The difference in computer speed

[Kickaha]

The closer areas of the actual renders do look distorted and the central areas look very far away, but once you assemble the node in SCream, the distortion is corrected and the room is back to its intended size.   At first the spinning also made me queasy, but once I got the hang of the controls, I was fine.

They're  doing some kind of compensation, then.  That should be interesting.  I hope you do a demo, though, because it takes me about a week to download something that size and the odds of it not being corrupted are less than 50 per cent.

In SCream the textures for the box have to be POT textures, thus giving you the distortion you mention Imari?

I looked at a SCream demo, and it did have the problem Ad7venture is talking about because the walls of a room are essentially flat.  As one turned the viewpoint a table in front of the wall did not look right.  Much more complicated manipulation is done in other engines but you need to start with a special spherical render.

[Kickaha]

I've got a couple hard drives, a 40 and a 20 that are quite a few years old.  I don't even know how many.  I know I carried them over in my last upgrade and that was about 4 years ago.  I  sure hope they don't fail because I don't back up anything.

I'm paranoid about backing up, and clone my hard drive to an external drive each week.

Don't be paranoid like me Ad7venture but please back things up!

[ad7venture]

Don't be paranoid like me Ad7venture but please back things up!

My cdrom is bad, so it's pretty hard.  I guess I'd be a little frustrated if it went down, but all I do is hobby stuff.

I looked at a SCream demo, and it did have the problem Ad7venture is talking about because the walls of a room are essentially flat.  As one turned the viewpoint a table in front of the wall did not look right.

That's what I was talking about.  I found it all right because it was easy to freeze the view with the large free play mouse area.  I imagine they used this super wide angle view to get everything in  6 shots and then corrected for it.  I don't think it would matter if you used a sphere either, because things further away appear to move slower than things closer up and you can't do that with a 2d image.  I wouldn't want a steady diet of that kind of game but I am looking forward to playing Imari's game if I manage to get it downloaded somehow.

[Imari]

Hrmmm.  I just ran through the SCream demo as well as several test rooms that I have made.   Once in the engine, I only see a noticable distortion on items that are very close to the camera.  I can certainly see that wandering through an environment like Niges looks better in that respect, but I'm not able (or willing) at this point to convert everything to low-poly.   

There certainly is a flatness to the cubic panoramas, but I hope to add movement once Agustin implements video-in-hotspots.  That will allow fires crackling on the hearth, plants swaying, clock pendulums swaying, etc.   One can already use moving skydomes in exterior scenes. 
 

[ad7venture]

I can certainly see that wandering through an environment like Niges looks better in that respect, but I'm not able (or willing) at this point to convert everything to low-poly.   

It sounds like the engine is mature enough that you should stick with it.  I really didn't notice distortion, only the flatness kind of thing and that would be virtually impossible to correct.  You really need  to design a low poly game from scratch.  Low poly doesn't quite mean what it used to, but it still takes a little thought unless you have high end hardware. Graphics are important to us, but in the end it will be puzzles and story that keep an audience.  I've seen some amazing tech demo's but the effect wore off after about 2 minutes.  I've never quit playing a game because I didn't like the graphics.  I quit playing because the story doesn't interest me or I can't figure out what to do next.

[NigeC]

i would of thought its just one of those things you'd expect.. Imari if i could model like that, i wouldn't go for a low poly engine either 

My goal is to push Awakening to see how much detail i can get into one area before it badly impacts the engine and my system (now reformatted)

[Kickaha]

Hrmmm.  I just ran through the SCream demo as well as several test rooms that I have made.   Once in the engine, I only see a noticable distortion on items that are very close to the camera.  I can certainly see that wandering through an environment like Niges looks better in that respect, but I'm not able (or willing) at this point to convert everything to low-poly.   

Does the SCream engine do mip-mapping?  What kind of distortion is it?

There certainly is a flatness to the cubic panoramas, but I hope to add movement once Agustin implements video-in-hotspots.  That will allow fires crackling on the hearth, plants swaying, clock pendulums swaying, etc.   One can already use moving skydomes in exterior scenes. 
 

