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Smoothed Ski Track

The greatest unfinished sequel ever!
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Toshiba-3
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Smoothed Ski Track

Post by Toshiba-3 »

After nuDesert, nuSkitrack.

Image

I'm progressing with this, still a lot to do but nothing too big.
UVW fixes and placing some/most noncars back on earth.
Using Yfrid's skitrack skin at the moment.

You can download the first wip here if you want?!

Oh, no smashables, by the way.

Harm: I had to preprocess it in PT2, still some master pivot problem.
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Re: Smoothed Ski Track

Post by Harmalarm »

sweet. I still see quite a lot floating objects and uv errors, but couldn't find any holes so that is good! It sure is easy now to drive up to the road leading to the big ski-ramp. :)

I'm aware the preprocessing isn't quite fail-safe yet. What do you mean with master pivot problem. Was the track rotated still?
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Re: Smoothed Ski Track

Post by C2 Scientist »

Good work so far! There are still minor bumps, but such roads are hardly silk-smooth anyway. :) It's also a matter of smoothness vs performance.
Oh, no smashables, by the way.
Thanks for mentioning that. Unfortunately, I had forgotten it by the time I was going to drive through the first fence I found. :)

A tip regarding horizon images and fog, if you're interested: for horizons like these, I usually copy the original horizon image to a new layer, completely blur the copy to an average color, and blend it with the original by 50% (adjust as necessary). Then I use the averaged color as the fog RGB in textfile, so that the fog blends well with the horizon image. Of course, you could also average the final horizon image, and use that as fog color, if you want.
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Re: Smoothed Ski Track

Post by Toshiba-3 »

Smoooooother (7zip archive)
Be sure to have a powerful enough machine though.
Preprocessing matrix went from 8x8 to 16x16.
Smashables are supposed to work, but I'll have to work out these nets somehow, they are too solid.

I must decide if I stay at smooth iteration x1 or if I go with x2 before lowering the accessories for good.

Biggest concern are the goddamn vertices. If you drive a vehicle with a bbox tad too low, it will hit all the split vertices.
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Re: Smoothed Ski Track

Post by C2 Scientist »

Amazing smoothness! It's a real joy to cruise around. :)

The loading time is a bit hefty, and there's some slowdown if you're looking towards the centre of the map (those on my outdated PC, at least). Still, I'd vote for this version, no doubt :)
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Re: Smoothed Ski Track

Post by C2 Scientist »

Any luck with the fences yet? :)

Have you yet tried removing the vertical subdivisions on the fences? In editable polygon mode, you can quickly select a complete edge loop based on a sample selection. I think the vertical subdivisions don't serve much purpose anyway, only causing smashing problems.

You could also try halving the horizontal subdivisions, if nothing else helps.
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Re: Smoothed Ski Track

Post by Toshiba-3 »

Image

3 years later, it's here :slol:
I almost deleted it all yesterday as I was going through my project folder and removing unfinished stuff that didn't interest me anymore.
I don't care much about a smoother Beaver Mountains, but it seemed like an excellent exercise so there.
It put Harm's script under a lot of stress, poor thing didn't stop crashing :sdead:
There are UVW mishaps a bit everywhere but mleh the base mesh was so-so in the first place. Also some nets are strangely solid.

Skin is by Yfrid, motorbike and panzer by Stainless' Cameron Kerr.

You can download it here :saston:
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Re: Smoothed Ski Track

Post by coffeycup »

ImageSmooooooth!
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Re: Smoothed Ski Track

Post by Harmalarm »

Smoooth!

but off course this piqued my interest:
It put Harm's script under a lot of stress, poor thing didn't stop crashing :sdead:
There are UVW mishaps a bit everywhere but mleh the base mesh was so-so in the first place. Also some nets are strangely solid.
Do you have any idea what caused it? Mayby the big polycount? And are the uv issues part of the export or part of the smoothing modifier in max?
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Re: Smoothed Ski Track

Post by Toshiba-3 »

The polycount wasn't helping when it had to write the DAT file apparently (when it was preprocessed with a 30x30 matrix for example). And that made MAX hang for a long time, and then I just killed the whole process (did that several times etc.).
Every time I did that, afterward the script wouldn't preprocess the track at all, or if it started it would crash a bit later (and that would occur for any max scene, not only the ski track). Then after messing around with other stuff, it would suddenly start working again and I'd have no clue why etc.
:techsupport:
The solution was to import something with your script then export it. Then I could just go back to the ski track scene and preprocess (with 16x16 matrix) and export etc. So I guess when I killed the process some variables used by the script aren't reset and only using the import/export script successfully did reset them and allowed the preprocess script to work.

