Eternal X 1.2

[Pfhorrest]

Fixed all those typos now, except "Uhr", which I'm pretty sure is mimicking the timestamp format used on the "EMERGENCY SYSTEMS BROADCAST" at the start of Marathon 1.

The fisheye on The Tangent Universe is implemented via level-specific MML changing the FOV.

I'll look into those stuck monsters on Unwired later tonight.

[Pfhorrest]

I had planned to get an early start on "My Kingdom Pfhor A Horse" tonight, but all I managed besides those typos was to (try to) fix the monsters on Unwired, and also fix a switch texture bug I must've introduced a few weeks ago.

Tomorrow night I will attempt "Kingdom". I'd be great if any changes Aaron plans to make to the "Corporation" levels could be done by then too, because then I'll be attempting my own fixes to that the following (Wednesday) night.

[The Man]

I’ll try to get them done tomorrow afternoon. I’m trying to finish all the textures in Chronicles that I’m capable of getting done right now; once I’ve done that I’ll hopefully be able to finish the “Corporation” levels. Do you have any advice for dealing with .dds files, btw? I’m pretty sure most of Eternal’s HD shapes are in .dds format, but I don’t understand much about them.

ETA: I think I’ve got everything except the .dds textures and the ones I’ll have to recreate from scratch done now. Need some sleep now. I’ll work on the levels tomorrow afternoon.

[Pfhorrest]

Thanks! For DDS files, you'll want to use Treellama's utility Aorta (Aleph One Replacement Texture Application, or something like that). Not sure where to download it from but it's probably not hard to find.

[The Man]

Here’s my latest revision of “Pissing”. I’m not 100% satisfied with it; there are actually a couple segments that I think could stand to be even more challenging than I’ve made them, but it’s certainly less unbalanced right now. There are a few other issues: the wall on line 695 needs to be textured and one of the walls near platform 596 is misaligned, but I don’t feel like going into Vasara and fixing them right now. Platform 596 was annoyingly slow in the film I just recorded, but I’ve at least fixed that.

I’ll probably tinker with it some more after beta 2 comes out, but I think this is good for now.

The link to Aorta was pretty easy to find; this seems to be the latest revision. BTW, what was the workaround you figured to fix the problem with bump-mapped edges of control panels and such? It’s surprisingly easy to generate cool-looking bump-mapped textures, but I do want to refine them as much as possible. I’m also still confounded as to how glow maps work, but that’s probably better for the scripting thread.

I’ll attach “Burning Down” in a few minutes; I haven’t finished working on it. There were a lot fewer changes I wanted to make to that one, though the same textures will still need to be fixed.

ETA: “Burning Down” added. As I said, I expect the same walls are probably untextured/misaligned. I didn’t actually check, but I didn’t fix them, so I don’t expect them to be any different.

[ravenshining]

There's also a DDS plugin for the GIMP that works pretty well, that's what I use.

[Pfhorrest]

Awesome, thanks!

The trick with the bump mapped switches and such is just to make sure that the edges of the texture are flat, not bumpy. E.g. my chargers all had bump maps that tapered down around each quadrant of the texture (around each charger), and that seemed to cause AO to "stretch" a few pixels from around that quadrant into the quadrant itself, which made the texture look misaligned. When the bump map around the edge of each quadrant was made flat, that stopped happening.

[The Man]

Thanks to both of you. I probably won’t bother fixing that for tonight’s Chronicles release. If I have patience, I’ll look at it after this week’s school assignment is done. For the most part I didn’t even bother generating bump maps for switches this time around, but there are several other textures that have sharp edges that look bad.

Any other particular tips you’d recommend for generating bump maps? Most of them look pretty good with few changes by just using the “make normal map” feature in Aorta, apart from the edges, but a few of them are pretty bad, and I can’t figure out any rhyme or reason as to why. I could also swear for the life of me there was a Photoshop filter that generated the equivalent of the left side of each bump map Aorta comes up with, but I can’t recall its name.

ETA: Btw, Dr Sumner writes concerning “Core Done Blew”:

Finished Core Done Blew this morning. Very challenging level. The hardest so far, particularly the opening. But there are other tough sections as well. From the moment you jump down that hole at poly 792 until you read Terminal 6, you have quite a tough haul to get through all those enemies. I know you have a PB and 2x to help out, but it is still as hard as the opening. To vid this level with Fists only would be quite a feat. I was able to complete the level that way. But vidding is another thing. Not impossible, but there are so many places to slip up and have your shields fritter away.

