Author Topic: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?  (Read 6897 times)

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Offline Bobboau

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
now, I want to make sure I don't give the wrong impression, here, I've reread my last post and I may have made it sound like I was lamenting that taylor touched my code, I view this as at worse a miscomunication on desiered behavior, I am looking into the change logs right now to see who did what. and because there tends to be a great deal of drama around stuff like this, I want to nip that right now.
I haven't actualy looked at this, I'm baseing my statements on what I am hearing in this thread, I haven't been able to look at it, because I haven't had power for the last four days and I still have no internet at home.

allright from the looks of it, I may have placed the scaleing factor in the wrong place, it is an incredably stupid thing for me to have done wich makes me wonder if I forgot the real reason why I did that or, if the interface for geometry_batcher::draw_bitmap got changed at some point (I seem to recall those two parameters got swaped at one point).  but it could just be that I origonaly put it in the wrong spot and nobody has used the scaleing factor this whole time and noticed it didn't do anything noticeable.

I find it hard to beleive that no one would have noticed a diference in behavior that signifigant when the change to geometry batching went in. so something seems odd about this situation, particularly, why is the current result so, obviusly (based on the screen shots and other people's testomony) not right?

I have to go home now, wich mean's I'm not going to be able to respond to anything untill tomarow, so maybe this is just people freaking out over nothing, I'll have to look at this myself.
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Offline Wanderer

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
I thought nearly everyone saw the altered graphics (it was changed in May i think). I reported it to taylor as soon as i saw it  but after a discussion i got an impression that the earlier graphics had been a long persistent bug that had finally been fixed.
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Offline Col. Fishguts

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
I think noone used the scaling factor for the tertiary glows so far, so nobody noticed the bug with the scaling factor/angle mixup. Now it's fixed, but the standard scaling (with the radius value stored in the POF) seems to be borked now. That's the situation I guess, no drama so far :)
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Offline taylor

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
DRAMA DRAMA DRAMA DRAMA DRAMA DRAMA DRAMA DRAMA DRAMA DRAMA ...

... Just getting it over with. ;) :D

allright from the looks of it, I may have placed the scaleing factor in the wrong place, it is an incredably stupid thing for me to have done wich makes me wonder if I forgot the real reason why I did that or, if the interface for geometry_batcher::draw_bitmap got changed at some point (I seem to recall those two parameters got swaped at one point).  but it could just be that I origonaly put it in the wrong spot and nobody has used the scaleing factor this whole time and noticed it didn't do anything noticeable.
From the original commit of the feature I don't think that it worked.  Not until the bug created by the geometry_batcher change did it work as far as I know.  I went through the logs pretty thoroughly before making the change to begin with so it wasn't just some willy-nilly thing.  I can say why no one noticed it wrong with the geometry_batcher change though, the default value for the angle is close enough to the default value for the radius that it was enough to fake it working properly.  The problem, of course, is that the modder specified radius value had no affect on the radius.  Also, the intended angle was incorrect, but I'm not sure that anyone ever noticed that properly for some reason.

I find it hard to beleive that no one would have noticed a diference in behavior that signifigant when the change to geometry batching went in. so something seems odd about this situation, particularly, why is the current result so, obviusly (based on the screen shots and other people's testomony) not right?
Here is the current issue, and why the default radius value is fubar:
Code: [Select]
primary_thruster_batcher.draw_bitmap( &p, 0, (w * 0.5f * Interp_thrust_glow_rad_factor), (w * 0.325f) );... that is the line for the primary thruster glow, and this is the tertiary glow...
Code: [Select]
tertiary_thruster_batcher.draw_bitmap( &p, 0, (magnitude * 4 * Interp_tertiary_thrust_glow_rad_factor), (w * 0.6f), (-(D > 0) ? D : -D) );As you see, with the bug fixed the (w * 0.6f) was used for the radius, and if Interp_tertiary_thrust_glow_rad_factor is 1, then it looks ok (though perhaps a little large).  The problem is how the radius is done, with (magnitude * 4 * Interp_tertiary_thrust_glow_rad_factor).  The radius for the tertiary glow uses a different scale than the primary and secondary glows. (Those are all the numbers from the original commit of the code, btw, and it has never been changed.)

So if the intent was for it to work the same as primary glows then changing the scale to do the same should fix the radius issue.  Not sure if the angle value would still be correct though.

And I did bring this up at one point before making the changes (both Goober and myself have cleaned up the thruster code over the past year), but never got a response indicating that the changes were anything other than bug fixes.

 

Offline Col. Fishguts

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
Good, now that the drama is over: Will the code be corrected, so that tertiary glows are scaled the same way as the primary glows. Or will it stay that way and the correction is up to the table entry ?

