Trial By Design
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| Submitted by Araknuum on Fri, 2016-08-19 13:56 | ||
The last couple weeks have been very different from my norm. I've barely touched DS, except in the Siege Editor, mapping. I still have a thousand thousand questions about how DS works, how it can be used to make a game, and those questions are getting more specific as I imagine, and learn. Is being Dead in Multiplayer, as a ghost, a game mechanic that can be used to complete quests or puzzles? Can DS support more complicated animations? The kind needed in order to make more active FMV's or in game interactions? Is it possible to put a globe around a map that displays sky and distant landscape? And can today's hardware and DS's software now dispense with The Fog in open areas? Big questions... and I think the answer is beyond my current scope, and possibly beyond the scope of The Siege Editor. I do know that I can do the mapping, and I have the story to follow. I can see it all behind my eyes, and I still have time. blogs: |
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Comments
I don't think it's essential to get rid of the fog, it's just important to create moods and lighting with an eye for immersion, believability.
Depends if there's a global state name for ghosts that the game can recognised for doors/switches/chests & npcs. Certainly it can recognize ghosts for activating respawning mechanisms like the necromancer.
Yes this is not only possible but implemented in the DS1 Legendary Mod for certain areas, mostly NIS sequences though the final dungeon area in Kingdom of Ehb uses it for the battle against Gom.
You activate it by specifying a skybox in a mood. GPG also activated it for NIS sequences by a gizmo in the region itself but I had limited success using that approach.
The main drawback is that it centers on the player and the boundary of the skybox is whatever frustrum width is used in the mood. In most areas this creates weird popups of scenery (cliffs, trees, houses, etc.) as the mood reaches them as the fog settings are suspended when a skybox is active. Very disconcerting when you are moving around the game but not so much when used in a NIS sequence where the player is anchored to the ground and can't move until the NIS sequence has finished, whereby the original mood of the region is restored, fog and all.
However if used in a very small region, like the arena for the final battle against Gom, it could be very effective. If you made quite small regions surrounded by barriers like walls, cliffs, impenetrable forests, etc., which were smaller than the frustrum width set for the mood with the skybox, then I imagine it would look quite fabulous. This is something I'm planning to investigate one day in making a small map with such true outdoor regions.
Other maps, mainly FPS games, use a sphere covering the entire region in order to generate a skybox. No matter where you move around the region the skybox would look realistic.
The main purpose of the fog is to cover up the edges of the world. Plus the default camera angle restricts you to a 32 degree angle at best so to help hide the fact that fog is being employed in the first place. However with camera mods being so popular, the restricted viewing angle can be easily overcome. You can see more of the world but also can see things that the developers wanted to hide from you, such as pieces of the world popping into view and the infamous edge of the world (where map nodes weren't placed because they never expected you to ever be able to see them through all the fog).
So generally a compromise is the best solution, a relaxation of the camera angles but only a moderate increase in viewing distances. Try using the maximum settings of Elys AllSaves Launcher to demonstrate the point.
Again creating small outdoor regions (smaller than the frustrum being employed in the moods) could allow a mapper to overcome these limitations. Incidentally these limitations don't apply as much to indoor regions as black fog is used for those areas and few indoor areas are big enough to trouble the frustrum (except possibly that huge area in Wesrin Cross).
Here's a demo map showing two skyboxes in action. Should work in DS2 or BW without any Legendary Mod assets being required.
http://www.siegetheday.org/~iryan/files/Skybox_Test.ds2res
The first region is 64x64 units and has a 100 unit frustrum. No gaps show in the world.
The second region is 96x96 with the same frustrum and at the edge you can clearly see the problems I was talking about.
Some of the wall on the opposite side disappears. The wall is also only 4 units high which isn't enough to prevent seeing over the edge of the region. Pretty atmospheric however. Clearly map making could produce something quite spectacular and unseen yet in the world of DS2 mapping & modding.
For interest the textures used are 1024 x 1024 and 1Mb each. In contrast the skybox used for Gom's lair is 2048 x 2048 and 4Mb in size. That's HD quality. The difficulty is getting such high quality skybox textures that are freeware. There's a lot on the net but have to be purchased.
So, skyboxes are enabled in ds2... I wonder if I can get them to function in 1? Thank you Iryan, this is a treasure of info. I've found myself to be very fond of building maps, but I have all of my tools working for DS1 now, and I hesitate to try getting DS2 and it's tools working, as I had quite a lot of trouble when I tried the second siege editor a couple years ago.
