Project Slaanhatten

[Slaan]

Can you make a quick video of you applying spawn volumes using pilles and explain how it works as you go? I feel like I am making stuff up, and you are likely the for most expert right now.

 

Can give it a go, just time atm is my enemy as my work shifts are all over the place hence the cheapo shadowplay vids that I can set uploading while I sleep. Those apartments were a beastly task tho, my eyes were popping out by the end of that session and I actually had to just stop but I think I can throw something together soon.

 

Also consider I'm still hitting some 'triggered empty volume' stuff and now I know the groups are in the right spot and have the required blocks within etc (once again, pille saves the day) there may be bugs with the system. The funny thing is in that last video, I check the console before I hit the apartments as one of the simpler groups I'd placed triggers nothing lol then pretty much everything else was as crazy as I'd hoped.

[Slaan]

Quality is not awesome, my net is poop atm but hopefully this will help.

 

[video=youtube;E3v0HW-pjA0]

[Guppycur]

Do you realize you can use right click to resize the sleeper volumes? You do not need to use the sleeper volume size boxes. :-)

 

Thanks for this video, I'm watching it now and will make more comments as I go through it.

[Guppycur]

Excellent video. The sleepers work better than I thought they would. Intelligent volume placement is going to be vital. I like it.

 

Hal had some comment about sleepers coming in as blocks if you do one thing instead of the other, but I didn't pay attention to what, but it may have been why they didn't attack.

 

Anyway, fantastic show and tell.

 

What Hal blank world is that? I feel I've missed something...

[Slaan]

The empty world is what hal's editor (button panel?) unlocked I believe, I've never seen it before but it's quite possible I missed it in 15.

Main reason I use it is because it removes the need to extract prefabs (and the time it takes to trim/edit), with editor mode enabled 'prefab save' is just too handy to have and being able to switch between the ingame and pilles editor without having to close either is awesome.

 

I can't avoid extraction all together, when it comes to stealing whole buildings and dropping them in the hub as a fixed part of a prefab section then mass bbb imports and a couple of large extracts were the way to go. I reckon I could do all the chopping in Pilles editor tho so hopefully we'll say nay to the tedious extraction process in A16, time will tell when I start 'adding' stuff again instead of the touch-ups I'm mainly focused on atm.

[Slaan]

*fixed*

 

Test version is available, the full hub and it's meshes are there just check the included readme and map for details.

Edited July 22, 2017 by Slaan (see edit history)

[Kaiser502]

Crazy Mountain

 

Is this on you game to, of am I reporting a bug. Either way love your work. This thing is awesome.

 

Edited July 24, 2017 by Kaiser502
forgot pic (see edit history)

[Laz Man]

Quality is not awesome, my net is poop atm but hopefully this will help.

 

[video=youtube;E3v0HW-pjA0]

 

Hey Slaan, thanks for the vid. For some reason when I place sleepers in game they blow up after a few seconds. Have you run into that problem before. I observed this using Hal's empty world. I just noticed its any block. Any block placed ends up falling and going poof. I suspect this has something to do with hal's empty world.

Edited July 24, 2017 by Laz Man (see edit history)

[StompyNZ]

Sounds like SI is disabled for some reason. Can happen if the chunk generator glitches out

[Slaan]

Enable dm and turn off physics, or bad things can happen lol

[Slaan]

Is this on you game to, of am I reporting a bug. Either way love your work. This thing is awesome.

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]21924[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]21924[/ATTACH]

 

Theres details on the placement of the hub within navezgane in the read me included in the download. For now you'll have to live with it but there's plans to make all that bad clipping disappear and offer an easy way for people to move the whole city should they desire

 

**edit**

 

One thing I did not mention is that for this test version the hub is literally dropped ontop of the area so any prefabs that would have been there will be overwritten, but their distant meshes will still appear. Again, when it's time for a proper release all of these things will be purged.