There were two quibbles I had with the level. The first was the extreme tediousness in having to open those doors at the beginning every time you want to save or recharge. In fact, you have to open them twice. Once going in and then going out. I can understand it at the beginning. But later in the level once those rooms are not in play anymore, it sure would be nice if some switch were to permanently open those two doors for easy access to the PB and 2x. The other is having enemies positioned on top of the core. It keeps someone trying to clear out the level with Fists only from doing such. I know it’s petty, but it has always bugged me to have a level that you cannot clear out with Fists because certain enemies are inaccessible.

The only error was one spelling error in Terminal 3: maintainance —> maintenance.

I think he has a fair point regarding the doors. Maybe the “can’t deactivate externally” flag should just be switched off for them.

[Pfhorrest]

Thanks to John for that feedback again! Typo fixed.

I also finished my runthrough of "Kingdom" tonight. The main complaints seemed to be about how difficult the beginning is, and to address that I added a bunch of Bobs and ammo caches that beam in throughout the opening areas, including an invincibility powerup near the jumping puzzle; and I made that jumping puzzle far less puzzling. It should now be possibly to basically just plow through that combat in the exterior and run out of invincibility right around the time you get inside.

Ryoko also complained about the interior combat being dull after that exterior combat, so I beefed that up a little bit, and generally controlled it a bit more with some zone borders.

He had also had complaints about pointless switch puzzles but it looks like those had already been fixed some time before tonight, probably way back then.

I also touched up some lighting and texturing stuff.


I found a texture glitch I meant to fix tonight but no time for that now, will try tomorrow.



As for bump maps, note that there are two components to them. One is basically a height map, where white sticks out of the plane and black recesses into it and greys go in between of course. (I think that is maybe called a displacement map?) The other is a normal map, which is basically a map of the angle that a given pixel is at relative to the plane of the texture, and thus how light it should be lit or shaded based on its angle to the camera. "Make normal map" generates normal maps out of displacement maps, putting them on the left side and the displacement map on the right side. If what you're putting on the left when you start isn't actually a displacement map, you might get lucky if it turns out that dark pixels are supposed to be recesses and light pixels are supposed to be prominences, but that's just luck. You really need to make greyscale displacement maps for each texture, and then generate normal maps from those with Aorta, if you want to ensure it looks right.

[The Man]

Thanks; that explains a fair bit of it. Do you have any recommendations for how to make greyscale displacement maps? It does seem like more often than not, the dark pixels are indeed supposed to be recesses (recesses and shadows tend to coincide), so that does help.

[Pfhorrest]

It sounds like you're looking for a way to generate the displacement maps from the full color textures, but there really isn't one; you have to manually paint the right shade of grey over the right part of eaxh texture. That's why I decided to recreate the textures ina vector format, becausne at least that way I have all the shaped laid out and can just make them eaxh the right grey ina copy of the file.

[Pfhorrest]

ugh... I was just playtesting Pissing on the Corp through Burning Down the Corp and, Aaron, it looks like you somehow worked from an older version of Pissing on the Corp, and lost all of the work I did on it last week! I assumed that you had grabbed the version that had been up for six days already when you started your changes to it yesterday, so I just overwrite my version with it, and now all of my work is gone.

I managed to pull my old version back out of git and updated the repo with that instead of your version. If you could please redo your changes based off of that version that's up now before tomorrow night I would really appreciate it.

ETA: hold up a sec I just found a big bug in my version I want to fix first. fixed. (vasara sometimes sales some polygons into "ouch" polys with static floors as a side-effect of its map-teleport feature)

[The Man]

Bump maps: I was afraid that would be the answer. Oh well; I’ll see what I can do over the next few months.

Corporation levels: dammit, I had no idea you’d worked on them recently. I’ll try to approximate my changes, but it won’t be an exact recreation right now because I’ve got to get some sleep. I will probably actually beef up the combat in “Pissing” even more than I had; I’ve played the level enough times now that I know where players have the option to retreat, so I know which parts can still stand to be made more challenging than I made them. Check this space in an hour or two (it’s currently 21:30 EDT).

ETA: “Burning Down” looks like it’s still my version. I remade most of my changes in your version of “Pissing” and added several extra monsters. (There were a few specific changes, such as monster & item impassable polygons and the addition of a couple dozen teleporter polygons, that I didn’t bother replicating exactly right now. I’ll do them in time for beta 3 for sure, though.) I haven’t specifically play-tested this version yet and probably won’t have time until tomorrow night, but I’m familiar enough with the level now that I can be reasonably confident that no parts of it will be unfair. There’s only one part where players can’t actually retreat to a recharger if they use the proper strategy, and I barely added any monsters to that part; I also don’t think I added so many monsters in other parts of the level that people won’t be able to move.

