Slaan

I've been waiting a while to bring some areas to completion, things like the sewer area in the video were left empty mainly because there was no way to bring the challenge into them and they end up being easy places for people to live out of right next to all the loots in the city. Now I don't want to have to re-visit any of the old areas after this conversion process unless it's to add some funky stuff or further improve the 'dungeon' areas. I have a massive back log of ideas that have only recently became possible (or worth the effort) and I'm itching te get into the empty areas and fill them with some love. Motivation has never been higher, even with the custom hub issues. Sleepers I believe, really are that good and they really do bring some of the dull areas to life/undeath/whatever.

With no certain guarantee we'll get it back into random gen I've no intentions on rushing anything. I'd rather invest some time into patching the compo pack prefabs up as that will be the main injection of custom POI's into most servers for a while I imagine. I've a lot on my plate the next couple weeks but have a LOT of spare time come the start of August, like two to three weeks of spare time. I'd like to think I can have the majority of the sections face-lifted by then or during that period. Once I'm at the halfway mark I'll release what I have with a prefab xml for navezgane so people can give it a spin and get the feedback rolling in. - - - Updated - - - A thing worth mentioning tho, there are about 25-30 sections of city that are just place-holder terrain/empty spots ready to be built on. They require 0 work to bring up to date. So the 10 of 102 prefabs is really more like 10/70 which even when you consider their size, is not tooo massive a job.

New blog

Sleepers in action

Ok so a quick progress update as 16 is now stable. We probably won't be enjoying custom hubs in RWG till at least A17, if ever. If you know better or are more informed I beg you to speak up. I've read mixed posts all over hinting that It's probably just slipped under the radar and coupled with the fact the previewer works fine with them I am still feeling optimistic this may be addressed in future but until I know otherwise I'm gonna focus on slow boating through the city a section at a time, painting, touching up and adding sleepers etc. Navezgane is now the only place you will be able to test/play with the whole city, the socket system can easily handle the prefabs but there is no way to organise them together and as stand alone prefabs they look a little off to say the least, once the hub nears completion and if random gen compatibility is still missing maybe I'll work on some kind of way to make the hub look better there. I take no responsibility for the terrible terrain clipping It's rather annoying as with a few exceptions A16 was gonna make things perfect and I can see how bloody awesome it looks just from the meshes in the previewer, tho I do guess it's not a proper mod project unless something doesn't work right . I'm almost comfortable with the way I'm set on doing the sleepers, once I have around 15-20 sections done I'll release something people can have a mess around with, you won't be disappointed... well once you get over the fact your not in random gen anyway. It's pretty weird as I kinda wanna be angry, but things are just so much better now... it's not fair

I like this idea very much. It would be nice if we could reverse engineer a single building so that it could produce several variants based on maybe the same exterior painting style/materials. So if you wanted a fresh new district for RWG you build maybe a shop style building and a house, then just randomise as you mention, a bunch of each to the same theme. Building a whole bunch of tunnel sections, anti-chambers and control rooms etc and have it string them all together into a dungeon style prefab you could just sink into the floor or hang off another building as a basement so it don't need to look nice on the exterior. Think Magoli's polar station with a single entrance and hidden beneath the floor, or a sewer/subway themed run. On the surface you have a prefab can identify with to know it's a dungeon, but they will never know what layout it is... and if they ever make maps you just gen a bunch more ;D.

You seriously underestimate the man hours required to populate a city sized prefab with sleepers =p , 400+ buildings and the spaces in-between them, I lost at least another inch of my hairline assessing the scale of work to be done manually this alpha.

I've put maybe 50 hours into restoring my Hub so far, that's a lot of building time, a decent wedge of purging and correcting and far too much time painting haha but by a long mile I've spent more time writing/calculating sleeper volumes than anything else and without your efforts I think it's something only the hard core builders would put any real effort into. You've saved me literally 100's of hours, I just fixed 3 of my prefabs in 20 mins, corrected all my mis-placed volumes, re-sized some of them, edited the game stage modifiers of some. Saved everything fine and the XML looks sound.

Wow, gonna dive straight into this now, some seriously awesome features you've added there. *edit* Amazing, still to test some stuff properly but assuming it works ok, in 30 seconds I spotted a whole bunch of mistakes in some of my sleeper code. This will open the door for amateur/new prefabbers in a big way, although simple enough in theory the XML code for the sleepers looks pretty daunting once your at 15+ volumes in a single prefab and it's nothing but a whole bunch of numbers. I think a lot of my mistakes have stemmed from having no way to easily see the area designated and doing a lot of math in my head and jotting in the wrong numbers. A lot of the errors (triggered emtpy volume) are gonna be much easier to track down now.

