il pleut tous les jours

After months of silence etc.

It's been a long long time I was waiting for that.
CFe is open again under a new form.
That is all.
devWAM

And I know Google currently blocks this page, but it's a false alarm...

Here's a new 'ped'. It's Cucco the chicken. That's the model from Zelda: Twhilight Princess. It comes with a new set of animations I made in MAX2.
You can download it at Road Reaction.

In other news, FUEL has been released for PC. It rocks. Even runs on my comp.

This blog will probably become more active. Seeing I post useless shit there clearly is no reason I post my useless shit elsewhere than here. I'll work on the integrity of the tosh server and with my usual projects. First thing: Crashocalypse is now hosted here as well. We still have to bring the actual files back, but I fixed the layout, the galleries and the dead links. An update of Digga is coming as well and then a small update to BBQ for the people enjoying PvP. I got new animations for boned peds working in C2. I guess it's just a matter of time till I get the skeleton animations working too. I'll probably release a chicken (the one from Zelda TP) as a test (it's already ingame though, I'm testing the bones limitations). And then if I'm lucky, the fucking biker I work on for at least 1 month now. I'll also bring back some short tuts I posted on CWA, in here. I should actually create a tutorial tag.

What you see up there is a picture depicting the Stiletto in "Choro Q" style (didn't know the term untill a few hours ago). It's been drawn by Agent_Orange from the Carmageddon Wikia. You can see the original drawing here. TTR suggested me to do it in MAX and I thought it'd be a good idea to test some more simpmats. The result is a mix of wireframe actor rendering mode and full lit materials for cars. The new full lit trick is very simple and I'll explain it later this week.

This is the key to a lot of visual design tricks and creativity.

In a C2 track the lighting is usualy set at the the very start of the track text file. It only lets you specify the directional and ambiant light that will be applied on every material. Which is not much at all considering all the lighting settings that you can set in Plaything 2.
Without using the FULL LIT TRICK the game will only use the ambiant and directional lighting specified in the text file and the diffuse color. If you use the trick the game will follow the settings you set in Plaything2 for each material! This means diffuse color, ambiant/directional lighting, specular & specular force. Spending some time on the material settings can make a lot of difference ingame (visually). Lights become real lights because they are full lit now (logical you say). Chromey stuff, pipes and shiny things can be shiney now (high specular). It is possible to combine env mapping with diffuse lighting and special material settings to achieve very precise visual concepts. You can make different types of material react differently to the ambiant light or the directional light. Or create color schemes and work on the atmosphere of your track to give it more life or constitency in your track concept! (what I did with the last TDR Arena revamp for example)

So! How to make use of this trick you ask?
Well ages ago, people (probably Cesm/C2S/ChevyII) noticed there's one thing that isn't affected by the global lighting: the powerup materials. Then the easiest way is simply to create a single dummy powerup which you'll place totaly out of the track (usualy far under the track). It is needed to make it unreachable because all the "special" materials would be back to default if the powerup was activated. It can ofcourse be used as a trick too, activating a powerup would turn off all the lights in a track for example. Anyway back to the dummy itself: it must not be an empty dummy as we'll apply every "special material" to a triangle of the fake powerup. Have a look at this, this is what I use to easily sort them out and see which material is already activated via the full lit trick, it is a simple plan which I estimates the number of subdivisions based on the amount of needed "special materials" (easy to do in Max):



And here's an example (above). You can see most of the exterior materials are shady etc. and the corridor is full lit.
The FULL LIT TRICK might theoricaly also allow the use of textures with baked lighting and shadows. Making them full lit (read shadingless) would prevent the highlighted parts in a texture to be darkened or darker parts to be highlighted ingame. One can imagine a room in the nuclear silo where the light is green and is diffused in a very particular manner. Just get rid of the normal lighting by using the full lit trick and bake the green lighting you want in the textures. 3D programs like 3dsMax can bake shading and highlights into textures directly.
Another use is making hard shadows. No need to duplicate textures and make one darker. Just duplicate the material and use the lighting settings to make one darker (no specular, high specular force and low a/d lighting) then apply it to the triangles defining the shadow and to one triangle of the fake powerup. It can be done without the full lit trick by using diffuse color (cold/warm black/dark grey) but the global lighting would still be applied on it and it might look weird at times: addition of the black diffused color and the global lighting shady area (shadows aren't supposed to be additive), while in the case of the full lit trick there's no addition of shadows or anything, just a specific lighting set to define a shadow.

