Our of room placement for indoor maps

derpdedo

Just found out the hard way you cant building anything outside of normal room sections. spent the past 2 days making a really awesome boss level, only to find that I cant place any encounters in it because it's outside normal parameters of a single room.

anyone know if Perfect World will allow this to be usable in the future?

leinahtanwc

derpdedo wrote: »

Just found out the hard way you cant building anything outside of normal room sections. spent the past 2 days making a really awesome boss level, only to find that I cant place any encounters in it because it's outside normal parameters of a single room.

anyone know if Perfect World will allow this to be usable in the future?

I ran into the same problem during my first foundry - I eventually scrapped the map and re-created it using an outdoor map. Tinkering with the fog settings can create the black void effect you are looking for, and if it is high enough off the ground, the fall will kill any mistep (usually... and you could always stick a portal into a pit of ghosts down there for those who survive 600+ feet drops). Of course, there are other bugs should the level be really weird (monster clipping/teleporting on platforms that are materialized at a later time [not immediately].

If you want to see some examples of the effects, my two foundries have it.
Bones and Brimstone, my first and multi-player foundry. A little lacking on details in my book, but a little fun still, especially with the end.

And my second map, Doomguides' Folly - aimed at single player and multiplayer with class based puzzles/exploration.

eldarth

Edit: Nevermind. Misunderstood.

I'm surprised you were even able to place details outside of a room.

derpdedo

leinahtanwc wrote: »

I ran into the same problem during my first foundry - I eventually scrapped the map and re-created it using an outdoor map. Tinkering with the fog settings can create the black void effect you are looking for, and if it is high enough off the ground, the fall will kill any mistep (usually... and you could always stick a portal into a pit of ghosts down there for those who survive 600+ feet drops). Of course, there are other bugs should the level be really weird (monster clipping/teleporting on platforms that are materialized at a later time [not immediately].

If you want to see some examples of the effects, my two foundries have it.
Bones and Brimstone, my first and multi-player foundry. A little lacking on details in my book, but a little fun still, especially with the end.

And my second map, Doomguides' Folly - aimed at single player and multiplayer with class based puzzles/exploration.

Aye, I copied the entire section and pasted it into a large flat outdoor section My volcano is saved I just had to edit the height for everything. Gotta find a way to set the lighting to match an inside dungeon. The only light I want is to be coming from the lava and other static lights I place.
Thank you for the examples to look at. I will take look as soon as I have the time.

eldarth wrote: »

Edit: Nevermind. Misunderstood.

I'm surprised you were even able to place details outside of a room.

Actually you can do everything outside a room placement except place encounters in the Foundry, setting up a teleport to get to it is the easy part. Triggers work just fine. However everything outside the rooms may be deleted by the server upon publication to reduce the size considering it to be not usable space.

derpdedo

This is what it looks like in an indoor dungeon, the outdoor version looks to have moon light lighting everything. I'll pound away on it tonight, so tired of seeing lava n steam everywhere. The triggers are easier for explosions and some cat walks collapsing within a giant puff of fire into the lava now that I've redone them 20 times now

crypticmapolis

That cave looks hot

crypticmapolis

eldarth wrote: »

Edit: Nevermind. Misunderstood.

I'm surprised you were even able to place details outside of a room.

We made the choice to allow detail object placement outside of a room simply because sometimes it's needed to do specific things. For example, if I wanted to have a caved-in sewer, I might need to have some large rocks and rubble that are poking into the room from the outside.

celantra

crypticmapolis wrote: »

We made the choice to allow detail object placement outside of a room simply because sometimes it's needed to do specific things. For example, if I wanted to have a caved-in sewer, I might need to have some large rocks and rubble that are poking into the room from the outside.

I think this is a good thing. Please don't change it. It only takes one time to realize that an interior map will only allow the player to take actions in rooms.

