TGEA 1.7.0 Beta1 feedback

#21 @Adam, that shouldn't be too hard. We had a painting system to go along with the GroundCover, but it was very hacky and not really worth putting along side the system itself for this release. Basically what it was doing was indexing into a U8 buffer sized 256x256 and using the value at each point as an "opaqueness" for each terrain square.

Instead what you'd want to do is grab the TerrainBlock, then when it goes to place an element in the GC code, test to see if the material at that x, y square position matches whichever "layer" you specify in your ground cover types. So you'd basically go and get the material index, and if it's grass and the current element is the grass layer (that's going to be arbitrary up to you) go ahead and place it, otherwise skip. Make sure not to screw up the randomness of the GC placement though.

Hope that helps.

#22 @ Ken
I am asking this because I think I misunderstood something.
Can TGEA 1.7 be run on cards that do not have shader support.
In the pre public beta you asked us to try it on cards without shaders and I have tried 4 different cards that have no shader support with no luck.

#23 First of all - thank you GG/SG/PG/FL and all others who is working on this.
With this release the Torque started to look like "big guys" (engines).

Hopefully I'll be able to find more time to dig into engine deeper than just running it "to see how is it going". My project takes too much time.
/me goes away to re-schedule own time :)

#24 TGEA *should* run on non-shadered cards, however we are running into cases where it is not.

There wasn't a lot of time to test in the office on a lot of different cards, so Geforce MX was about it.. It's something we have seen fail now on Intel integrated graphics and we are trying to find out what the deal is.

Just letting us know what cards it isn't running on is helpful, so thanks and we will keep you posted as we make progress on this issue :)

#25 Hey guys,
First and foremost - oustanding release - and simply its a well needed enhancement to tgea!

ONe quick question, in the tge 3d demo - the buttons appear to function for a xb 360 controller, but they do not actually work - with the exeption of the "A" in game for jumping. Is this true? or have I messed up something?

Sean

#26 The menu works if I use:
$enableDirectInput = "1";

#27 Good find!

#28 Enjoy:
Use the xbox controller to control the character and menus.
if default.bind.cs
After

moveMap.bind( gamepad, yaxis, "D", "-0.23 0.23", gamePadMoveY );

Add

//Added Sean T. Boyette
$enableDirectInput = "1";
activateDirectInput();
enableJoystick();    
//Buttons
moveMap.bind( joystick, button0, jump );
moveMap.bind( joystick, button1, altTrigger );
moveMap.bind( joystick, button2, toggleFirstPerson );
moveMap.bind( joystick, button6, toggleCamera);

//Right Stick
moveMap.bind( joystick, rxaxis,"D", "-0.23 0.23", gamePadYaw );
moveMap.bind( joystick, ryaxis,"D", "-0.23 0.23", gamePadPitch );
//Left Stick
moveMap.bind( joystick, xaxis, "D", "-0.23 0.23", gamePadMoveX );
moveMap.bind( joystick, yaxis, "D", "-0.23 0.23", gamePadMoveY );

// D-PAD
// Press are release
moveMap.bind( joystick, upov, "moveforward" );
moveMap.bind( joystick, dpov, "movebackward" );
moveMap.bind( joystick, lpov, "moveleft" );
moveMap.bind( joystick, rpov, "moveright" );
// Press before releasing of previous pov
moveMap.bind( joystick, upov2, "moveforward" );
moveMap.bind( joystick, dpov2, "movebackward" );
moveMap.bind( joystick, lpov2, "moveleft" );
moveMap.bind( joystick, rpov2, "moveright" );
//End Sean T. Boyette

#29 Just tried the latest beta, looks good! only problem im having is when I use Atlas2 it sits their part way through "Loading Objects", it doesn't appeared to have crashed, on the other hand "lightmapDimension" is set to 0.

Regards!

#30 The open beta is humming along smoothly on my computer for the time being, have opened up the Atlas demo, the Forge demo, and the standard TGE demo ported over to TGEA, but I haven't been able to open the T3D demo. :(

#31 Here's a quick fix for Sean's post to get 'Halo' style controls.
I found that pushing forward on the left stick moved the character backwards.
And I didn't want the inverted controls on the right stick.
In the default.bind.cs:

function gamePadMoveY( %val )
{
$mvYAxis_L = %val;
}

change to

function gamePadMoveY( %val )
{
$mvYAxis_L = -%val;
}

and

ffunction gamePadPitch( %val )
{
$mvPitchUpSpeed = -0.1 * %val; // Inverted!
}

change to

function gamePadPitch( %val )
{
$mvPitchUpSpeed = 0.1 * %val; // Inverted!
}

#32 Had a brief play with the beta this weekend and overall I like the way things are going.