That looks pretty sweet, we're gonna need a lot of colours... I'm hitting 15-20 spawn areas per section in some areas. Some way to fine tune the areas once they're set in is sorely needed atm and this looks like it could plug that gap nice, really can't wait after doing 8 city parts by hand adding the sleepers in and tweaking them is fast becomming the new time consumer.

Overlapping spawn areas seems to work fine, I have a section of tunnels that look like a letter 'E' from above and the main corridor itself has one volume but as you walk down the corridor you are triggering the volumes in the off shott corridors too. Custom prefabs are defo not gonna be the loot pinatas they used to be.... well they are but you gonna die.

[quote=Pille;683682 Unfortunately, making a proper visual representation of sleeper volumes is harder than I've expected since you can use negative numbers for the SleeperVolumeStart variable. So your Volume is not limited to the volume of your prefab. Does this mean we can set a trigger area bigger than the space available in the prefab? for example, having a volume set to 50 x 50 in a prefab thats only say 30 x 30 (lendth x width). The idea being it triggers and loads sleepers for that area when your a few blocks away instead of when you actually walk through the door.

I've spent quite some time the past couple weeks looking at how I can repair/continue my hub and get a decent first round of sleepers in there too, it's a gigantic amount of work. I've now found a point where I'm working at a decent pace, starting the process a section at a time (considering the content of some of them) and as I seem to be struggling in a similar area to you (more specifically adding 'extras' the easy way after the first lot are set in) in that there's no quick easy way to see em in game. So I'm using hal's empty world/DLL, loading one up, dm & editor mode enabled. Second screen has pilles editor. The reason I use both is fixing jobs, like rows of borked poles or big areas of dodgy blocks can be done in the editor and saved, then instantly loaded up in the empty world. If a particular job needs done by hand, or I need a reference for a rotation then I whack em down and 'prefab save' then I can load this back up into pilles editor. Im working faster now I think than I could ever have before. Working this way has a few snags which I hinted at earlier, using 'prefab save' ingame or maybe it's saving via the editor cleans out the prefabs XML so I''ve started writing my sleeper groups in my backup then dropping them into the game folder at the end to test. Also once sleepers are saved into the .tts, when the prefab is loaded back up ingame they are invisible and if the prefab is saved via 'prefab save' the sleeper blocks will be removed, which is kinda related to your issue. My counter atm is when I consider a section 'finished' and ready for sleeper groups, I place my sleepers in game a group at a time in a single round as the 'final job' and write the xml as I go. You could on a small build just place em all in a single shot quite fast and 'prefab save' em in as it's easy enough with the editor woring out the coords needed. I'm keeping notes per section of the order I add groups to the xml, but thats for easy tracking as I expect the hub in total to contain at least 500 or so spawn areas but the gamestages XML seems quite flexable as the master controller for really turning things up or down once the groups are set into the prefabs. Once my sleepers are added tho they are blocked out of using this easy method of placing them in, I dunno if there's a tweak could be made to the DLL as I'm sure in the first build it was released in you could re-load a prefab with the sleeper blocks visible by default. It's far from the end of the world tho, pille has done an awesome job the past couple weeks refining the editor and as rotations are much less an issue with sleepers making minor adjustments or additions can be done on the fly.

Yeah pretty much. The pencil mode is where I'm spending most of my time, the things that were a bit tiresome to draw in hals are easy with your brushes and I can switch over to select mode with a hot key whenever it's needed. When I'm skimming through layers and spot something that needs fixing I either select air to erase the mistake or whatever the block is directly to replace, two clicks and I'm skimming down the layers again. Not had to remove layers yet but had no issues doing rows/columns, Hals' approach was pretty useful for that as every fresh extract will need trimming above and below, however the days of having to extract are limited for me now as I'm finding it much easier to make a base build in the editor to freshen up in an empty SP world with the games editor mode enabled with the bbb commands.

One other little thing, by default scrolling the mouse moves the grid up/down, even working on big prefabs I tend be be zoomed enough to view the whole grid. Can this be swapped with scrolling through layers by default? or perhaps this is a minor change I could tweak myself? I't cool we can mouseover the bars and scroll, but again if im working layer by layer, the ability to place and move up without having to move the cursor is quite handy as I tend to ctrl + scroll for zooming anyway so I don't have to leave the grid.