(this is a minor issue huh I'm extremely grateful for your work with this script, it changed everything. :thumbsup: )
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Re: Smoothed Ski Track

Post by Harmalarm »

So I guess when I killed the process some variables used by the script aren't reset and only using the import/export script successfully did reset them and allowed the preprocess script to work.
Yeah, that's probably what caused it.

The slow export, or MAX hanging, might be caused by the addition I made half a year ago where the models are being pre-optimized when exported. This pre-optimizing process is quite slow I'm afraid. Perhaps it is better if I add this as an option instead of forcing it on every export.

Was the smoothed track attached to a single mesh and then re-cut in max by the preprocessing?
I wonder if the cut's are then exactly the same as the 'original cuts'. (as you said you used 16x16 which is also used in the original tracks I think) If not, you might end up with many little polygons. between the old and new cuts.
(this is a minor issue huh I'm extremely grateful for your work with this script, it changed everything. :thumbsup: )
Oh, heh, I know you are. I'm just interested in ways to improve it. ;)
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Re: Smoothed Ski Track

Post by Toshiba-3 »

Oh having to wait is not a problem, I think you could just add a little message after a while if the export takes a long time saying something like this: "optimizing meshes, might take some time". Not forcing the option might result in working addons having a ton of mapping vertices or such.

The terrain was indeed a single mesh. But I apparently had (three years ago) removed the "original cuts" and cleaned the whole mesh (turned it back into quads to make for a better turbosmooth).

On ways to improve it, well I guess the script could reset all variables when it starts to prevent these crashes.
I also understood we can't properly instance powerup models so each powerup has its own model, a tad annoying as it fills up the model pool (or did I miss some tip about this?).
Somehow related to that problem, it'd be nice to be able to set a different model identifier than the actor identifier (important for C1).
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Re: Smoothed Ski Track

Post by Harmalarm »

I also understood we can't properly instance powerup models so each powerup has its own model, a tad annoying as it fills up the model pool (or did I miss some tip about this?).
Hmm, I would have to look into that. The purpose is to just instance objects with "&£" as a prefix. The script should recognise the & and will know it is an instanced object. I might have made a mistake, as I guess this is the first thing you tried.
Somehow related to that problem, it'd be nice to be able to set a different model identifier than the actor identifier (important for C1).
I see what you mean. My first aproach would be to make it possible to add a custom parameter to your objects. In this parameter you can supply a model identifier name to each object. Basically the object's name in max will then be the Actor name in carma, and the name you provide in the custom attribute will be it's model name. That should do it right?
I'm not sure if the property will be instanced when you instance the actors, but that would not make much sense anyway I think.
Or we should do it the other way around, object's name in max is the model name, and the properties name will be the actor name... Not sure yet. What do you think?
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Re: Smoothed Ski Track

Post by Toshiba-3 »

With powerups we are forced to do proper numbering (well I think, you know &£XXYYYY.ACT). If we remove the .ACT at the end your script will indeed instance a model named &£ (or just £, unsure at the time of writing this) for all powerups. But powerups rarely use the same model! And as I implied before, I don't think we can put an underscore or something between XX and YYYY to break the numbered suffix your script looks for. You get the idea. Specifying a model identifier per powerup object could help with the problem.

So yes I think that idea of a custom parameter per object to set the model identifier is good. If the parameter is not present, the script just use the object name for both actor/model identifiers (doesn't matter much in C2 besides for powerups).
However I'd rather see that custom parameter follow instanced actors because the point is to have various actors with different actor identifiers share the same model. And that aspect of C1 where actors and models must have different identifiers rarely includes instanced objects (beside wheels) so you'll have to do it one by one anyway.
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Re: Smoothed Ski Track

Post by Harmalarm »

Heh, I actually made powerups in max using names like "&£91_napalm_001". I gave all powerups understandable names so I could easilly place them in the way I wanted. I then exported the whole thing and ran it through pt2's preprocessing. That renamed the actor to '&£91xxxx' and the models names are '&£91_napalm_'. When I take a hex-look into the dat file, the powerups are only represented once, so they are instanced.

BUT each powerup index has it's own model, and that is probably what you mean by instancing powerups.

So now the model identifier property and it's use is clear to me. I will see if I can find some time to add it properly, and in the meantime will take a look at the preprocessing again.
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