Re: “Burning Down”, if there isn’t time to integrate the versions properly before beta 2 tomorrow, don’t worry about it; just use your version (assuming you’d made changes). IIRC the only changes I made to “Burning Down” this month were ambient sounds and other cosmetic changes like that.

[Pfhorrest]

Thanks! I haven’t touched “Burning” yet; that’s scheduled for tonight and will be based on your version. I won’t be touching “Pissing” tonight either so if you want to make further refinements to it in the next 24hrs before beta 2 tomorrow go right ahead. (I’ll also be uploading my changes to “Burning “ later tonight and you’re free to continue from there tomorrow too).

Sleep well! I need to get some sleep myself soon too.

[The Man]

Thanks, and you sleep well tomorrow. IDK how long I’ll be out tomorrow (I have some errands to run in the late morning, early afternoon, and then a friend’s birthday party that starts at around 1800 EDT, but I have no idea how long that’ll last), or whether I’ll feel like doing anything in the morning before I leave. I expect my further changes to either level will be minor at most; the likeliest thing I’d do would be finish doing the monster & item impassable and teleporter polygons in “Pissing”. Assuming that you fixed the texture issues I mentioned, I can’t think of any other urgent changes to “Burning Down”.

[Pfhorrest]

Finished off "Burning". Besides your misaligned texture, a typo Crater Creator found, and Ryoko generally being sick of Pfhor levels all around, the only real to-do thing was a complaint from Ryoko about the level flow (needing to backtrack to the start), so I changed around which doors and elevators are operational some to make you make a big loop more akin to "Pissing" instead of two rounds of backtracking. I also made an elevator fast to match "Pissing".

Then I spent the rest of the night greatly improving the lighting on both levels, which desperately needed it.

Working with the two side-by-side, I realize that there are somehow differences in the shared geometry between them, which doesn't make any sense from a story point of view as this is literally the same facility on two different versions of the same day. It made sense that maybe different doors would be locked and different elevators turned off because of killer butterflies or whatever, so in the different branches you would have to visit different parts of the facility to get the job done; but it makes no sense that the Pfhor would have rush-remodeled this or that room based on whether you sided with Leela or Tycho earlier in the day.

But there's no time to fix that, so I guess I'll just hope nobody notices. Unless someone wants to go through them after beta 2 tomorrow and adjust them to compensate for that. I'm not sure how or when that ended up being the case as I'm pretty sure these levels began life as literally the same map, just with different doors or elevators operable.

Everything up on Github now. I also fixed that mysterious texture bug, but noticed a landscape bug when taking this spontaneous screenshot of The World Is Hollow:

[The Man]

I suspect the discrepancies occurred after the level was split into two halves; DMA or one of the other mapmakers must’ve changed parts in one version and forgotten to change them in the other. The most foolproof way to resolve the discrepancies might actually be to re-combine them back into one level for a template, then make the individual changes blocking off whichever parts of the level need to be blocked off for the versions used in the game. This ensures that no one would miss any discrepancies.

This would be complicated in itself, however, since Weland doesn’t currently support this, and I doubt the old Chisel map merge effect would work for more than 1,024 polygons. There’s an old plugin that might work in an old version of Weland (perhaps 1.4.1), but I haven’t managed to get it to work in 1.4.3 or 1.4.4. I’m not sure how many polygons the combined version would have, but I’d guess around 1,400 or 1,500, which should be fine.

If someone does manage to get a map merge plugin running, the best way to combine the levels would be to delete all the segments that don’t appear in both levels from one version, then run the script to combine them. You’ll still have to reconnect the doors and such.

One additional benefit of recombining the segments would be that if the architecture/texturing were changed significantly again, there wouldn’t be a need to replicate the changes in two different levels; you could just redo whatever changes were need to block off parts of the level, which should be significantly less time-consuming and tedious. It might even be possible to write a short Lua script to make the changes automatically when the level loads, depending upon which version it is, meaning that there would be no need to have any discrepancies in the .sceA file at all.

I’m also now wondering if there are similar discrepancies between “Bug-Eyed in Space” and “Once More Unto the Breach…”. Probably so. Wouldn’t be able to resolve those in the same way, though, since there literally isn’t enough physical space to combine them.

Anyway, latest revision.

[Pfhorrest]

Thanks! That's merged now.

[The Man]

A couple of addenda from Dr Sumner regarding “Core Done Blew”:

Aaron there was one other thing I forgot to mention about Core Done Blew. I had a few of the enemies get stuck on the circular wall of the core. They weren't stuck within the wall. Just up against it. Once I punched at them, they were freed and started fighting. But if I had not punched them, I am pretty sure they would have stayed put. This was after I had activated all the enemies in that large room. I left the room after defeating many of them. Once I came back, that’s when I noticed a couple of wasps and one compiler up against the wall. Not in the same place either.

