25 réponses à ce sujet

[kamal_]

Ingame demo....

 

Anyway, flying carpet. This trick could also be used to make the city pass by as the pc rides in a carriage and looks out the windows, looks out the porthole of a spelljammer, or other such places where the builder wants to convey motion.

[andysks]

How...?

[kamal_]

How?

Create a placeable for the terrain you are going to be moving past. This placeable should be flat (non-flat placeables will ruin the trick, as I will explain later). Assign the placeable the texture of the terrain to move past, this texture should be a seamless texture, meaning you can tile the texture with no visible seams (like the stock terrain textures).

Place your new "terrain placeable" in the area, tiling it if needed to cover things. Place your moving object (flying carpet etc) where you want it in relation to the terrain placeable. In this demo I placed it 6 feet above the terrain placeable.

Put in walkmesh helpers as needed. There is one sized for the flying carpet in the demo, so the player can walk on the carpet.

Lock your placeables at the desired height, for convenience.

Lower the actual terrain so it will not be visible to the pc. In this demo I lowered it to -50 and painted it black just in case. Because the "terrain placeables" cover a large area, the player can not see the actual terrain. Instead they see the terrain placeable and interpret it as the actual terrain.

At this point we've got our pc standing on the flying carpet above static placeables that look like stationary terrain. Now for the trick to make our carpet "fly"...

Turn on UV scrolling for the terrain placeables. Set the scrolling to the speed you want. In this demo I think I used 0.1, higher numbers give faster "motion". This step is why you need flat terrain placeables, as non-flat portion will not actually be moving.

Since all the "terrain placeable" textures are in motion relative to the pc, your brain interprets this as the pc moving over the terrain instead (on our flying carpet)...

For a view out a stagecoach window, you might want to use some vertically oriented placeables like the tree or city building cards for your moving terrain. You could even layer them for a parallax effect (pseudo 3-D via multiple 2-D layersscrolling at different speeds, with the closest layers scrolling the fastest).

[kamal_]

For the demo, I tiled 9 placeables that I had given the exterior map's dirt03 texture to. Because the texture is seamless, and all nine tiles are set to the same UV scroll direction and speed, the nine placeables look like a single larger one without needing to find a very high resolution texture.

Theoretically you could even set up a "steering wheel" for the player to use. I'm not sure if you can access UV scrolling via script, but you could destroy the terrain placeables and replace them with another set that had UV scrolling in a different direction, destroying and creating as needed.

[rjshae]

Nice. Mixing in some moving SEF would help add to the effect, I think, as would a steady wind sound.

[andysks]

Good stuff. I will certainly experiment with this. and I hate that even while I love making cinematics I cannot move terrain, follow terrain etc. What you did is, I think the old style graphics trick (atari, commodo) where if the character seemed to run he was actually just doing a running animation and the background would move. The only thing I didn't get from the above is this line:

 

Assign the placeable the texture of the terrain to move past, this texture should be a seamless texture, meaning you can tile the texture with no visible seams (like the stock terrain textures).

 

Assign texture to the placeable... maybe I need to read again . Thanks anyway.

[rjshae]

I think he's referring to the fact that you can change the texture on a simple model using MDB Cloner.

[kamal_]

Yes. You must make a new placeable for this (except if you wanted to move compared to a stock flat placeable). When you make that new placeable, you must assign it the texture you want for your ground. You can use mdbcloner on some of the stock "floor" placeables for instance.

Rjshae mentioned moving sefs and wind noise. Yes, you could certainly make moving vfx, especially if you wanted to use the game model effect vfx to make moving buildings or something. You could spawn then "ahead" of the movement and make them move to "in back of" the movement, despawn and repeat. Probably a fair amount of work involved in that, but it would allow you to use non flat terrain and move a vfx "terrain" instead of UV scrolling the texture. Invisible creatures assigned the appearance of objects could also be set up, and you'd have them spawn in, walk to waypoints behind the pc, despawn and retreat.

