MonkeyWorld3D 2.0

Sion,

I had a chance to run through your bug list and have noted the following:



General


  • Sliders - Yes, they're tiny, but given the workspace available they work.

  • Preferences - Is still a work in progress.  In fact, the camera controls you mention can be done through the camera controls at the bottom of MW3D.



View

  • I was unable to reproduce either the camera movement stopping on key change or the shape re-scaling (it never snapped back).



Terrain creation

  • Concave Up/Down - This worked in my tests and will be covered in an upcoming vGuide (video Guide) tutorial.

  • Paint - A vGuide tutorial titled "Real-Time_Terrain_Smoothing" details this tool in depth.

  • Noise terrain & Inverse - Both are verified as bugs.

  • Smooth terrain - Verified.

  • Export heightmap extension - Ok.  Consider it done.



Editing terrain

  • Terrain marker not centered with mouse - I've tested this and seen it happen several times.  On a whole it stays centered, even through terrain editing, but I'm looking into the exceptions.

  • Lowering terrain - For now think of this as a controlled erase feature.  Instead of blanking out the entire terrain map only portions are negated.  Brush strength control is in the works.

  • Terrain textures - This is a two part answer: first, watch the upcoming vGuide tutorial titled "Terrain Textures".  It will answer applying textures and the blending of the texture with the color grid.  Second, in my tests the textured terrain remained throughout real-time editing.  If you used the New or Import Heightmap options it creates a new terrain so your old textures are not applied (though I have found a bug that leaves the textures listed when such an event occurs).

  • Paint Texture - Color painting still in development.  Also, please note that there are two terrain modifiers named Paint.  One is meant to color the terrain while the Tool named Paint is actually real-time smoothing (see the vGuide tutorial titled "Real-Time_Terrain_Smoothing").

  • Vegetation layer - A vGuide tutorial will be out very soon to cover the current functionality.  For now, selecting a type of Grass1 or Grass2 are your best bets.

  • Terrain Flatten / Water Surface - The current implementation is a starting point only.

Hi, i

At last i got some time to play around with mw3d - First impression - looks good :slight_smile: but feels complicated and i'm going to download the vid-tutorials next -

but hey this will take lots of time over 56 k

Ok, some more notes from the linux front :slight_smile:



The heightmap

Hi all.

First happy new year for all of you, and hope that it will be a good year for the Monkey engine.  Thanks all for the incouragment guys, this  realy means a lot to us, and keep us moving forward as hard as we can.


Hi, i
Will you guys supply an embedded version, something that can be added to another program and utilised.

The whole core package, can be reutilized for another gui system, say new Irrsor swing stuff, or BUI, or Swing, the way swt interacts with the editor is events, their are a lots of events fired when the model of the core just changes, say, terrian change and has been added, then an event will be triggered causing all the gui system related to terrian control to be activated. its completly seperated.as a POC, we will try the new Swing stuff from Irrisor, not the whole editor, but parts of it. If you wish you can implement the same stuff with Swings.

The custom sliders really needs to be improved - they are damn hard to use!

Will be working on that, and will try imporving it, the bad thing about the SWT, is that its a heavy weight component, so approximatly no customization can be dont in the user interface, but still their is some way around  :wink:

In the "Preferences" menu, most of the settings seem to be "0.0" - that can't be right? I tried changing the camera settings a bit and the camera ended up at some exterme position.

fixed.

Holding a movement key down and then pressing another movement key at the same time causes movement to stop

Thats an SWT issue, it can't recieve multiple event.

Terrain creation:

    * I can't get "concave up"/"concave down"/+/- buttoms to work - nothing happens
    * The paint settings buttons need descriptions (ie. tag texts)
    * The "Modify"->"Noise terrain" & "Modify"->"Inverse" doesn't work
    * When using "Modify"->"Smooth terrain" it only works if the "Immediate" box is checked. Clicking the "Apply" button does nothing.
    * You might want to put an file extention on the combo list in the "Export heightmap" menu. If "heightmap.bmp" is choosen as a filename, a the heightmap is exported as "heightmap.bmp.bmp" without the user knowing

Thanks for this detailed feedback. will be more clear in the next stuff.

I haven't been able to get the "paint texture" feature to work

The name must be changed to Smooth, sorry for this. you don't see anything, cause you apprently smoothing an flatt terrian. try making some hills, and clifs,and try this nice tool.