Edited July 24, 2017 by Slaan (see edit history)

[Laz Man]

Enable dm and turn off physics, or bad things can happen lol

 

I thought that might be it. Thanks will try that out later.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Theres details on the placement of the hub within navezgane in the read me included in the download. For now you'll have to live with it but there's plans to make all that bad clipping disappear and offer an easy way for people to move the whole city should they desire

 

**edit**

 

One thing I did not mention is that for this test version the hub is literally dropped ontop of the area so any prefabs that would have been there will be overwritten, but their distant meshes will still appear. Again, when it's time for a proper release all of these things will be purged.

 

Another temp. fix might be to increase the air layers above the prefab so it replaces any large mountains.

[Slaan]

 

Another temp. fix might be to increase the air layers above the prefab so it replaces any large mountains.

 

The curse of saving thru the empty world is it removes the excess air layers as I move through. BigC90210 has wrote me a wicked little script for re-calculating the lot coords and fixing the xml, further down the line it will remove the prefabs that dont need to be there too but he is working on *stuff* atm so I'll work more on a neater placement in the future and quite probably a custom nav world using herphols DLL to sculpt the terrain a little better.

 

Back when I started I never thought I'd see the hub in Navezgane even tho it's always been possible, now it's kinda gotta be there, there's a whole bunch of options available that we just could not have in random gen. Extending the highway across the map with prefab sections as one example, connecting diersville and perishton, joining the river up to the one in Nav. I wasn't a big fan of using herphols editor for extracting prefabs (117 x 117 x upto 70 could get a little troublesome) so I never used it, but the way it writes to the Nav world file is extremely useful now.

[Laz Man]

The curse of saving thru the empty world is it removes the excess air layers as I move through. BigC90210 has wrote me a wicked little script for re-calculating the lot coords and fixing the xml, further down the line it will remove the prefabs that dont need to be there too but he is working on *stuff* atm so I'll work more on a neater placement in the future and quite probably a custom nav world using herphols DLL to sculpt the terrain a little better.

 

Back when I started I never thought I'd see the hub in Navezgane even tho it's always been possible, now it's kinda gotta be there, there's a whole bunch of options available that we just could not have in random gen. Extending the highway across the map with prefab sections as one example, connecting diersville and perishton, joining the river up to the one in Nav. I wasn't a big fan of using herphols editor for extracting prefabs (117 x 117 x upto 70 could get a little troublesome) so I never used it, but the way it writes to the Nav world file is extremely useful now.

 

Once your ready for release, you should make slaan hatten a separate selection alongside navesgane and random world gen.

[Slaan]

Once your ready for release, you should make slaan hatten a separate selection alongside navesgane and random world gen.

 

One possible idea is that there could be multiple versions of each section, you run a script to do a shuffle and build the hub before it's added to your prefabs folder from the selection of options available for each section.

 

More complicated edits, say like the bridge over the river that cross over multiple tiles can just be deleted from the prefab sections completely and dropped in on top as a separate prefab altogether. So using the bridge example, I just remove it and re-add it as a giant single prefab, the script can pick between bridge A which is perfect, bridge B which is half broken, bridge C is perfect but has crazy sleeper bomb... and stuff like this can be done via empty world and prefab save without having to mess around with the usual extracting/harder to learn things.

 

I'd say this is just the beginning but the project is well over a year old, you remember getting this in the mail....

[Slaan]

I'll have a fresh release available soon consisting of mainly the northern half of the hub, spent waaaaay more time on this than originally intended but things are slowly coming together now the majority of the larger custom stuff has been *fixed*.

 

Till then, checkout the new (but quite old) hospital area.

 

[SlicksGirl]

how is the rgen version of this going?

[Laz Man]

Great hospital. Those sleeper spawns really makes the place come alive.

[ajlam05]

Very Cool! I will be waiting for the random gen release of it soon

[Slaan]

I've yet to test the custom hub layout code with the 16.3b but I'm not optimistic about the project in it's current form hitting random gen. The fixing process turned into a chore a lot faster than I predicted, 120~ hours in and I'd say I'm maybe a third of the way through although admittedly I've literally done nothing the past few weeks and probably won't be doing much for a little while yet.