Unfortunately, applying a funk on one of the materials using the full lit trick will disable it.
By the way it is a good idea to place the dummy powerup apart from the rest of the powerups and even at the root of your track hierarchy just to access it easily and not be confused with something else. You can even rename it into a powerup just before the preprocessing.

To resume the idea of this trick: using the FULL LIT TRICK lets you specify a specific lighting for any material instead of the global lighting.

You have to select a component and clone it then select the copy and make it a bit bigger.
Notice that the original and the copy must have the same center. The difference between
the edge of the original model and the edge of the clone makes the width of the black lines
then you must flip the triangles of the copy and apply a black (or another colour) material on the whole thing.
You'll probably have to adjust the width of the 'difference' manually here and there to have a regular black width everywhere.
Some components can eventually be optimized polycount-wise.
Do that for every component (maybe not the wheels as they are already black, depends of what you're doing), and you'll get something like that :


Rikusyo's Doraemon

Usually whathever you try to get a component rocking around an axe with an angle will result in terrible failure. The game just doesn't want it to happen.
Here's how to force it.

Let's take the steering wheel as an example. Create it and place it normaly in your model with the angle etc. Be sure to make it a separate component though.
When you're ready to go into PT2 duplicate the steering wheel component and rotate it so that you remove completely the angle and align the steering wheel with one of the X,Y,Z axis. Remember the angle you needed to make it parallel with one of the axes as it will be used to give that angle back to the steering wheel through a groove. So keep the model like it, with two steering wheels at the same position but with a different angle. And export to PT2 and continue your work.
In PT2 don't try to make the steering wheel a correct actor (a correct actor is centered on 0,0,0) just let it there as we'll use absolute coords later to specify its center. However in PT2 create an empty dummy as a child of the steering wheel then drag it back under the master component and put the steering wheel inside it. Rename the dummy ST_DUMMY.ACT or something obvious. Oh BTW you can delete the steering wheel in correct position.
Now calculate the absolute center of the aligned steering wheel, or at least it must be the point around which the steering wheel was rotated to make it parallel with the X/Y/Z axis.

Then use these grooves:

STWHEEL.ACT			-> This groove is applied on the SW mesh. It's the usual rocking groove.
not a lollipop
constant
no path
rock
absolute
20
-0.127,0.187,-0.948		-> The center coord around which the SW was rotated.
z
0

NEXT GROOVE

ST_DUMMY.ACT		-> This groove is applied at the parent dummy. It gives the angle back.
Not a lollipop
Constant
No path
Rock
Flash
-1
-0.127,0.187,-0.948	-> The center coord around which the SW was rotated.
x			-> Axis that will get the angle back.
60			-> The opposite of the angle you used to align the SW with one of the XYZ axis.

Actually the text files in the INTRFACE folder are just kind of CSS. You can't remove anything in there or even mod it too much. Every menu item is hardcoded, from the background forms to the images and text. Click on read more to have a quick look.

A bad manip and the whole Gourmet Carmageddon project disappeared!
I'm quite pissed to say the least. I have the changelog of what I had done so I can redo everything easily. Even better, maybe try to avoid the crashing bugs. But I have lost the super cool loading screen I had made :'(

Ah well... I guess on the C1 side, I'll finish the Night track someday and the C1 tutorial and later I'll give Gourmet Carmageddon a go again.
C2 stuff for now.

I there! Digga here!

I've been working on this since february!
It took quite a time to optimize actually: from 12,000 triangles down to 5,800!
Quite the same thing with the 1024*1024 texture split into a lot of textures etc.
Cabine has a pivot. Driver's head and steering wheel too. Smoke is set via Ylollipop.
Has detachables and smashies. Usual funks. Doors are flap detachables but not kev-o-flap (doesn't work right with the cabine pivot).
Some tricks with the smashies to create damage shock on the detachables. Also hidden message. Just like the Sor BN12.
Everything's twatted, 8bit stuff included btw.
I took some time to adjust the damage system as well. And the physics. Not sure I've been that effective on the latter though.
I tweaked as much things as I could etc.

Oh BTW, it's the Loader from Clutch/Armageddon Riders! Though thedriver is Ron Dumpster now.

Downloading there: Roady Reaction.