Because I don't want to correct the table more than once ;)
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Offline Tolwyn

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
From what taylor told me: we are supposed to wait for a fix :)
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Offline taylor

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
Yeah, just wait for a fix.  I'd prefer to wait for Bobboau's blessing on new values to use, but I'll make the changes myself in a couple of days if he doesn't have a chance to offer anything by then.  And I'll be sure to put out a test build before 3.6.9 final for you guys to test out, just in case it needs to be tweaked a little bit still.

 

Offline Tolwyn

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
I'll be sure to put out a test build before 3.6.9 final for you guys to test out, just in case it needs to be tweaked a little bit still.

Lovely! ;)
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Offline Bobboau

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
ok

void geometry_batcher::draw_bitmap(vertex *pnt, int orient, float rad, float angle, float depth);
int g3_draw_rotated_bitmap_3d(vertex *pnt, float angle, float rad,uint tmap_flags, float depth);

as we see here to maintain the same behavior between these two versions the angle and radius values need to be swaped.
here is the problem, it would seem the radius scaleing factor was put on the wrong parameter in the earliest version of the thruster effect, not when it got ported over to the geometry batcher. the default value for this scaleing factor is 1.0, so it has no effect unless it is specificly changed, and if you tried to change it all you would likely notice is nothing happened (the angle probly wouldn't jump out at you unless you were looking for it, also this is a little known feature, so I doubt many have tried) so, I think the way to handle this should be to put the two parameters back the way they were, and move the scaleing factor over to the corect parameter. this would put the effect back into the same basic behaviour that we have been used to for the majority of it's life

magnatude is based on the normalization of the thrust vectors, and is thus never more than 1, so the current code will draw the glow with a radius of only 0-4, no mater the size listed in the pof, or the size of the model.
obviusly 0-4 makes more sence as something that would have to do with radians, and w (wich is a scalar of the thruster point size) would make more sence as the radius of the glow.
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Offline taylor

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
****.  :snipe:

Ok, I'll switch it around, but make the user-specified radius factor actually apply to radius. :)

 

Offline Col. Fishguts

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
Good, I'll wait for the next RC then. Thanks muchly. :)
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Offline taylor

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
I'm not really in the mood to do a full build (cut a clean patch, drop it in a clean tree, do new builds from scratch), so I just uploaded builds off of my current 3.6.9-dev tree.  Some of the changes in here won't hit 3.6.9 (there are particle rendering issues for instance, and big slowdowns if you alt-tab back to the game when in-mission), but the bulk of my fixes which aren't in CVS yet are in here.  Make sure that the tertiary thrusters are working as expected now, and I'll start getting all of the various fixes in CVS tomorrow.

http://icculus.org/~taylor/fso/willrobinson/hoopla.rar

 

Offline Tolwyn

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
excellent, thanks! It works :)
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Offline Tolwyn

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
I've been doing some testing today (taylor fixed tertiary thrusters on cap ships) and noticed another issue, that has been bothering me for some time now, although it was not that obvious without the tertiary glow.

Take a look at this. Is this intended? Can't see why it should, but...



I mean, how should thruster flame be visible from one angle and not from another?
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Offline Col. Fishguts

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
   Make sure that the tertiary thrusters are working as expected now, and I'll start getting all of the various fixes in CVS tomorrow.

It works yay :yes:
Tertiary thrusters are scaled like the others and even the $Thruster03 Radius factor: works correctly. May I point out a little typo before you commit the fix ?
The secondary glows length factor is called $Thruster01 Length factor: in the table, that might confuse some people.

Also, whoever put it in the wiki misspelled it as Lenght.

@Tolwyn: That's supposed to be like that, IIRC is serves to hide the clipping.
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Offline Tolwyn

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
@Tolwyn: That's supposed to be like that, IIRC is serves to hide the clipping.

I was not aware about the $Thruster01 Length factor. Now I can tweak it to my liking :)
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Offline taylor

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
The secondary glows length factor is called $Thruster01 Length factor: in the table, that might confuse some people.
Ok, fixed.  Both the old and correct options are valid, but the old one ("Thruster01") will issue a warning to use the correct option instead.

Thanks for pointing that out btw.  No telling when we would have noticed otherwise. :)

 

Offline Wanderer

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
Also, whoever put it in the wiki misspelled it as Lenght.

That would probably be me....  :doubt:
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Offline Col. Fishguts

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Re: Ambent Engine Glow: Where did it go?
No worries, it was easy to guess the correct syntax. If you're gonna edit the wiki page, you could also fill in what they define.

"$Thruster02 Radius factor:" varies the width of the secondary glow
"$Thruster02 Length factor:" varies the length of the secondary glow
"I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it." - D. Lynch

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