Re: [Adonthell-devel] Started work on Waste's Edge map

[Kai Sterker]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 6:42 AM, Josh Glover <address@hidden> wrote:

>> All in all my goal is to get the map done as far as possible,
>
> That will be really great! I think once we have a functional (if not
> complete, from an art point of view) WE map, it will be really
> motivating.

That's what I hope as well.

> I'm struggling to find time to work on Adonthell right now, due to my
> coding time being taken up with other, quasi work-related projects.
> However, it would be hard not to work on Adonthell if it looked like
> we were pretty close to getting WE done! :)

Yeah. Done in that case will probably mean complete, but not very
polished. But then there is hope to actually get some artistic
contributions to fix that.

Anyway, as for my own progress, if I did not forget anything, it's now
possible to use wastesedge data with worldtest to look at the
work-in-progress map. Still has some issues I need to track down,
though:

* The render zones are not optimal yet, so transitions between floors
are a little rough and there appear to be places that are not
correctly covered by a render zone at all. The issue really is that I
have all but forgotten how the render zones were meant to work
exactly, so I need to look at the code first before I can tweak them
to my liking. Or maybe the code needs to change to what I have done
intuitively.

* The stairs from cellar to kitchen and from second to third floor do
not work well with the collision system. It's possible to climb them
while running, but not when just walking. I double checked the model
and that is fine, so no idea what the issue is. All other stairs that
use the same proportions, just in different directions, work
flawlessly. Needs some looking at in the debugger.


And some final words about the characters. Instead of having 15 clones
running around, I decided to use the v0.3 character graphics. I've
changed the convert_graphics.py script a bit to filter out the shadow
during the conversion and then used a batch-plugin for Gimp to
mass-upscale the individual frames. The animation and model file I
have built just needs to be copied for each character, plus a single
search+replace to change the path to the graphics/animation files.

I'm not quite sure if I got the character size 100% correct. Working
from the scale specified here

  http://adonthell.berlios.de/doc/index.php/Graphics:Angle#Examples.2FGuidelines

and some information about shoulder width (about 50cm) and an assumed
height of about 180cm, that boiled down to something like 25x58px.
Seeing that our base tiles are 48px wide, I changed that to 24x58px.
In the end, since a character frame is flat, but does of course
contain depth as well, I ended up making the model 24x18x56 (width,
depth, height). Might be debatable, but since it's supposed to be a
hack anyway, I didn't want to spend too much time on it. Might try
some slightly different sizes with the next NPCs I convert, to see
what might fit best.


Anyway, feel free to try it out and report whatever problems you might
encounter.

Kai