DeleD Community Edition

[Starnick]

Heh, yeah that's an old bug for the nude figure...thought it was fixed though in the latest release

Three things I ran into:

1) I tried a few of the models that came with DeleD + one of mine (all textured), everything looked reasonably ok, but when I loaded them up into MV the model was completely white - no texturing. However, exporting the model you used, worked pretty well

2) Physics - was this supposed to generate CV's automatically? I didn't define any manually, but it did create a physics file - is that intended? (there wasn't much in it of course )

3) Not sure if you encountered this, but the default scale...is teeny! Some of the models I exported were really small in the modelviewer/world editor...oddly enough the model you used seem to be decently sized in the model viewer, but in the world editor...it was really no bigger than my avatar's foot/leg heh.

I guess #3 depends on how well you setup your scaling with the generic units in DeleD, but for the successfully exported model...that was a really weird occurance

Keep up the good work Paul!

[Starnick]

Also a question: How do we mark primitives to generate CVs?

I saw your response to Merrie's thread in the Tut board:

[Paul-Jan]

Granada: I'm assuming you are refering to the church there, not to the avatar...

Starnick: Thanks for trying it out! I'll look into updating my multiverse toolset to fix the naked avatar thing...

As to your findings,
1) The texturing didn't work? Hmmm, odd, haven't got a clue, seems to work fine for every model I use... although I mostly test using the World Editor and the actual client (only way to test CV's as far as I'm aware), perhaps it's a MV thing... Will look into it!

2) No, it doesn't generate CV's automatically, it's all manual. My current thoughts on this is that automatic generation isn't as good an idea as I thought it was (especially with the multiverse developers working on this stuff themselves), in stead I'll focus on making manual generation as easy as possible.

What you have to do is create a material called 'collision' (I personally use a transparent red) and create either cubes or spheres with it. Then scale/move/rotate the cubes to fit. I'll be adding two more ways of marking collision volumes: naming them mvcv_whatever (for compatability with the default approach of the conversion tool), and marking them through the Custom Properties (the tag ... in the object inspector)... The latter approach is a bit more elaborate, but very structured and non-intrusive.

Once I get the first version out the door, I'll write a nice little introduction/tutorial on how to create collision volumes.

3) Thanks for mentioning the scale issues, I'm still working on this. The castlesiege model seemed to be getting the appropriate scale when I placed it using the world editor and used a x10 scale. I'll be needing to figure out the default Deled Unit -> Multiverse conversion scale, and take it into account in the scale defaults.

[granada]

[Starnick]

[Paul-Jan]

*woa*, lots of feedback there, thanks a bunch.

Quick response:
- The physics file always being exported will be fixed.
- I'll re-run all those models through the exporter and see if I can match your experiences.
- No, lights don't get exported (yet). Haven't given them much thought yet. Exporting a lightmapped scene should work nicely, but lights themselves... I don't know yet.
- I'll also check if running multiple models in a row through the exporter causes some sort of leaking or whatever. Gotta find some explanation for that Access Violation thingy you run into.

Now you go and get yourself some rest!

[Starnick]

[Starnick]

Just for kicks I exported a 128 by 128 by 128 cube, model viewer shows the height of an object in meters - it was .128. So it would appear that 1 generic deled unit = 1 mm in MV.

Which, makes sense...since MV's base unit is all in millimeters

Thats one thing I never "liked" about generic units, as everyone (well almost) says that they're whatever you need them to be. So I guess that's true...but still doesn't make me want to actually model in feet or meters. Still, if someone set up their gridlines to match MV in meters, and the exporter does a conversion for a base scale of 1...you're going to have something a lot bigger.

[Starnick]

Update:

I got a fully textured/CVed...cube into MV successfully. That other model I was using -still- doesnt appear textured however. But it works on my end, also worked on a few other models (that were using system.bmp) too.

Also introduced DeleD explicitly to some of my other teammembers, so far they like what they see too

[Paul-Jan]

Hmmz, could not reach the multiverse servers most of the afternoon, which also meant my client wouldn't start, which meant I couldn't test my collision volumes properly. I am sure there is some way around that, but I couldn't could it look up on the internet, because I couldn't reach the multiverse servers. Oh, wait, in the latest version of the MV tool I can also take a look at the CV's. But I couldn't download it, because I couldn't reach the Multiverse servers. Hmphhh...

