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16

Developer Created Tutorials / Re: Thazagers Coding Tutorial Series - NEWCOMERS WATCH!!!

« on: Dec 25, 18, 11:23:42 AM »

They are incredibly helpful to get your toes wet in HeroEngine!

Dwight, you still lurking hehe. How us pirates nest coming along?

Slowly

I had the world reset and finally have some serious time to spend on development. It's been a while since I used HE and I am finally understanding the reasoning behind HSL!

17

Developer Created Tutorials / Re: Thazagers Coding Tutorial Series - NEWCOMERS WATCH!!!

« on: Dec 15, 18, 01:59:32 PM »

They are incredibly helpful to get your toes wet in HeroEngine!

18

Game Dev and Gaming / Re: 3D Studio Max Toolset

« on: Jun 29, 17, 01:19:34 PM »

Welcome back. Its good to see you again. Now get your game released damn you haha!

It's about time indeed!

---

Updated the toolset to version 3
- Optimized functions to update UD's
- Implemented the whitebox importer tool (this is an internal tool that Jrom90 once created) for those who use it for their world.
- Updated first post with a roadmap and feature requests.

19

Design & World Building / Re: [Area Design] Best practise

« on: Jun 29, 17, 01:13:25 PM »

And henceforth, my plans get optimized, I believe:

The Scenario by Thazager and Amanda would be to use an alternating brick pattern to not have a small position where the player can seamlessly cross borders with 3 adjecent area's and thus loading and unloading things in memory.

- The brick pattern is something very advantaguous and would resolve a lot of my issues, and not create new ones to the current extent of my knowledge.

Taking nocake's advice into consideration (Scenario nocake), I hope you mean something like as depicted below?

- Advantage here is that the island won't get rendered as long as the player is not in the vicinity of the border of the ocean-area surrounding the island directly.
- Advantage as well is that as soon as the player is on the island, I only would be needing to render the area with the yellow arrow depicting the viewdistance additionally, which would not be resource intensive, as it would only consist of a heightmap and ocean.
- Disadvantage is that the minimum render-distance is of that of the largest island in that area for the entire world, but that can be solved by having different environment-settings on a per area basis.

Having the render-distance decreased in the area surrounding the ocean would even leave enough time without a loading screen to render the island.

To conclude: To whose who have a lot more experience with HeroEngine over the years since its development and testing, would you also suggest the scenario as depicted by nocake, if I have understood it correctly?

(P.S.: This has been a really helpful discussion, so I want to thank you all for your input so far!)

20

Design & World Building / Re: [Area Design] Best practise

« on: Jun 29, 17, 09:40:56 AM »

Thank you so much for your input so far, it helped create a whole new plan for the island-environment.

Has anyone come up with a solution on having the size of a water plane the exact same size as a heightmap? So far, the heightmap units and water-units are not the same.

21

Design & World Building / Re: [Area Design] Best practise

« on: Jun 29, 17, 04:07:56 AM »

From what I have seen and read about, linking 4 areas at a corner point is not very good. It might be better to link them where 1 is half way between 2 others, or have the row of areas offset by half an area.

So you won't get players, by chance, going around in circles where the 4 areas meet. That's actually a good idea! I will build some testing grounds and see how it works! Thanks a lot Thazager!

Uhhh Dwight you are back?

I was never gone; I lurked. But yes, I am back now in active development again after we developed the game in a different Engine. Porting assets over as we speak and developing the 3D Studio Max toolset again

22

Design & World Building / [Area Design] Best practise

« on: Jun 27, 17, 09:54:01 AM »

Hello community!

We are currently in the process to port over all of our assets and systems to HeroEngine, but I am wondering what your experience would say what the best solution is to my current issue.

In the attachment, you will find 3 potential scenario's for our seamless world grid. The game itself is based on an island structure: the player will travel from island to island to discover new abilities, new quests, and so forth. Hence, I believe that most area-load would be on those islands. What would the best option be?

Scenario #1:
Each Area consists of only 1 heightmap. Both in the X and Y direction, we will start expanding. Each heightmap will have 1 area server (a la 15MB of RAM on average on the server).

