VastPark developer zone

jethro - 06-06-2008 12:45:49

Hi guys,
have a few questions for you
1. Using l3dt, once I've created my terrain is there any particular format I need to export to for use in VastPark also is there any other way to create terrain?

Hi Jethro,

We toyed with the idea of having an IMML element for terrain, but have currently decided to just go with Models, which means that you'll want to export out of l3dt to .x - depending on the .x exporter, it may come out strangely and as the current Publisher doesn't let you preview before you publish (the in dev Publisher does tho!), it might take a little trial an error to see how VastPark is going to treat it. We usually recommend in this case that you get the content into 3dsmax and export out of there using the exporters we provide as they are generally quite faithful.

2. How big can I make a park in kilometers or is there no max size?

No limit other than the end-users hardware. One unit in VastPark = 1m.

3. How do I create a shader and what does a post effect shader do in VastPark?

There are a number of tools available for creating shaders, the ones online have mainly come from the NVIDIA shader library I believe. Take a look at FX Composer.

General shaders are assigned to material groups to perform some sort of alteration to the pixels/vertices of that group whereas post shaders should be assigned to a camera and modify the pixels/vertices of the entire view. So for post effect you might make it seem like everything is underwater, or black and white or blurred, etc, etc

4. How do I create my own skybox?

A skybox consists of 6 textures, Top, Bottom, Left, Right, Front, Back which are joined to form a cube, with the observer inside that cube. I think the guys usually slice them up in photoshop...

For the publisher to let you publish a Sky, you'll need to select the 6 textures in explorer and drag them on at the same time.

5. If I want to create my own character/vehicle what are the requirements to do so i.e. animations, hitboxes, bone structure, attachment slots, scripts?

The current AvatarController expects these names for the animations (the animations names and ranges need to be inserted in the Publisher when publishing):

- walkforward

- walkbackward

- runforward

- runbackward

- walkright

- walkleft

- runright

- runleft

- jump

- idle

I can't help too much with the other parts of your question, so I'll get one of our content guys to reply (might take a few days, long weekend here :))

6. Can I customise the keys a character uses to move around eg. if I wanted the character to crouch using 'c'?

Yes...but not in the current codebase. The plan is to abstract out some of the controllers into plugins which can be custom-built. Our current AvatarController/FPSController doesn't yet support crouching.

Hey Craig,

thanks for the quick reply

another question,

Do the 'TV3DSkinExport.dle' and 'TV3DPhysExport.dle' support 3dsMax9 x64?

I get an error when I load up 3dsmax Error code: 193 - %1 is not a valid Win32 application.[/i]

failed to initialize.

Hey Jethro,

Unfortanately the 3ds Max plugins we have don't support the 64bit version of Max9. I'm still yet to find a .x exporter to work properly for me but you could try either <a href="http://www.andytather.co.uk/Panda/directxmax_downloads.aspx">http://www.andytather.co.uk/Panda/directxmax_downloads.aspx</a> or <a href="http://kwxport.sourceforge.net/">http://kwxport.sourceforge.net/</a>.

5. If I want to create my own character/vehicle what are the requirements to do so i.e. animations, hitboxes, bone structure, attachment slots, scripts?

Bone structure isn't important when it comes to creating your own character. Just make sure when your export your character that animations are on the same timeline.
When you publish your character you can give names to your animations by adding the keyframe range. Then if you want to call that animation in the Creator you can create a script that looks like this.

function main(obj, args)
obj:playanimation('animationname',true)
end

Apply the script to a trigger on your character and run Interactive preview. True refers to looping the animation, and the animation name is the one you specify when publishing.

Cheers,
Shep