New release (version 0.4.2)

[Skorpio]

What are the correct names for the gold bag and chest? Here's a render of the new gold bag:

GoldBag.jpg (39.24 KiB) Viewed 15022 times

[svenskmand]

Thats pretty nice

[Skorpio]

The problems with my test level were obviously caused by the quarters. I just removed all quarters and now the creatures walk around and fight.

I still need the correct names for the gold bag and chest meshes before I can upload the patch.

[andrewbuck]

They should be GoldBag.mesh and GoldChest.mesh. The issue with the quarters is interesting, I will have to look into that in the code base. Removing it for now is the correct thing to do but it means there is probably some bug in the AI logic.

P.S. The gold bag looks way better than the crappy one I sent you, thanks for doing that. My art skills are pretty lacking and I didn't want to mix your nice looking models with my junky placeholder meshes.

-Buck

[Skorpio]

I'm uploading the patch now. The chest texture could be improved a little bit. I called the patch: OpenDungeons-0.4.2-Patch1.zip, I hope that's ok.

[andrewbuck]

That's exactly what I was thinking for a name. I'll check out the patch when I get back home tonight.

-Buck

[Skorpio]

I had to upload a new patch, because I forgot to apply the scale of the gold bag. I added some bags and chests as monsters to my test level to test them.

[svenskmand]

When the new release is out then remember to add that to the news section in the wiki

[andrewbuck]

I downloaded your "patch2" and tried it out against the linux build on my machine (by just taking your "media" folder from the zips). It seems to work just fine. One minor thing that should be modified, the bed is currently a bit longer than 2 tiles. We should either make it bigger than 1x2 in the level file so the game engine knows this, or we should make the mesh smaller so it fits in the space the game engine allocates for it. As is, the beds tend to overlap a little bit.

Also, the chest monsters and bed monsters might be a bit confusing to players not familiar with the forums here, so we may want to rethink that (although they really don't hurt anything).

Neither of these issues are significant enough to really merit another patch, it is just something we want to work out before the next release.

P.S. At some point we should lock this thread and make another "New Release" thread to begin discussing the next version we plan to release (what to include in it, the progress, and then bugs, etc like we did with this one). I think we should leave this open for a while yet as we are still in the "bugs" phase of this release. Actually maybe we want to always have two threads open, the just released one for bugs and the next to be released for planning. We should also think of a naming scheme for these threads. It can't really be release 0.4.3 because we don't know what version it will be when it is done, maybe something like Alpha 1, Alpha 2, etc.

-Buck

[andrewbuck]

I finally made some progress gettng my OpenDungeons build environment to allow me to do some basic debugging. Because of this I pushed a commit to sourceforge which fixes the windows crash when you click on empty space (i.e. when you click on space that is not covered by tiles). I am looking into the crash from the digging right now, I think I know what to do to fix it but I'm not 100% sure yet.

-Buck

[andrewbuck]

I got the digging bug fixed as as well as another bug which caused the camera to drift slowly due to an uninitialised variable. I will attach the new EXE file to this message. Skorpio, if you could package it up the way you did with the other patch (and add any other files you may have updated since then) I would appreciate it.

On a related issue, Windows sucks. The bugs were an issue related to my code, so that was my fault; but the fact that the Windows development environment (specifically the debugger) STILL does not work after approximately 12 hours of tinkering with it is most definitely Microsoft's fault. I boggles my mind to think that people develop code on Windows full time and don't end up killing themselves after a few weeks.

NOTE: I added the .exe file in a .zip file because the forum would not let me upload an exe, however it is not really packaged the way you did the patches so it will need to be unzipped, packaged in the appropriate folder, and then re-zipped.

-Buck

[Skorpio]

Cool finally I can dig. The new patch is already available. I added a new dark dirt texture for the quarters and changed the uv coordinates of the gold tiles. I also tried to include a construct worker in the test level, but that caused the same problems as in my Test2 level, before I removed the rooms. It had the same stats as the kobold. Maybe the game has problems with more creatures that can dig.

Oh, and now I can't click on the void at all. I thought that way you could add new tiles to a map. At least it doesn't crash anymore. Good job!

Edit: If you place 25 or 50 tiles besides full tiles, the game chooses the wrong full tiles, so that some faces are missing.

[andrewbuck]

If you added a new texture for the quarters it would be nice if you used the old texture for the treasury so they can be told apart.