Actually one more thing. The smashable switch at line 2713 is supposed to activate poly 971. I assume that poly is supposed to cause the Juggernaut stationed there to explode? However it never does.

[Pfhorrest]

Thanks as always to John for that feedback. No time to look into that right now, but maybe it's something Lia would like to look into if she's still looking for something to help with?

Got unexpectedly much done tonight. Distributed the accumulated physics changes since last release. Touched up the lighting on My Kingdom Pfhor A Horse some more. Updated the only Pfhor texture that kept bugging me to something I like better (screenshot below). Made the "2" in the human oxygen charger subscript and made some other things superscript on other human chargers for a style match. Fixed the wrapping glitch on the Spherescape and also generally improved that landscape although it seems that it just gets washed out to white in Shader mode, but I'm not sure if that's new and if so what's causing it or how to fix it.

Eternal X 1.2 beta 2 is up now.

[The Man]

Is it possible the fog script for those levels got set somehow to hide landscapes? That’s actually the default behaviour in the engine, IIRC; I think it has to be manually overridden.

A couple sound things that I’ve been meaning to note for awhile, and somehow forgot to bring up until just now:

· The breathing sound effect (“unused 1”) should perhaps be set to “cannot be restarted”. It sounds silly when you’re recharging oxygen and the player interrupts themselves while taking a breath. I think this should fix it, though I need to test this to verify. I’ll do so on Monday, probably.

· The grenade explosion sound effect should perhaps be changed from “loud” to “medium”. It is, at times, genuinely startling when you’re playing with headphones and there’s a sudden grenade explosion near you. I get that grenade explosions should be loud, but I think we can allow this as an “acceptable break from reality”. They are currently unsettlingly louder than essentially every other sound effect in the game.

ETA: Dr Sumner on “Heart of Fusion”:

Played through Heart of Fusion. As with Roots and Radicals, you need to put some enemies in the rooms of the core. By the time I got into the core, I had already defeated the Compilers. The defense drones had nothing to do except get in my way. Sometimes they stop in the hallway and block your path. The only error of any kind dealt with the Compiler on poly 816. It shot at me one time. Otherwise it seemed stuck no matter where it moved to. I would hit it, it would move, and stand there as though stuck. Never shot at me except that one time.

[Pfhorrest]

The fog script is not set to hide landscapes. It works fine on all other landscapes in all other render modes, and even on the spherescape in OGL Classic, which still supports fog.

Good thoughts on those other things and thanks to John as always! Will address those maybe Monday night.

[The Man]

Weird. I'll see if I can figure some of that out. And thanks, and no problem.

John's comments on "Hysterical Womb":

Finished Hysterical Womb yesterday. I really like the level. The only question I had deals with the two doors at poly 606 and 964. They lead from the southeast and southwest sections back to the central section. The door at 964 does not have the “Can’t Deactivate Externally” flag set, while the door at 606 does. Since the doors seem to have the same purpose, I would like to see both doors with their flag NOT set. It’s helpful to be able to keep both doors open.

[Pfhorrest]

Thanks to John again! I've fixed that, and also deleted and re-added the weird compiler on Heart of Fusion, and added some impassible polys to both Roots And Radicals and Heart Of Fusion to help prevent MADD-jams.

I also turned the grenade explosion sound down to medium, and tried to change the flag on the breathing sound, but ShapeFusion won't see to let me change any of those flags on any sounds. Are you able to?

[Pfhorrest]

I also just went through and did all of the things that all of the reviews said to do for all of the levels I was planning to work on this week (S'pht'ia through She Is The Dark One), which was surprisingly little, which I find weird because I kind of hate the start of this chapter myself.

All there was was to fix two buggy monsters and a typo on Sleeping Gods and to make Dark One an indoor level because of Aaron's insightful point that this level being on the surface implies the catacombs below are not nearly as far below as they should be. (This level was designed to be on the surface next to the Citadel, and there's even a view of the Citadel from one window, or there was until I just removed it).

Tonight I'll probably fix up some texture things that annoyed me in this chapter that I expected to put off until three weeks from now, and then spend the rest of the week just running through these levels trying my best to hate them less with lighting and texturing improvements.

Various reviews say the combat on them could be better too, but I'm not sure what to do about that given the limited selection of monsters available in this setting -- Defenders, F'lick'ta, and Ticks, basically -- so maybe after I'm through here someone else with a better eye for combat could run through and fix that aspect up.