The addition of the terrain editor fills an area that has been putting me off using TGEA in the past and the megaterrains are a great bonus :)

I've not dug into the code changes in too much detail, but I do like the changes in the way projects are generated as modules. The ability to have multiple windows and use native menus/dialogues are also nice additions.

Looking forward to using TGEA more in the future :)

#33 Looks like their also working on converters to move Legacy to Atlas :) but still not yet managed to compile my own Atlas to work ingame, but the water demo does? Any suggestions?

#34 Great upgrade. I am quite happy with it.
After playing with the demos, I ported a little game I've been working on. It took all of about 15 minutes to convert, including compiling the map2dif exe and converting my difs to work. :)
Great job. Once the next bug fix release is out, I will play with it some more. (don't like having to start from scratch everytime I change a dts)

#35 Hi !

Thank you for this major uprade WOAAHHH !!!!.
I understand that this is just the beta version buuuut;

Just two questions:

1. What happened to bloom !!!!? (Yes, we can live without HDR lightning or FSAA, or make it selectable at least)

We've used the TGE 1.5.2 for our upcoming mmorph and tried implement the bloom but it was way too
expensive performance wise.
Now we've been waiting for TGEA to evolve (way too buggy for now and too time comsuming to
develop for (we are funding based fulltime developer, VERY small team) and we hit the limits of TGE 1.5.2 (optimization wise) and port our project for that (that improved batch rendering in TGEA is a top notch).

2. When one creates a new megaterrain, do I really have to paint it manually, since the terrain texture ->
apply doesn't work ?
EDIT: sorted

And last a suggestion/wish;

Is it possible to implement or to increase to amount of used textures from that ancient only 6 textures per terrain or at least to make an upgrade (by GG) to assign a detail map per texture used, opposed to that one which is used throughout the whole terrain (see Dekker Ying's solution) ?
Using Atlas terrains are way too cumbersome for us, and large even using Grome.
This MegaTerrain is sized exactly for our project :)

PS2: How do I get the ground cover to work ? Since I've tried with all the provided demos, none of the billboards nor shapes won't show up.
What I'm doing wrong, again :P ?

Cheers !!!

Here's the links to a sneak preview (it's on a beta stage right now)

www.blackmetalgames.fi/IMG/ChatZuma_1.jpg

www.blackmetalgames.fi/IMG/ChatZuma_2.jpg

www.blackmetalgames.fi/IMG/ChatZuma_3.jpg

#36 Great demo, been playing with the huge terrains for days now runs perfect on my vista machine. I have a question tho, is this upgrade supposed to be able to run down to 1.5.2 graphics (opengl) ? I have another machine that has an intel 82945g graphics card in it and tgea beta wont run on it at all. Got the latest dx on it but no cigar.

#37 Theres not opengl support yet. That I believe is in the works but it will not make it into this release I do not believe. As far as downscaling, it is spose to be falling back to a supported rendering pipeline but for some reasion on intel based cards it seems to be causing some issues. I believe this is due to Intel's false reporting of supported features on the card. Its a issue that many many game development companies have been jumping on Intel about for some time now.

#38 Will GroundCover work on MegaTerrains?

#39 @Adam: Currently it only works on a single legacy terrain. I got it up and running in Atlas pretty quickly by using some castrays for the ground. I didn't try to get it working for megaterrains, but I believe that the main part of the problem (just from scanning through the code when editing it) is that it finds a terraininstance and attaches itself to that, and with megaterrains there are multiple instances. Probably wouldn't take too much to get it to support multiple blocks.

#40 The following information was verified TGEA 1.7.0 Beta 2 but a quick peek at the code in TGEA 1.7.0 Beta 1 looks like the information described below should apply as well.

Ground cover will work on "Mega Terrains" (from what I can tell, what was previously called "legacy" terrain has been completely replaced by "Mega Terrain"). You need to give your TerrainBlock a name and then specify that name in the groundcover terrain property.

For example if you had 4 terrains:

new TerrainBlock(Terrain1) {//...};
      new TerrainBlock(Terrain2) {//...};
      new TerrainBlock(Terrain3) {//...};
      new TerrainBlock(Terrain4) {//...};

and you wanted the GroundCover to go on Terrain4 you would specify:

new GroundCover(groundcover1) {
      //...
      terrain = "Terrain4";
      //...};

You can do this through the mission editor under the "Ground Cover General" section.

Also, from what I can tell, the TerrainBlock specified in the GroundCover terrain field only finds / assigns the named terrain object in the OnAdd function of TerrainBlock. This means if you create a GroundCover with the mission editor you won't see any ground cover until you save and restart the mission. It looks like GroundCover::InspectPostApply would probably be a good place to re-assign the associated terrain object but that method doesn't presently do anything (assuming this is where this code would be in the future).

Other than that, GroundCover will work just fine with multiple TerrainBlocks (aka "mega terrains" and also aka "legacy terrains").