 

Other than the layout code issues with RWG, my biggest worry atm is performance, as gorgeous as it looks I think the constant switch from distant terrain to nearby draw distance is having a huge impact, try stacking a socket city full of big buildings over a large area and you'll start to see what I mean.

 

I've tested the hub in multiple locations throughout Navezgane and regardless of where I drop it there is gonna be a huge amount of work to make it look like it fits (we're talking about custom prefabs around the entire 1.5 x 1.5km hub to make it match the landscape). It's hard to motivate myself to make the Nav version look as good as it could as it was never intended to even be there in the first place and loosing the ability to spawn in RWG was like getting kicked in the balls as that's where I've always enjoyed playing and why I started putting it together in the first place.

 

I'm not sure the pimps intended or expected the layout code to be used the way I have and ever since the beginning I've always been wary on the lifespan of the project and would it last till gold, it has been and still is an experimental learning experience and now more than ever I think it's time to start considering a 2.0 and looking at the drawing board to see how I can bring the new RWG to it's knees with some of the old tricks I've learned but there's just some things that don't look they'll ever be possible without the custom hub layouts (or some new version of), loosing the ability to build what I want where I want it is a massive deal and is essentially what the project was about in the first place.

 

You can expect some form of the hub to make it into a Navezgane map *soon-ish*, don't hold your breath waiting for a RWG version, although if they fix the issues with whatever is going on with the layout code then rest assured I'll be back at it full time to try and make it work. The last thing I want is to leave over 1000 hours worth of work sitting in limbo but the flip side is I don't want to waste any more time on something that's potentially gonna be unusable.

[Pille]

Wow awful news. I have no clue about most of the things you've mentioned but I might be able to support you regarding the performance issues. There are a few ideas I will test...

Edited September 13, 2017 by Pille (see edit history)

[stallionsden]

I've yet to test the custom hub layout code with the 16.3b but I'm not optimistic about the project in it's current form hitting random gen. The fixing process turned into a chore a lot faster than I predicted, 120~ hours in and I'd say I'm maybe a third of the way through although admittedly I've literally done nothing the past few weeks and probably won't be doing much for a little while yet.

 

Other than the layout code issues with RWG, my biggest worry atm is performance, as gorgeous as it looks I think the constant switch from distant terrain to nearby draw distance is having a huge impact, try stacking a socket city full of big buildings over a large area and you'll start to see what I mean.

 

I've tested the hub in multiple locations throughout Navezgane and regardless of where I drop it there is gonna be a huge amount of work to make it look like it fits (we're talking about custom prefabs around the entire 1.5 x 1.5km hub to make it match the landscape). It's hard to motivate myself to make the Nav version look as good as it could as it was never intended to even be there in the first place and loosing the ability to spawn in RWG was like getting kicked in the balls as that's where I've always enjoyed playing and why I started putting it together in the first place.

 

I'm not sure the pimps intended or expected the layout code to be used the way I have and ever since the beginning I've always been wary on the lifespan of the project and would it last till gold, it has been and still is an experimental learning experience and now more than ever I think it's time to start considering a 2.0 and looking at the drawing board to see how I can bring the new RWG to it's knees with some of the old tricks I've learned but there's just some things that don't look they'll ever be possible without the custom hub layouts (or some new version of), loosing the ability to build what I want where I want it is a massive deal and is essentially what the project was about in the first place.

 

You can expect some form of the hub to make it into a Navezgane map *soon-ish*, don't hold your breath waiting for a RWG version, although if they fix the issues with whatever is going on with the layout code then rest assured I'll be back at it full time to try and make it work. The last thing I want is to leave over 1000 hours worth of work sitting in limbo but the flip side is I don't want to waste any more time on something that's potentially gonna be unusable.

 

Spoke to kin about the hub layouts. He was unaware they werent working. And mentioned he had to rip everything apart to sort the socket system out. He did ask what issues errors was happening so he could look into it. I directed him to stompynz thread about it but if you have any further to add to it pm me or kin or maybe start a thread.