I also like to use dead space outside rooms on interior maps to place a pallet of items down when in 2D mode. There are still strong cases to decide to design in 2D mode in my mind, often when building complex objects. Its easier to laydown all the bits using duplicate that maintains coordinates, rather then 3D copy paste which places at author coordinates.

I ask again please do not change this, it provides really nice functionality when in 2D interior map mode.

eldarth

celantra wrote: »

I think this is a good thing. Please don't change it. It only takes one time to realize that an interior map will only allow the player to take actions in rooms.

Ditto. I've used it myself without really thinking/realizing it.

derpdedo

celantra wrote: »

I think this is a good thing. Please don't change it. It only takes one time to realize that an interior map will only allow the player to take actions in rooms.

I also like to use dead space outside rooms on interior maps to place a pallet of items down when in 2D mode. There are still strong cases to decide to design in 2D mode in my mind, often when building complex objects. Its easier to laydown all the bits using duplicate that maintains coordinates, rather then 3D copy paste which places at author coordinates.

I ask again please do not change this, it provides really nice functionality when in 2D interior map mode.

Allowing us to use space outside of rooms would not affect the 2D map. It would only be expanding the usable canvass for us to be able to create. The only difference would be you wouldn’t have a dedicated floor like you do for the outdoor maps.

Now if Cryptic would be willing to give us different size rooms that are blank with a very height ceiling would be awesome. I can’t use the large rooms they supply as default because the existing space is used with other things.

I used to mod Dungeon Siege back in the day. We were able to make everything from the ground up from snap together dungeon nodes to weapons. Unfortunately it was abused by hackers and you could do all your work off line. But the game was hosted on your system, not on a safe server like we have here.

celantra

I am not talking about making those spaces active. I am only talking about not removing the ability to place objects in the dead space when building maps and not restricting objects placed slightly outside walls to allow parts of details to be used in poke through.

Interior and exterior maps are very different animals as a result of the door mapping and room snapping code. Custom rooms with no defined doorways could become very cumbersome for an author. They would not behave as Cryptic rooms. Exterior maps allow building from the ground up and do not have the snap together elements of interiors.

I would love some larger rooms with high ceilings and plenty of space to build in. Maybe in dimensions of 100x100, 500x500, 1000x1000, these would allow authors to be able to build full environments on interior maps. Lighting and sky become an issue if you are wanting to mimic an outdoor environment in one of these rooms, but you should be able to build some interesting interiors. Really if you want a sky, use an exterior map.

kithlis

Just thinking - haven't tried it... can you snap together a bunch of Cryptic interior maps as the "foundation", and then just build all your custom rooms above it all?
Would take a bit of "Y" modifying, but I have functional timers under an interior room, so the concept seems the same.

You would of course, as Celantra notes, lose the room-snapping and doorway ability of defined Cryptic rooms... but if you just wanted one giant interior room, it seems possible.

eldarth

celantra wrote: »

I would love some larger rooms with high ceilings and plenty of space to build in. Maybe in dimensions of 100x100, 500x500, 1000x1000, these would allow authors to be able to build full environments on interior maps. Lighting and sky become an issue if you are wanting to mimic an outdoor environment in one of these rooms, but you should be able to build some interesting interiors. Really if you want a sky, use an exterior map.

Agree immensely. I'd also loooooove to see all the "rooms" from the interior maps available on exterior maps -- they could even just have a flat-white non-textured exterior - I'd happily deal with putting facades on all the exteriors of the rooms rather than having to build the inside and outside from scratch.

crypticmapolis

celantra wrote: »

I would love some larger rooms with high ceilings and plenty of space to build in. Maybe in dimensions of 100x100, 500x500, 1000x1000, these would allow authors to be able to build full environments on interior maps. Lighting and sky become an issue if you are wanting to mimic an outdoor environment in one of these rooms, but you should be able to build some interesting interiors. Really if you want a sky, use an exterior map.