That sounds promising - I liked the artwork you posted a while back and look forward to what you will produce

[Imari]

In SCream your "node" is a cubic panorama, so it's not mip-mapped.   I'd say it's the equivalent of having a fixed player position and a skycube.   This is the "north facing" side of the cube for one of the nodes in my Governor's Office.    I usually have several "nodes" in a complex "room" such as this one.  -
http://www.realmsforge.com/GovOff_n2B.jpg

And this is a screenshot of what it looks like in SCream.  As you can see, it no longer makes the room look huge, the effect of looking down a tunnel is gone.   I don't know what the algorythms are for the correction of the distortion, must be something Agustin's programed in LUA. -
http://www.realmsforge.com/windowedScreenshot.jpg

You render your six shots of the node, place them in a resources folder, and add the paths to your SCream LUA file using the special SCream script.   You can add hotspots to the images, insert close-ups and cut scenes, add music and sounds, etc.   My still shot does not do the engine justice.  You can download the SCream demo/engine here -
http://www.nucleosys.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1542

In a former post (http://www.adventuredevelopers.com/forum/index.php?topic=1083.0), I explained briefly how to set it up.

Better yet, to get a feeling for the abilities of the engine, play Scratches.   Director's Cut uses the latest version of SCream.   On the Nucleosys forums, Agustin has been adding updates to the game as he continues to improve the engine.   There's an old demo available here, though Agustin has improved the engine since this was made -
http://www.scratchesmystery.com/demo.htm

[Imari]

And since we've shifted to talking about game engines again....  Has anyone tried any of the Torque/Garage Games products?  I saw this game, which is supposedly an adventure game.   With descriptive words like "brutal" and "gruesome" it doesn't sound like my cup of tea, but the graphics looked interesting.   
http://www.garagegames.com/products/118/

Unfortunately, the demo crashed my computer and caused an insta-reboot.  (<--- That was the part potentially pertinent to "The difference in computer speed"   )

[Kickaha]

In SCream your "node" is a cubic panorama, so it's not mip-mapped.   I'd say it's the equivalent of having a fixed player position and a skycube.   This is the "north facing" side of the cube for one of the nodes in my Governor's Office.    I usually have several "nodes" in a complex "room" such as this one.  -
http://www.realmsforge.com/GovOff_n2B.jpg

And this is a screenshot of what it looks like in SCream.  As you can see, it no longer makes the room look huge, the effect of looking down a tunnel is gone.   I don't know what the algorythms are for the correction of the distortion, must be something Agustin's programed in LUA. -
http://www.realmsforge.com/windowedScreenshot.jpg

The screenshots are good and evocative.

Is it the difference just in the first the eye is on one wall, in the second the eye is in the middle?

The rest comes courtesy of OpenGL, and telling it what perspective transform to use.

[ad7venture]

(<--- That was the part potentially pertinent to "The difference in computer speed"   

We use a very loose definition of "on topic" here.  More of a guide line really.

[Imari]

Is it the difference just in the first the eye is on one wall, in the second the eye is in the middle?

The example that I showed might lead one to that conclusion, but I don't think that's actually the case.  If you rotate in the game, you can turn 360 degrees without noticing any real distortion.  I've added this shot, taken with the camera rotated about another 45 degrees, so that it rests on a "seam".   At least the distortion is not apparent to me.   
http://www.realmsforge.com/Screenshot2a.jpg

I think the distance from the virtual camera is computed on a per pixel basis (or something) so that the image is distorted to imitate a sphere.   

[NigeC]

it looks great to me, i can't see any signs of distortion, i'll say it again.. it looks amazing


while we're showing ours lol
this is my latest effort with Awakening, still not a lot to show, but i was having online layer problems in dark areas, but it was my video drivers:
http://www.nigecstudios.uk.to/street.htm
it will only work in Firefox/windows

if you get a player error update the player to 2.05.02 beta for Firefox
http://www.awingsoft.com/web3d/web3d.htm

[ad7venture]

Pretty nice Nige.  It runs fairly smooth on my computer but kind of rolls around like a marble when I let go of the key.  I'm not all that sure I like the web player for a large file, it seems to take longer than if I download it. 

I finally found a directX exporter that works with Blender and Irrlicht.  I just tried a simple animated model and it worked today.  That means I can write a whole Irrlicht game with Blender.  I'm not going to do much with it until I finish my Wintermute game, though. 

[NigeC]

the rolling about can be sorted.. the collide and gravity is a bit off as i downsized the camera view , to fit the undersized model i made.. Truespace insists on making models small on export, at the moment I'm exporting 3DS i might try OBJ as its designed import poser models for clothes etc it should export the right size
I'm just on working thro a FPS tutorial, i hate that type of game with a passion but its giving me the interactions for the makings of an adventure game