Also, add some sound appropriate to the movement to increase the movement illusion.

And yes, it is like those old games that would scroll the entire background to show movement.

[andysks]

Cool. I always hesitate to try mdb cloners 3ds max or how else all these programs are called due to the fact that it already took me quite some time to learn the toolset and some basic scripting. But I guess with the rhythm the CC and new ideas that come up these days... I might need to check some things out.

[Loki_999]

Genius!

[rjshae]

I wonder whether it is possible to vary the UV scrolling by applying an SEF diffuse texture replacement? Or is that parameter a fixed component of the model?

[kamal_]

On creatures at least, the sef skin textures appled are automatically scrolled with the creature skin texture. I suppose you could set up a sef that had scrolling built in, if you do I would think that scrolling is always going to be relative to the objects UV scroll setting.

[grotbag1]

Incredible! Really clever!

 

 

...He said, while stealing the idea as quickly as possible.

[rjshae]

I was thinking for high altitude flight, you could add a second scrolling layer with a handful of clouds masked with a single-bit alpha channel. Because it is fuzzy and always moving, I think the cloud layer could be stretched out quite a bit (to avoid the appearance of repetition). The different movement rate of the clouds could possibly help mask the tiling effect of the ground a little.

 

Ooo... this thread just gave me an idea for moving elevator walls in a mine or dungeon.

[kamal_]

I tried this last night with some stock tree card placeables, which are flat rectangles that have clear bits. The tree images move, but the clear/non clear parts do not move, so there were black tree silhouettes when the tree Iimage was not in them.

[kamal_]

Rjshae: mine cart rides....

[kamal_]

Sea waves via placeable trickery, in nwn1 but the concept should work here as well.

http://forum.bioware...6341-sea-waves/

[Eguintir Eligard]

Just so I am clear, you can't actually fly it over a city as suggested, because it would require a repeating texture?

 

Unless you had a city that was a repeating texture, or at least a very long non repeat texture?

[rjshae]

Just so I am clear, you can't actually fly it over a city as suggested, because it would require a repeating texture?

 

Unless you had a city that was a repeating texture, or at least a very long non repeat texture?

 

That would be my guess. You'd either need a grid of floor tiles, each covering part of the much larger texture, or one humongous floor tile.

[kamal_]

Yes, the player is not actually moving, only things are set up in such a way as to make it look like the player is moving.

Moving over a city would require a repeating city texture (for a high distance where the city could reasonably appear 2d because of the height), or to give the Iimpression of low height moving vfx buildings or some such. Other areas where there is significant heights that should be seen in 3d (though a forest as opposed to far over it) would need the same thing.

For terrain that appear predominantly 2d from the height the player is supposed to be at, such as the desert or calm water, the scrolling textures of the placeables that represent the ground is enough to provide a good illusion of movement.

I chose to use the desert for my example because the flying carpet is a staple theme in desert adventures, and the flat carpet gives a good view and was easy to set up for demo.

[Friar]

Oh wow!

Nice work!

I could definitely see this optical illusion it being useful for spelljammer.

However, on the personal level this would, most definitely, be useful in telling my Arabian Al-Qadim adventure.

I just have to set aside some time to get my .tga map to fire off correctly and then I would use this illusion as a transition scene from place to place.

[Friar]

I open the MDB cloner, use the file menu,look for an MDB texture to clone, but I don't even know where to begin looking.

 

I looked under Atari/NeverwinterNight/data and just about everything else.

[kamal_]

I open the MDB cloner, use the file menu,look for an MDB texture to clone, but I don't even know where to begin looking.

 

I looked under Atari/NeverwinterNight/data and just about everything else.

You want the terrain textures. They begin with TT and are .dds. They are textures designed to be tiled. If I still have it, I'll post the proof of concept demo sometime this weekend.

[Eguintir Eligard]

They're in data and the final sub folder is named terrains. Don't recall the folder parent in data it's probably textures something