I've been toying around with this idea actually, but there are some concerns I have with allowing large map-sized rooms. First, there's a lot more that goes into building a room than adding floors, ceilings and walls. My biggest concern is performance, since most of our interior kits do not have efficient occlusion built into their geometry (something we're trying to improve) they rely on an invisible occlusion hull that is generated around the room to cull out objects in other rooms and make sure lights don't bleed between rooms. If you were to build a dungeon inside of a 1000x1000 room, it would likely have performance problems.

With that said, what would you all think if I added some rooms that were specifically made for building larger rooms with. The big difference here would be that these "room builder" rooms would just delete a wall entirely when you place a door opening there instead of replacing the wall with a doorway. Piecing together a larger room out of these would look something like this:

Of course there would be more sizes to work with but you get the idea. This cluster of rooms ends up looking like this in-game:

As long as the kit supports it, I can make rooms with taller ceilings as well.

agentjaspor

Uhhhhhh, yes please! That would be awesome.

derpdedo

crypticmapolis wrote: »

I've been toying around with this idea actually, but there are some concerns I have with allowing large map-sized rooms. First, there's a lot more that goes into building a room than adding floors, ceilings and walls. My biggest concern is performance, since most of our interior kits do not have efficient occlusion built into their geometry (something we're trying to improve) they rely on an invisible occlusion hull that is generated around the room to cull out objects in other rooms and make sure lights don't bleed between rooms. If you were to build a dungeon inside of a 1000x1000 room, it would likely have performance problems.

With that said, what would you all think if I added some rooms that were specifically made for building larger rooms with. The big difference here would be that these "room builder" rooms would just delete a wall entirely when you place a door opening there instead of replacing the wall with a doorway. Piecing together a larger room out of these would look something like this:
Of course there would be more sizes to work with but you get the idea. This cluster of rooms ends up looking like this in-game:
As long as the kit supports it, I can make rooms with taller ceilings as well.

That would be perfect; I love the taller Ceiling approach. Deleting the walls will be awesome; we can make our own as needed.

But what about the entry, can we have a high, Med, and low option? Start at the top and work our way down into a pit for example? If not, teleporters would be more than sufficient for this affect.

But since we have your attention on this, please allow me to ask you these 3 questions…

1: Are there plans for letting us turn off the bit mapping during construction in the future? During basic layout/construction it would cut down render lag when specific detail isn’t’ needed. But then turn it back on when we need to polish it up.

2: Is it possible in the future to allow us to group objects together? Some of us take the time to build stuff piece by piece, but when it comes to moving whole mass for instance Up or down, we would have to do it one piece at a time. This would help us in 3d view the most when trying to rotate the whole mass.

3: Would it is it possible in the future to allow us to be able to lock an item down making it not selectable during editing in either 2d or 3d view ?

celantra

That would be awesomely kewl.

Would the occlusion bubble remain intact between the rooms? How will that effect lighting? i.e. If a light object is on one side of the dropped wall would it shine through to the other side of the dropped wall?

My other question would be if there might be some path issues, would we have issues as these blank walls would be interpreted as doors in path resolution upon publish. Paths through doors have been problematic from time to time is why I ask.

I hate being the devils advocate. I would say regardless, even if these are issues, the benefits far outweigh them, and workarounds are certainly possible.

Edit: Also I note in your example that there is a firepot in the middle of the rooms. Of course it would be ideal if these rooms were a blank slate as far as lighting and detail items are concerned.

eldarth

crypticmapolis wrote: »

With that said, what would you all think if I added some rooms that were specifically made for building larger rooms with. The big difference here would be that these "room builder" rooms would just delete a wall entirely when you place a door opening there instead of replacing the wall with a doorway...

...As long as the kit supports it, I can make rooms with taller ceilings as well.

Yes please. And perhaps a couple of the large cavern rooms could have the floors/paths excised?