I still haven't been able to get the "Vegetation layer" feature to work

What problems did you face during creating a new one. of course you have a terrain first.here is what you have to make.
1. Click on the new button.
2. Select the layer that you want to edit, the already created one.
3. Click on edit the type of the layer, and choose, weather its a model, or grass, and click on the paint button. the paint occure where the terrain cursor is positioned, so you have to see it first.

Thanks alot for your feedback.



Most slider bars seem to be to short - for example: terrain editing - sliders for radius, brush strength, ... are only about 1 cm long

Thats a damn bad layout stuff, SWT reported inconcistancy in laying out components, from windows to linux, especialy with SWT.CENTER, changed most of what i have faced, but i have missed those.

The user guide mentions a resource managment facility, has this been dropped ?

We want to make this feature for the MonkeyWorld3D, currently the simplest form of it is throught the work space, where you right click and import models and textures, and other stuff.
But still the other part must be done. The thoughts are for the adding a library managment, where those tiny peices a user interacte with first be setted in the library. For example, a simple material editor, where a user can create his/her materials, and then resuse then in the work space, instead of created a new material every time he want to apply it on the model. most likely the library will be in the xml format, and the sorted items are:
1. Entities.
2. Materials.
3. Particles.
This will allow users to have a resuse, and share stuff in a more conviniet way. I have seen other system consider (texture + material) as the materials, we need a modle for this material type. or we can simply add the material attributes.
Any thoughts on this ?

i was wondering how vegetation is done, all i see are options for a brush and some texturing but im pretty clueless to what is going on. Thanks.

Ok, downloaded the terrain - texturing video - tutorial, but noted that i'm missing the whole texture section on the right main tab bar ???

(the headline is there but nothing in it ?)

i can add texture layer with the main menue terrain -> texture layers however but they never show on the terrain (yes, level-ligthing enabled to 300 both) and when i close the

terrain texture window and reopen the layer is gone but the choosen texture bitmap is still there ???

Yo Winkman,

Haven't checked this personally on Linux yet…but it should be on the right tab menu.  By default the leading tabs fill the space allocated for the tabs.  A header listing just to the right of your last tab will have a double caret ">>" and a number.  The number represents the number of hidden tabs.  If you click that item it will drop down an item selector for the hidden tabs.   



Also, you can resize the right tab menu by placing your cursor on the vertical bar between the 3D view and the tab menu and click+drag it to the left.  The further you drag the more tabs will be displayed.  Please note that this cuts into your 3D view which is why the default is set to 3 visible and 3 hidden (at full screen depending upon resolution).



If you still don't have a Terrain tab than something is wrong and we'll need to look deeper.



As for the mysterious layer removal but the disembodied texture still listed; I've seen this before and am looking into this further.  As noted in the tutorial, in alpha 0.1 of MonkeyWorld3D the Texture Layers dialog had a "Commit" button that is missing in the 2.0 release.  From what I've looked at it is the reason the textures are never applied to the terrain and cause texture listing problems.  For the time being stick with the work around covered in the video tut.  For basic even multilayering I find it faster but it doesn't allow for height based layers.



As a follow up to the Terrain Texturing video the Entities Texturing will be released this week as well.  The details for covering the alpha channels and settings got me a little hung up.

Hi digitalntburn, i think i didn't get over the problem properly here :slight_smile:

The terrain tab on the tab window is there but when i expand the texture layer section (2nd from above) then there is no content in it, thats my problem.

(tool settings and vegetation layers are ok but texture layers is simply empty)

In the terrain texture layer window from the main menue there is an apply changes button but it doesn't seem to do anything.



…looking forward to the next tutorials…

Sorry for the inconvience winkman, i will fix those problems and i will appload another mw3d.jar, in which you can easly replace. I also must double check every thing in the linux regard.

Thanks.

Hey no reason to thank me :slight_smile: , instead i have to thank You for this great tool.

So keep it up folks.

Yep, another nice tutorial,well done guys…



Finally figured out how to apply textures to the terrain… (Previously I was using the terrain wireframe mode, which threw up the FileNotFoundException I reported in an earlier post,  just needed to toggle this off…).



Just a couple of problems that I found (am using Windows2000 by the way!!).



After I add a texture and select it, the Remove and Advanced Settings Buttons still remain disabled (i.e. cant press them)…

And the textures are very dark  (even tho I activated the level light and entered the light settings as the tutorial)…  Will play around a bit more, probably something simple this one…



Keep it up!