Oh, and now I can't click on the void at all. I thought that way you could add new tiles to a map.

That is the intended design, at least for now. I don't want to do drag/drop to add new tiles because then people will make boring square levels. The way to do it is to push "b" to turn on brush mode and then use the period and comma keys to set a brush size of 6 or 7 and then "paint" out a new portion of the level.

If you place 25 or 50 tiles besides full tiles, the game chooses the wrong full tiles, so that some faces are missing.

I think I will probably leave this alone. The brush mechanism is really the way to add tiles and that works correctly. Most of the terminal commands are meant for debugging/development and will be implemented in a more user friendly way in the future. I may fix it at some point, but it is not a high priority.

-Buck

[andrewbuck]

I think I got the bug fixed which caused your creatures to just "stand still" when there was a quarters on your Test2.level. It was a rather interesting bug: there was a single break statement missing in the creature AI switch statement in the walkToTile case. This caused a fairly convoluted infinite loop to occur. The thing that makes it interesting is that it only occurred when all of the following conditions were met at once:

* There was a creature who decided to do a findHome action (i.e. walk to a quarters and put down a bed).
* On the way there this creature sees an enemy creature, and
* The creature walking to the quarters passes within 5 tiles of the enemy creature, and
* The creatures were too far apart to actually hit eachother (if they were close enough to do damage they would eventually kill eachother and break the loop).

If any one of these four things was not true the infinite loop would not occur and everything worked fine. It was only when you introduced a level that had a quarters AND had enemies close enough to the creatures trying to walk there to make this happen.

This really illustrates why a properly functioning debugger is so useful (thankfully I was able to reproduce this on my linux box where I can use the debugger). It only took ~30 minutes or so to find this with the debugger, but it would have take hours to do it without one.

-Buck

[svenskmand]

If the visual studio thing is so crappy, then have you considered trying Eclipse? I have used it for Java, its debugger works very well. For C++ I it should more or less work the same.

[andrewbuck]

That's a possibility I had not considered and I should look into it. I went with visual studio because I had some instructions on how to get that set up but now that the libraries are in palace it might not be too difficult to change to eclipse. The next few days I plan to work more on adding to the codebase so I will be back in linux for a while but next time I deal with windows I'll probably check that out.

-Buck

[svenskmand]

So Skorpio, when will you upload all you models to the SVN? I would really love to mess around with them

[Skorpio]

I've just uploaded the kobold blend to test svn. I still have to organize the files and create folders for each model. Also some files need to be cleaned up first. That's a rather tedious work, but at least the content will be better organized then. Maybe I'll upload the files tomorrow.

I'm not sure about the development/master folders. ATM everything is still under development, so should the files be in the development or master folders?

Edit: I'm uploading a new patch with a slightly modified bed and level file. I've merged it with the other patches, so that people have to download only one zip.

[svenskmand]

I've just uploaded the kobold blend to test svn. I still have to organize the files and create folders for each model. Also some files need to be cleaned up first. That's a rather tedious work, but at least the content will be better organized then. Maybe I'll upload the files tomorrow.

Ok

I'm not sure about the development/master folders. ATM everything is still under development, so should the files be in the development or master folders?

Yeah, I had second thoughts about the development/master folders for the content. Because each artist would usually work on one model all by himself, and if he is working on it one day, and then takes some days break, it would not matter if we commits the change to the SVN as he is the only one working on the model, so it might be better to not have the master and development folders. But then I again it might be usefull, I have not model before (obivousely as I am just learning blender ), and certainly not it participation with others, so if someone has experience with this then please advice us

[xahodo]

Perhaps the gold-bag and gold-chest could use tessellation (nicer looking coins)?

OpenGL has had support for tessellation for a while already, so most proper 3D modelling programs should have support for it.

[svenskmand]

What is the difference between tesselations, bump-mapping and normal-maps?

xahodo: Please introduce yourself in this thread, as it looks like your are coming by here once in a while

[Skorpio]

I'm uploading the models now. I put everything in the master folder, because the kobold was already in it. Hopefully I didn't forget anything. BTW some models have their textures packed in the blend file, others have separate textures so you have to change the path.

Edit: For some reason it didn't upload everything. I'll check it tomorrow. Need to go offline now cause I have a hangover and my head could explode every second.