Scenario #2:
The island will be built on a single heightmap in the area, with 8 surrounding heightmaps creating a nice and even area which can be seamlessly linked in a better way. The other area's, which won't have a lot of players, consists of one large heightmap and an ocean the same size of a standard island-area.
Advantages: we are increasing the size of an area which isn't highly populated and we do have a whole area server for a single island. The RAM on the area server, if an area if 4 times as large but less populated would be less than 4x15=60MB. When there's less populated placed, increasing it size would be rational if game-design requires it so.
Disadvantage: ?

Scenario #3:
We will create a single area with a single heightmap which only has the island. We would then be creating L-shaped area's with 2 heightmaps that go around an island-area. The blue waves indicate the ocean.
Advantage: the island-area is smaller, and thus the world server can concentrate more on that island.
Disadvantages: ?

I would love to have your input on our area design concepts! We believe that most of the time, the player will start exploring the area's at the bottom of the sea and will visit islands solely to trade goods and do quests. Quests of course will be handled by a different system area, and thus won't have a large impact on the island-area server.

My plan is option 3 due to server load and player-management.

Kind regards,


Dwight

23

Game Dev and Gaming / Re: 3D Studio Max Toolset

« on: Jun 26, 17, 01:13:50 AM »

Welcome back!

Thanks Scott!

~Toolset has been updated to Version 2

- Added a button that toggles see-through of objects (instead of first going into the object preferences)
- Added Quick Notes (Scene notes that get saved in the .max file)
- Added a shameful link to the website of our project
---

Feel free to request things to be added for your projects specifically!

24

Game Dev and Gaming / 3D Studio Max Toolset

« on: Jun 25, 17, 07:48:09 AM »

Hello guys,

It's been a while since our team was active in the HeroEngine community, but we decided to return after having created an alpha slice in a different game-engine.

Right now, we are porting all the assets over and as you guys might have guessed, it can be a hassle to get the assets just right! Think about coloring, or pivots, or even those User Defines!

I have created a tool that helps solve these issues : http://www.pirates-nest.com/3dsmax/3DSToolset.mse

Place this script in your Autodesk 3D Studio Max scripts folder (usually located in C:/Program Files/Autodesk/3DS Max 20xx/scripts/).

It includes an auto-update function as well: as soon as you open the script, and an update is available, your tool will update as well!

Happy modelling!

---------
Roadmap*:
- Object Destruction
- Adding bones to the destroyed elements, and thus creating an explosion animation that is animated by bones
- Project Manager tool
- Name-Manager
- Stone Creator (bulk included)

Feature requests:
- None


* Elements on the roadmap are not in order of importance and may be implemented at random

25

Art & Art Pipeline / Re: Unity3D Assets

« on: Jan 24, 14, 05:19:43 AM »

Yes there is, but you would model and construct them differently

Not an out-of-the-box option.

26

Art & Art Pipeline / Re: Skydome too high

« on: Jan 15, 14, 02:44:11 AM »

If you would be so kind and show us that skydome in 3ds max / maya while it is selected (so that we can see the transpose gizmo).

Cooper is right on this one: cutting something in half isn't going to automatically put your transpose gizmo at the bottom of the object, where it SHOULD be.

27

Design & World Building / Re: occlusion culls and frame rate

« on: Jan 14, 14, 05:14:33 AM »

Can you show that scene with a wire-render [ctrl w].

Where did you hear that 100k is recommended?

28

Art & Art Pipeline / Re: Maya 2013 Export Issue

« on: Jan 08, 14, 06:27:03 PM »

admin is just the name of the user, the name of the computer.

Look really close, it says aRdmin instead of admin.

29

Scripting & Programming / Re: Game World Shuts down after inactvity

« on: Jan 08, 14, 05:17:51 AM »

Does this mean I will HAVE to buy the full, download version for me to host?

While still in production:
- You would have to buy the full license in order to host it on your own server and do what you want with it

While being live:
- Servers are provided for you and won't shut down due to inactivity (when not profitable, of course Idea Fabrik will not host the servers for you after 1 year of being live ["alive" would be a better wording, I reckon].

Hosting your own servers will be around 1500 dollars a month of course

30

Art & Art Pipeline / Re: Seams in my skycube?

« on: Jan 06, 14, 02:52:05 PM »

Yes, there are.

Is this one of the engine's skycubes?