This is the camp area of the royal hunting preserve where my story begins. I've done the node work to make the hill, sans connecting tunnels between the caves underneath. Without a mood, the world frustrum set to default shows just a black background and a sphere of rendered terrain which doesn't show individual nodes loading, but instead just cuts them at the edge and reveals as you approach. You're saying that the skybox also reveals at the frustrum limit, and is placed, not around the character, but around the region at a certain distance, am I correct? so this edge would show black until my character came within range of the skybox? If so, it is a solution, though you're right, it would only work in small enough areas that the frustrum limits can't be seen.
I wonder if any experimentation can be done on the frustrum to see how far it can be stretched until it starts breaking things? hmmm... I theorize that the amount and variety of objects in the region would become the limiting factor, again making this work best in small areas and for FMV's.
You may be out of luck trying to get skyboxes working in DS1. I'm not 100% sure but I believe mood functions are hard coded. Creating a dll (which is possible in DS1) to hook into the engine to enable the call for the skybox from the mood_manager.skrit may work but only if the basic support is there in the first place. Though with your map layout it would look spectacular.
One idea though is to consider that its relatively straightforward (now we know) to port maps from DS1 to DS2. So once your map was finished, or even before then, a version could be made to work in DS2 and take advantage of skyboxes or just to see if it does indeed make the map look better.
The skyboxes in DS2 are actually placed around the character and moves with them. This causes scenery to fade in and out as the player moves. DS2 also has a render_proxy gizmo (as used in the beach NIS scene at Eirolon) which is static. I tried using it but unless you stand in a specific place, it doesn't work well. It does work well in NIS sequences where the player doesn't move so I guess that's why GPG uses it but if you pay close attention to the areas it is used, they are all surrounded by high rock walls so you can't see any imperfections in the scene.
So in DS1 I believe you are correct in experimenting with the mood frustrum and also colours to get a good compromise. I'm not sure what the limit would be in DS1 but in some NIS sequences in DS2 I have it set as high as 120. However the DS2 engine is more advanced and optimized than the DS1 version so it may be lower in DS1 even though we're running the game on lot better hardware now than when it was first released 14 years ago.
Since I'm very interested in this subject as well as Araknuum, I went ahead and did some experimentation.
There doesn't appear to be any set limits in the DS1 engine for frustrum widths. This is a screenshot with the frustrum set at 200.
However as you can see it starts to display areas of the map the designers never expected you to see. Clever design could overcome this however.
Also while this test map (made by cloning the df2ds region from the multiplayer map) loaded and played fine for the few minutes I tested it, doesn't mean that a full map stretching the frustrum limits like this would, especially once action starts happening.
A more moderate increase of a frustrum set at 100 produced more fluid scenery that 200 did.
Incidentally I did similar tests in DS2 and found out that the maximum frustrum size is preset to about 80 or so! Very annoying.
"The skyboxes in DS2 are actually placed around the character and moves with them."
Then it's the exact way I'd like it to work. can the skybox art change with mood? Would it be possible to make a skybox that is a picture of distant terrain, that clarifies and "moves closer" by changing the art as you approach? with high enough frustrum and careful mapping and mood transitions, you could lend the illusion of distance traveled and be able to see your destination in the distance, until you were there. DS stitches many regions by funneling you into a narrow transfer between them. This concept could work, and could be coupled with strategic transfers and occlusions of the scenery to create a massive boost in the player's sense of immersion and progress. Can skyboxes be animated? What about time of day based mood changes? Oh man... What if we could put a sun in the sky that rose and set, or clouds that moved? Animating Skyboxes or just changing moods with a sequence of skyboxes, that could get technical, and certainly the art has to be created, maybe with pics of those distant regions taken from the editor?
Clever design just means not using fog and low frustrum to overcome design flaws like you saw. So much of what you don't see in DS is where the designers used the low frustrum, fog, and azimuth restrictions to get away with more compact regions. So much of what is missing from your first pic could have been mapped over, but was never seen with the limits in place. Modders overcome those limits, in any game they are used, by freeing restricted cameras and increasing view distance. A region designed with a frustrum of 100 or more would be easy enough to fill in and occlude, it would just take more mapping and an eye for finding and mapping over any flaws, which is what I'm on to with my next region, The Crag.
