, resulting in things just falling through the floor. In the end I ended up running the Windows version of 0.5.0 under Wine just. It had problems with crashing, but it worked enough to satisfy my curiosity.

LiamM32 {l Wrote}:If they had it so good, then why would they want to go backwards? Can anyone please enlighten me on this?

These changes were before my time on the project, so my thoughts are largely speculation.
  • I imagine the menus were changed so they could be implemented in a programatically built and displayed, without needing to make fiddly changes to graphical assets and code.
  • Although an iconographic inventory is nice, the symbols can blend together a bit, and I imagine it's a bunch of extra maintenance.
  • Removal of smoothing and irregularities of voxels would have been a by product of removing voxels. In a previous version Amuzen added a height map surface world, but that isn't easily married with voxels, so the solution he came up with was to use 'sticks' which are variable height voxels. In addition to being variable height, each corner of a stick can have a different height. This allows for the height map like surface, combined with the Minecraft like building and destruction of the terrain. The down side to this it removed irregularities from the vertical parts of the terrain, making cave walls looking rather flat.
  • I'm not sure as to the reason of removing 3D eyes and going for paint on details for the face. I speculate that it's either easier to editing or having an anime look.
  • As for the terrain textures, I suspect he was desiring something more 'painterly' or least more apt for an anime look, and much of what's there are place holders waiting for something better.
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Re: Some bug fixes and improvements

Postby LiamM32 » 26 Sep 2016, 09:36

xenodora {l Wrote}:Goddess actually, but that's not important. And thank you for the praise, however, I'm hesitant to describe it as revived, as I know real life can suck up all my free time to point I'm not able to continue side projects, but for now I'm sticking with it.

Yeah, :D I see what you mean. But you have already made quite an impact on this project. For example, the ground is no longer all black with Nvidia graphics.
I used the "diff" command and found that you have changed quite a lot in both the data/ and src/ directory.
xenodora {l Wrote}:I would like to see your patch for getting the exporter working under newer versions of Blender.

I just tried to locate it, but so far have not managed to find the right one. I just have too many lipsofsuna/ and blender-2.7x/ folders on my computer, over multiple partitions. You see, whenever I fresh-installed a new Ubuntu, I would use a new partition while shrinking (rather than deleting) my old root partition, but then I would have a separate partition for my /home/ folder, which I would use for every new Ubuntu installation. But then I kept my source projects in /usr/local/src/, so now I have to look over a whole lot of partitions.
I will try to get back to it later. Strangely, the bloodworm can be exported in Blender 2.7x using the old exporter, but most other objects can't.

xenodora {l Wrote}:Amuzen has written a lot of good code, but it can be hard to fathom how all the modular pieces work together to produce certain results.

Yeah, about that; I should mention that I don't really like the coding style, in my non-expert opinion, of the data/ folder. I think it's just excessively modular, which might be intended to make it easier, but it's way too far. There's just so many scripts that I have to look through to figure out anything.

In particular, I think that it relies too much on the spec system. This reduces the number of steps to make fairly meaningless additions to the game (like a lightning-fast killer lizardman), as you just need to put an entry into a .json file and it will load it in automatically. But it makes it hard to make more meaningful changes. I was thinking of a script to generate a new character, so that each aer (human) NPC of the same ActorSpec would be unique. This could also go beyond the appearance of aer characters; generating variations of all the monsters. I was also thinking that each creature could have a script to determine how likely it is to spawn in a particular location, as I believe that there are currently only two levels of rarity to choose from.
I would rather have to copy & paste & edit a script for each individual monster than to have just one script that would load many monsters which are not fundamentally different inside.

Of course, if this kind of system is just a regular part of coding in Lua, please tell me. I wouldn't know.

Now that you added a built-in Lua console, it should probably be easier for me to test any mods that I attempt, like being able to print the values of variables.

xenodora {l Wrote}:I'm not sure as to the reason of removing 3D eyes and going for paint on details for the face. I speculate that it's either easier to editing or having an anime look.

Yeah. I wonder if there's a way to make the eyes look good from every angle while preserving an animé look; Making them look "animé" without appearing to be painted on.
Simply reverting to 3D eyes might still be the best way to go though.

While it might be best to just ditch the cellshading, a big part of me feels like it would be worth improving the implementation of it. If it truly did look "animé", then I think I would like it. I don't think we really have that yet though.
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