I wish I could offer more critique but if this is allowing the drawing of blocks straight onto the grid then happy days, can I hold shift when in pencil mode to draw lines/boxes? also when in this mode maybe have r.mouse (or another button) directly copy another block when clicked? The reason being, if I make a mistake atm I have to select the block, dig out the edit on the block list and hit set then switch back to what I was using and continue, in hals I would just r.click some air, edit the offender and r.click what I was doing and continue. Everything else I've tried outside of importing a prefab into another prefab (as soon as prefabbing is back on its feet I do this lots) has worked. Some mouse over text would be a massive help, especially for those who are familiar with hals' and kinda know what they're looking for but not sure how yours goes about it. I like the method of painting and being able to set those blocks, but 99% of the time if Im in the editor it's to make corrections or save time building big walls or just tedious jobs you can do in seconds instead of placing manually in game (concrete pole rotations... I'm looking right at you). One thing I do believe may be missing is the ability to copy multiple layers within a prefab, I tried selecting on multiple layers but once I moved up or down the selected area drops. Hals editor used to let us select the amount of layers we wanted to copy then you could simply size up the area on the bottom layer and paste it where ever. Now you side views mean I can build layer by layer in any direction so I could work that way, but sometimes when I need a full prefab it's simpler to set the amount of layers it has and select the whole area in the bottom layer to bring it all over in seconds. I didn't want to say earlier as I'm only really starting to use it a bit more now, but what an amazing piece of work, the features I've needed so far have all been there and aside from a few minor QoL adjustments I don't think we could ask for more (but can we have some more!).

That thread was an interesting read, should have known stompy would know what that gibberish meant but it does open up possibilities for sure tho im not so sure I could bend it to my will enough to make it work with prefabs 117 x 117 that are required to be laid out in a certain way or llook terrible.

yeah got that up and running, no problems... yet

I currently have the hub sitting in navesgane, I'm not sure if it's gonna be possible to put it back into random gen at this point in a neat and tidy way. I'll make something available by the end of the experimental period, the project is in a state of flux atm while I consider a bunch of different options. The previewer seems to work fine, throws us a bone of hope that there's a bug elsewhere which could end up being fixed.

distant terrain is overwriting the prefab meshes and still looks a little wonky in places, it's a lot easier to pick up on when your flying around but down at ground level the skyline is stunning, you can start to appreciate just how many buildings there is when you can see 4-5 streets from the window of the house your looting. Getting it to work well with sleepers and play nice is an ambitious task but it already looks awesome from the ground when your running around or travelling the highway, it's huge how much more immersive the city feels when you can see a massive wedge of it from higher vantage points.

The custom hub layout code at the bottom of the rwgmixer has a few example of how to manually place streets (roads) and prefabs/prefab lots and you can always download the project itself to see what I've done in the mixer. The short answer is yes but the custom hub layout is causing errors and cannot be used ingame, this may or may not be fixed in future but until it does the only way to get away with the 'prefab grid' technique is in navezgane atm.

Still a lot of work to do but the first version of the distant terrain meshes are complete, the views are amazing, the pimps really done a nice job with this feature and big thanks to hal for getting the commands to us. Business district A view down the highway In-game previewer view Basketball arena/southside Long view, the skyscraper is approx 960-1000m away

Hi Pille, nice work with the editor so far I hope to spend some time getting to know it over the comming weeks. Just tried the links for the 64bit version and both downloads are giving me once they are extracted and run. 32bit version seems fine.

Just the reasoning behind some of the settings in the rwgmixer, I do the modding side of things on the Northern Lan server and use that to basically setup the game for the types of things we most enjoyed through the alpha's (PvP, City combat, hardcore survival) and it's become a rolling WIP XML mess project that we tweak/add based on our player feedback/personal expirience. So while the release version of slaanhatten is bare bones, it's kinda designed to be something you can add to your own mixer/game and use the way you like. The included mixer is just a quick copy/paste "I dont care just wanna look" vanilla job with the required tweaks to get it in the game in as good a way as possible.

4200 is what I use to cater for a high offset and give plenty of room for the terrain to make the transition to the rest of the world. In all honesty it's been a while since I've really sat down and looked at that but I generally like to play with at least a 0.6 offset. The bigger cells are a pain in some ways but offer some benefits too depending how your setting up a game/server. I've never had cities or towns overlap into the hub, but generally speaking it contains the loot of about 10+ vanilla towns so I like to have a thinned down world where the city is the main feature and my cells are typically larger than I imagine most would use. Experimentation is the key tho, if you get it setup and working in a way that your happy with then thats awesome and the feedback is always useful, I'll defo be experimenting more in future to get those cells trimmed down for sure.