[Slaan]

Wow awful news. I have no clue about most of the things you've mentioned but I might be able to support you regarding the performance issues. There are a few ideas I will test...

 

I'll tidy up what I have and push out the latest stuff, this is not the end of days by any means but the project itself had it's foundations set in A12 and four conversions is starting to take it's toll. There's a few errors cropping up that I can't nail down but it's nothing that a restart doesn't remedy.

 

That said, the Nav version is very rough and feels like a big step backwards but the content of the hub itself is a real beauty and other than the wonky performance I'm really happy with what I have done, the sections that have been touched up are really looking more complete than any previous versions I've released.

 

Gotta remember tho, I can't just fix stucco_house_1, I gotta fix all 45 stucco_house_1's because of the way I built the hub which is the real killer and the thing that's eating me the most is spending so much time working with the converting/touch ups that there's been zero progress towards actually fleshing the rest of the area out and taking advantage of all the cool stuff that A16 brought us (and wondering how long the A17 conversion will take). There's over 200 buildings not including the wacky stuff like the bridges, sewers, highway and all the things inbetween and easily space for a 'few' more and while things don't have to be perfect, one day it would be nice to get it error free.

 

When it's sorted you guys can see what you think of the performance, sacrifices will be made for the make up of the city itself naturally as it's always been but then again I do like my cake and will eat it

 

Spoke to kin about the hub layouts. He was unaware they werent working. And mentioned he had to rip everything apart to sort the socket system out. He did ask what issues errors was happening so he could look into it. I directed him to stompynz thread about it but if you have any further to add to it pm me or kin or maybe start a thread.

 

Thats great to hear, the errors can be tested simply running the custom hub test layouts that are still in the mixer. The worlds will generate in the previewer without issues. The problem arises when you approach the area in game and you get a game killing error that persists through restarts, I've never been able to get close enough to view the hub on the horizon it's like as soon as it hits the distant draw distance it dies. The prefabs themselves (minus a couple of errors here and there) generate fine as individual wilderness POI's.

[stallionsden]

I'll tidy up what I have and push out the latest stuff, this is not the end of days by any means but the project itself had it's foundations set in A12 and four conversions is starting to take it's toll. There's a few errors cropping up that I can't nail down but it's nothing that a restart doesn't remedy.

 

That said, the Nav version is very rough and feels like a big step backwards but the content of the hub itself is a real beauty and other than the wonky performance I'm really happy with what I have done, the sections that have been touched up are really looking more complete than any previous versions I've released.

 

Gotta remember tho, I can't just fix stucco_house_1, I gotta fix all 45 stucco_house_1's because of the way I built the hub which is the real killer and the thing that's eating me the most is spending so much time working with the converting/touch ups that there's been zero progress towards actually fleshing the rest of the area out and taking advantage of all the cool stuff that A16 brought us (and wondering how long the A17 conversion will take). There's over 200 buildings not including the wacky stuff like the bridges, sewers, highway and all the things inbetween and easily space for a 'few' more and while things don't have to be perfect, one day it would be nice to get it error free.

 

When it's sorted you guys can see what you think of the performance, sacrifices will be made for the make up of the city itself naturally as it's always been but then again I do like my cake and will eat it

 

 

 

Thats great to hear, the errors can be tested simply running the custom hub test layouts that are still in the mixer. The worlds will generate in the previewer without issues. The problem arises when you approach the area in game and you get a game killing error that persists through restarts, I've never been able to get close enough to view the hub on the horizon it's like as soon as it hits the distant draw distance it dies. The prefabs themselves (minus a couple of errors here and there) generate fine as individual wilderness POI's.

 

Has this been tested for a16.3 at all on case he has got to the problem or

[Slaan]

Im gonna look into this now, just prepping the stuff for the mini navesgane release so people can at least take a look at whats been done so far. The mixer will take a little work compared to the nav setup but I'll rport back in a couple hours or so.