But now they are back, and I've uploaded a new version. Haven't accomplished anything world-shattering, but
- .physics doesn't get exported if there aren't any collision volumes
- collision volumes can now be marked in the mvcv_sphere_/mvcv_capsule_ etc. way. Anything unknown is treated as an OBB/ABB (those are one and the same thing inside the physics file really).
- collision volumes can also be marked through Custom Properties, by setting type to collision and shape to abb/obb/sphere/capsule. All this stuff will be properly documented with screenies and all of course.
- added basic support for capsules, I used the DeleD cylinder primitive for those because it was the closest match. Still need to implement rotation, so unless your capsule is standing right-up you are out of luck.

Time for some screenies, I'm working on a very simple test scene that I added to the .zip as well (note how the scene is very much a work in progress, and will never be more than a technical example anyway because I can't model a cube if my life depended on it). The screenshots show the same scene in DeleD, the client, and in the client showing collision volumes. I've made the pillar collision slightly bigger so they show up properly, the boxes collision volumes match exactly and have a lot of z-fighting going on when rendering (obviously). I exported at 10x.

[Paul-Jan]

About the scale thing: I think I'll set it up so that at a scale of 1 one DeleD unit matches one CM in Multiverse. If you fire up a new DeleD, the viewports show an area of about 1024x1024 units each, which would then correspond to size of about 10x10m, which would be a nice match imho. I'll make sure to annotate the scale conversion next to the edit box. (It would be even better if it could immediately tell you the total size of your model in Multiverse units, but at that stage of the export the exporter hasn't read in the model yet, so it doesn't know...

Still haven't figured out the missing textures thing, but I'll see how things go when I download a more up-to-date toolset. My best could be that there is something wrong with the materials I export (perhaps the phong shading model and default colors that I omit are semi-required). The error inside your ati dll is downright scary.

The attachment point thing is something I'll definitely look into after I get the collision volume and texturing issues nailed down. Should be perfectly doable.

Thanks for your continued feedback. Also, good work introducing DeleD to your team members.

[Starnick]

Yeah, their login server appears to be down...Im getting a big fat internal error @ login.multiverse.net for the client. Here's a quick fix:

There's a folder called config in your client's root directory, inside it there should be a file called:

world_settings_sample.xml

Rename it to world_settings.xml, and edit it to point to wherever you're running your server + the world name. Then just run the client with --development.

You'll bypass their login stuff completely. It's the old way of doing things, didn't know it still worked till today

[Starnick]

Well whatever bug is infecting your MV servers, are affecting ours . Some weird stuff is happening, including another mesh where a texture wasn't appearing:

http://img220.imageshack.us/my.php?image=weirdnessnm3.jpg

Obviously the bottom part should have a metallic texture...

Kinda odd that most of the textures are correct, save that one...so I put this one up for download:

http://www.mediafire.com/?2m4gvyytyun

It's a sloppy model that I put together in a few minutes (so I dont mind it being downloaded - btw all the textures come from the Deled packs ), but it might prove a good test subject nonetheless.

[Starnick]

Two interesting things just happened:

1) I exported another model, that I previously set up some lights and lightmapped...the lightmaps exported, and even showed up in the world editor...

2) I exported again to clear this up, and suddenly two of the three textures I used no longer were visible. However, when I replaced some of those textures with the one that was visible...guess what! They were textured again, albeit with the new texture applied...reverting back did nothing to make the right texture visible.

Edit: Yet another odd thing! I threw in a light, lightmapped it...and bam all the textures were showing again, albeit...lightmapped.

[Starnick]

Hmm, hey Paul-Jan have you given any thought regarding LOD?

I have yet done anything with level of detail, but you can either have manually created or automatic created LOD's - its all via the command line arguments for the conversion tool. But since this plug in effectively bypasses the official conversion tool, we don't have that option for DeleD.

It also has quite a few other command line arguments (there's a "moonshine" 3rd-party graphical UI version on their wiki too). It might be useful as a long-term goal to integrate these options into the deled -> mv plug in.

Also, if Deled is going to eventually include animation, this would be needed as well since those are other command line arguments.

Just a thought =)