The Crag is a ravine that separates the Desert and Swamp areas of my map, so it's going to be very alive and hot and wet. I plan for the player to climb down one side and up the other, through a network of caves and ancient dwellings. You'd only be outside for short periods, with steep walls surrounding you as you get deeper. The mood will be set to change, and reflect your progress into basically an underground jungle. Were I to convert this map into DS2 and set frustrum to 80, I could map with that view distance in mind, using the skybox instead of fog, unless fog is part of the intended mood. I'll go ahead and map with a frustrum of 100, to give me some margin.
Yes you can change the skyboxes simply by changing moods. That's in DS2. Looking at mood_manager.skrit between the two games, most functions are the same except DS1 lacks Mood.GetActiveSkyboxGo () and Mood.SetActiveSkyboxGo components.
I doubt skyboxes could be animated but the mood could be changed in a region so it would show a daylight skybox one time when a player entered it and a night time skybox some other time.
As for being able to see where your going and your destination, it could be possible.
The difficulty in finding the pyramids in DS1 could be a thing of the past.
The above image was with a frustrum set at 300. I tested it to 400 whereby you could see the pyramids from the edge of the region. However I do stress that this is with minimal objects in the region and no action.
Very impressive design work there. I'm sure many players would be eager to try your map when its finished. I'm also motivated to try to add some of these advancements to Legends of Utrae sometime.
Looking at the Crags, it seems to me that GPG could have used skyboxes for Zaramoth Horns for the small outdoor areas. Would have been very immersive I believe. In fact I think I'll make a small test map consisting of those regions stitched together to see how it works out.
....and then pasted onto the skybox. Making it work in ds1 is likely more than I'll ever do. but if it works in 2, that's great! I'd definitely map for DS2 playable regions, especially if I can simulate the effect of your pyramid photo in an 80 frustrum region.
Turns out I couldn't create a map with prefabs of zaramoth horns regions as I couldn't connect the prefab to the region's anchor node. So I made a mood mod to test out skyboxes in zaramoth horns and it was very spectacular until reaching Valdis's temple, where the limited view range broke immersion - see the last image.
The mood setting was 85 meters radius, 50 meters high and 50 meters depth. If there was some way of increasing the mood radius to even 120 or so, it would be worth releasing as a mod.
It would be great if the effect could be reproduced in DS1.
That is spectacular! The effect is so impactful, so much more atmosphere and presence of place! I'm very glad you're on this track Iryan, you've shown one of my wishes can come true, and you appear to be familiar enough with the mechanics that I believe you can pull it off.
How would I go about getting you a converted copy of a map I made? the Royal Camp area is incomplete but has the bones of most of the outer terrain. I don't have any lighting or mood set, just the nodes and a couple of objects. Do I just upload the .dsmap? Would you add a skybox to it and see if there are any issues with cut off terrain? I won't be able to get DS2 up and running for another week or so, trip to Alaska tuesday, but once I get there I'll have time to start fiddling with SE2 and experimenting with skyboxes. What a time to be alive!
:spider:
To upload a file, you can use a cloud service like https://mega.nz/ , which I use and recommend as its free of annoying ads and you get 50GB of free storage in your account. Uploading files is easy.
Yes I would be happy to add a mood and skybox to a copy of your map so you could experiment. My own experiments have been mixed. Firstly there is no predefined limit in DS2 for frustrum size, indeed one of the DS2 campaign moods specifies a frustrum of 500 with a depth and height of a 1000!
The issue is that Elys Allsaves locks you into the limit defined by the main.gas in the map (version 1). Version 2 of Elys Allsaves allows you to set a seefar limit of up to 120 in the launcher itself. This means in practice that you can set a frustrum of 120 with a corresponding setting for the fog. I was using AllSaves version 1, which is why the settings in the test maps couldn't be increased.
Unfortunately to unlock the camera from its restricted viewing angle in DS2, you really need Elys ALLSaves (strangely in Broken World this isn't a requirement). So its highly unlikely there'll ever be a mod released adding skyboxes to DS2, though for the sake of experimentation and discovery I'm continuing with a clone map of DS2.
UPDATE
I've discovered that Elys AllSaves does respect the frustrum settings of a map so if you set it very high, like 200 or so, then it doesn't matter if you activate the seefar setting in the launcher or not. You'll get 200 no matter what.
To demonstrate I've made another test map of Zaramoth Horns' staircase at the end, like the screenshots taken in a previous post. It should work well no matter whether you use AllSaves or not and both in DS2 and Broken World.
http://www.siegetheday.org/~iryan/files/Skybox_Test_02.ds2res
This could be invaluable for map makers trying to make something a little different.