...and Timers, of course.

stdaffyd

One thing I figured you can do but it does have a drawback, is to have a room on the map, place a large flat slab of rock on it, edit the rock and increase its height to say 100ft, edit a teleporter to 100ft (you need this to get access to it). Start playing the map at the origin end of the teleporter and teleport to your rock slab. Now you can enter edit mode with flying camera and place detail till your hearts content.
The issue? There is a room below you, go to the edge of the rock and you can see it, maybe fog it out or something? Will have to play with it.
You cannot 'start play here' pointing to the rock area because it will start you in the room and you can't free camera through the ceiling, but if you start outside a room you're ok. That's why I teleport in and then go to edit mode.

celantra

But you cannot place encounters, traps, or anything that has triggers.

stdaffyd

Yes you can, you are technically placing the objects in the rooms, it's just that you're 100 feet above the room. I ran up a platform of rock at 100ft and had an npc, an encounter, a sack, a teleport, and a proximity trigger to create a backpack item. All worked fine.
But like I said the issue is visual at the edge of what you build, you can see the room map below you, looks bad.

<edit> just had a play with fog just above the ceiling on the room below my platform of rock and had the lights out down below too. Looked ok, you could still tell but think it would work. Throw blocks of rooms covered by fog in whatever shape you'll need for what you want to build. Doesn't matter what they look like, you're not using their terrain.

celantra

Ah I see what you are saying now. As long as there is a room below where you place your construct you can just treat items as being at Y above. Clever, I may have to give that a try.

crypticmapolis

derpdedo wrote: »

That would be perfect; I love the taller Ceiling approach. Deleting the walls will be awesome; we can make our own as needed.

But what about the entry, can we have a high, Med, and low option? Start at the top and work our way down into a pit for example? If not, teleporters would be more than sufficient for this affect.

But since we have your attention on this, please allow me to ask you these 3 questions…

1: Are there plans for letting us turn off the bit mapping during construction in the future? During basic layout/construction it would cut down render lag when specific detail isn’t’ needed. But then turn it back on when we need to polish it up.

2: Is it possible in the future to allow us to group objects together? Some of us take the time to build stuff piece by piece, but when it comes to moving whole mass for instance Up or down, we would have to do it one piece at a time. This would help us in 3d view the most when trying to rotate the whole mass.

3: Would it is it possible in the future to allow us to be able to lock an item down making it not selectable during editing in either 2d or 3d view ?

We've talked about 1 and 2 internally, but nothing's scheduled for those yet. 1 is interesting, I'll bring that up with the programmers when I get a chance. In the meantime, wouldn't adjusting your video settings temporarily work for improving performance?

As far as choosing different heights for your doorways, the tech doesn't currently support that and I'm not sure that's how I would want to implement multilevel rooms.

crypticmapolis

celantra wrote: »

That would be awesomely kewl.

Would the occlusion bubble remain intact between the rooms? How will that effect lighting? i.e. If a light object is on one side of the dropped wall would it shine through to the other side of the dropped wall?

My other question would be if there might be some path issues, would we have issues as these blank walls would be interpreted as doors in path resolution upon publish. Paths through doors have been problematic from time to time is why I ask.

I hate being the devils advocate. I would say regardless, even if these are issues, the benefits far outweigh them, and workarounds are certainly possible.

Edit: Also I note in your example that there is a firepot in the middle of the rooms. Of course it would be ideal if these rooms were a blank slate as far as lighting and detail items are concerned.

The occlusion bubble would indeed remain in tact, but its effectiveness depends on your layout. If you make one giant room that fills the whole map, the occlusion hull won't be occluding much

Pathing mostly relies on collision and doesn't even know what a "door" is, so I would expect the pathing to work well. Our AI doesn't do well in close quarters, so some of the smaller doorways in some kits can be an issue.

Right now these rooms work exactly like other rooms, so there can be different light schemes available for each room. One problem I need to figure out is what happens when you link these up with a normal room.

derpdedo

crypticmapolis wrote: »

We've talked about 1 and 2 internally, but nothing's scheduled for those yet. 1 is interesting, I'll bring that up with the programmers when I get a chance. In the meantime, wouldn't adjusting your video settings temporarily work for improving performance?