Sounds great that you're hoping to have version 3.0 out before GDC in March!  :smiley:



I found a critical bug, that I think you should know about. When using the "Paint" ("Smooth"?) tool on terrains, the display window crashes if the tool is activated as the mouse moves off the terrain. It crashed my beautifully sculpted but unsaved terrain two times in a row :confused:

outstanding tool, and…Sorry if I sound to dumb, but…I click on the create model button but nothing happens…it does when I click on primitives , though…May i need then perhaps workspace folder filled with my md3, OBJ, etc, to be imported?



I am eager to give a try to the physics in the editor. I am -most surely-  finally starting a project for jME!  :slight_smile:


now that I'm here…



How possible is it right now to import one vertex animation model (ie, like md3)  but in the format that outputs the blender exporter made by heeve? I think is som kind of xml, but not sure as have not tested yet the whole thing.



There are advantages over md3. I use md3 as single piece, organic bending provided by the vertex animation and blenders bones and weights (even while his exporter surely export like snapshots of vertices, interpolated, only…does it grab the interpolation done by Blender?)  The only problem with md3 is…It does not support 2 UV vertex by each 3d vertex. Meaning that: whenever there is a UV island border (where a uv chunk has its contours) , it breaks the mesh there, generating 2 vertices. It can be fixed in engine, surely. usually passing a some sort of vertex weld to the md3, once in memory or something. I don't wanna cause extra work to anyone, and probably this would not be so easy. Instead, I was wondering if is usable already the blender character animation export, and specially if that can be imported into monkeyworld.  Md3 ha sits other issues, like 8000 tris maximum and some other.



Anyway, we're into a low pol game, so not so much issues. But the blender route for animation, looks like better. If nothing of this is possible, I'll switch to md3, and uv map the model as to hide best those geometry seams , forced by this format at every engine.



One note on this…Found at javagaming or somewhere (I downloaded it) the other day an xsi exporter.Dunno if is usable in jME, or just is java generic.  I can animate also in my xsi, but blender 2.4x today does also a fine job at that.



My less interest now on it , and on md5 jME exporter, is as we're targetting really low machines, puzzle game. So, I suspect weights computation (I cannot be convinced to use a format without weights like ms3d, though is simply perfect for my statics needs, along with obj ) would kill any low end machine, as far as I know, is done at the 3d card…anyway, can be done easily by a gf4 MX, which is just a bit higher of what we aim. Doing it at cpu would be safer, but perhaps would make it very slow. I don't know. For memory reasons, it'd be outstandingly better a format with bones and weights. And we also care a lot for HD memory.  (donwloadable game)



Too much questions. Somewhat there's conection with mojoworld, though i guess only my first post can be really answered.





thanks a lot in advance!



Oh, I am not a coder, I instead know a lot about graphics.But surely my friend can understand the coding explanations…Anyway, my questions are more about current art pipelines.


snaga,

To answer your initial question about the Create Model button…don't use it.  Instead, switch to the Workspace tab.  If you've followed the best practices listed in the User Guide the Model directory will be listed.  I do a lot of work in Blender and lately have really been putting hevee's exporter through its paces.  However, for the most part I use Blender's OBJ exporter and covert to JME through the tools listed on the jME site.  My model directory contains all the JME format models.  I simply drag-and-drop them into the 3D viewer.  MW3D takes care of the initial placement.



I see that you've already posted the bulk of the other questions over on hevee's export post and it's best to let him answer the export functionality questions.



MonkeyWorld3D is undergoing a ton of work to get version 3.0 out the door in the not-so-distant future.  Streamlining the art pipeline is one of my personal areas of focus.  Hevee's scripts go a long way to bridging the two products.  But Blender 2.41 is a major release with major changes to almost every core workflow that we, as designers or artists, would use.  The animation was a full rewrite from what I understand.  Hevee's got his hands full.

Hi snaga,



First thanks a lot for using it, and for the very nice words, really love to see such feedback. Thanks.



Currently models can be added via the workspace tab, as digitalntburn said, you navigate to the workspace, in the right menu, and you will notice all the directories listed in your context.

To add a little bit to Outrunner's post…his steps for Entity Transformation can also be applied to the 3D scene's camera!  In a very short amount of time it's possible for you to setup a fly through demo of the level.