As far as choosing different heights for your doorways, the tech doesn't currently support that and I'm not sure that's how I would want to implement multilevel rooms.

Thank you for your response. Adjusting our video settings could help some, but the bit mapping / bump mapping would still exist and be processed to a certain degree by the video card. A simple grey scale would be great with little lag.

I understand what you mean about the doors, I temporarily forgot about the possibility of the walls going away for these special rooms. will they have their own category in the tree? (Advanced Rooms)

Bit Mapping: Basically wraps a image from the library around 3d image

Bump Mapping: A computer graphics technique in which a perturbation to the surface normal of the object being rendered is looked up in a texture map at each pixel and applied before the illumination calculation is done.

ambisinisterr

crypticmapolis wrote: »

I've been toying around with this idea actually, but there are some concerns I have with allowing large map-sized rooms. First, there's a lot more that goes into building a room than adding floors, ceilings and walls. My biggest concern is performance, since most of our interior kits do not have efficient occlusion built into their geometry (something we're trying to improve) they rely on an invisible occlusion hull that is generated around the room to cull out objects in other rooms and make sure lights don't bleed between rooms. If you were to build a dungeon inside of a 1000x1000 room, it would likely have performance problems.

With that said, what would you all think if I added some rooms that were specifically made for building larger rooms with. The big difference here would be that these "room builder" rooms would just delete a wall entirely when you place a door opening there instead of replacing the wall with a doorway. Piecing together a larger room out of these would look something like this:

As long as the kit supports it, I can make rooms with taller ceilings as well.

On this type of topic though is there any chance of getting a "Build Your Own" indoor kit?

You had previously said that the advantage to using indoor rooms and areas was part to do with lighting issues but could there be rooms made up of invisible walls so that we could build our own caves and such?

The freedoms afforded by the lego bricks is just too much grander than the limitations given by the preset rooms to me. It would be nice to have completely undefined rooms of various sizes (with no built in ceilings or at least extremely high ceilings) which we could wall off and shape our own dungeons similar to how the developers build their dungeons.



Also Celantra's #2 is actually something I have wanted from way back in alpha. Not only would it make moving things easier but it would also make organised nuts like me happier because it would also be able to serve as a "folder" of sorts so I can better find the object I am looking for.

eldarth

Ooh while Crypticmapolis is reading this thread...

Suggestion:

Being able to filter (and maybe render?) select-able objects in 2D editor by height
For instance only show objects between -100y and 0y, or Above Terrain, or Below Terrain.

(I'll add this to foundry suggestion forum as well)

raphaeldisanto

crypticmapolis wrote: »

We've talked about 1 and 2 internally, but nothing's scheduled for those yet. 1 is interesting, I'll bring that up with the programmers when I get a chance. In the meantime, wouldn't adjusting your video settings temporarily work for improving performance?

As far as choosing different heights for your doorways, the tech doesn't currently support that and I'm not sure that's how I would want to implement multilevel rooms.

*grin*

Best way to build multilevel rooms is.... to build them yourself

derpdedo

eldarth wrote: »

Ooh while Crypticmapolis is reading this thread...

Suggestion:

Being able to filter (and maybe render?) select-able objects in 2D editor by height
For instance only show objects between -100y and 0y, or Above Terrain, or Below Terrain.

(I'll add this to foundry suggestion forum as well)

Agree, I have a number of 3d editing programs that that show multiple angles in 3d. For our use, I would suggest the ability to switch between static views: Top (birds eye), front, and side within the 2d editor. It would give us a bit more freedom when tweaking items without going into 3d view.

raphaeldisanto

instead of display priority as we have it now, I'd just like ye olde standard "bring to front" and "send to back" options, personally.

crypticmapolis

Hi folks, this concept has been realized on the NeverwinterPreview shard. Details can be found in this thread.