Aum50 and its future (good news)

Hey George,

nice work as always.

I have a question about environment models (not itnerested in character models).
In how far are we allowed to use those for _anything_? Also including making changes to the model?

I'm especially interested in the grass model and the bird from AUM 45, but don't want to break any rules

Awesome job as usual. Looking forward to Aum 51!

Nice job...looking forward to the future, as well.

Great stuff George, keep it up!

Hi George,

Congratulations, AUM is the best online magazin that I ever see in my live

You are making a fantastic work.

Best regards,

Marcio

Thanks for the Grass and deformable terrain articles George, they help tremendously.
Looks like the grass one will work for forests and tall flora too.
Cheers.

AUM is such a great magazine! I have so many game ideas on deformable terrain

Very nice George.
Thank you.

You never cease to amaze Excellent work yet again Cant wait to see the new layout

thx.....very interesting content....
aum is great!

Hey,

Good job, george! I learned from your magazines a lot and the best its free.
Thanks a lot !!!
One question: How you can draw on terrains with 3dgs?
The problem is where should I draw on the terrain, when I click on it. I need the pixel position, if you know what I mean.
I hope you can help me!

Best Regards,
beegee

--------------
stunt racing

The best AUM so far! The deformable terrian is precisly what I was looking for! Can't wait to see how you fixed the aging layout.

@beegee
Have a look at this code...
http://www.coniserver.net/ubbthreads/sho...0&fpart=all

If you scroll down, you'll see a modified version that can paint on an entity's skin

Thank you for the kind comments.
Claus_N: The new magazine will include contests, as well as a tighter "user contributions" integration. There will also be a few more (hopefully) pleasant surprises.
Firoball: I believe that you are interested in the grass models from Aum51, right? Those models were created by Az and were released as freeware so I guess that you can use them in any project. Better ask Az if you can find him. The bird from Aum45 came with Geometricks' model pack, so I'm afraid that you can't use it for a commercial project unless you buy their model pack.
Nemisis: the serious grass code will work ok for forests and tall flora.
beegee: if the link from Claus_N doesn't do the job send me a private message that describes what you need.

as always more then great...

and thanks a ton for the grass script. right what i was looking for.....must be some mind reading trick

whats the best way to send resources for aum??? are you floating the net and search them or do you accept mailed or uploaded ones??

cheers and hope to see the new magazine very soon
thanks for your hard work!!

Hi Blattsalat,

Thank you. Yes, I know that I have read your mind, as well as some other's minds when I have created that grass script
The easiest method to submit resources would be to email them to resources@acknex.net .Please check au.conitec.net for more details.

... how about my tutorial on how to create levels in MED at high speed? It is a powerful tutorial where it could take only a full 12-hour day to make a decent-sized level.

This is one of the better Aums. Nice work George and keep it up! Just one quick question...

How long does it take to write a version of Aum?

Jeremy

I Love the AUMs and i cant believe they will be better from now on , very good Job as always George .

ulillillia: sure, that would be a good addition to AU. Please email it to resources@acknex.net or if that is the final version tell me and I will get it from the forum.
Jeremy_D: well, I'm afraid that I can't give you an exact figure. I usually need a day for "Beginner's corner" and 2-3 days for "Code snippets". However, there were times when "Code snippets" took me almost a week.
Shinobi: I'm looking forward to having searchable magazines; I'll use that feature for sure.

However long it takes it's worth it, it's taught a lot of us how to program in 3dgs and kept us going in game making.

Sorry but the AUM link is broken

There are a lot of images for that tutorial (screenshots), close to even 8 MB! There are thumbnails as well and, when clicked on, give the full-size version of it. The HTML file itself is about 85 KB, and I'd still like to add a tips and tricks section (essentially to review everything learned, sort of like a summary). The tutorial is very long and detailed and covers just about everything you can think of. It makes texturing and design very fast as I'm devoted toward speed. I've already got the base texture for my 2448 buildings (and roads) in one hour, I've planned then copied and pasted everything and adjusted the building heights all in one hour. In all, I could do all that in just five hours! The tutorial also has a CSS file (a style sheet) attached to it. To help save some bandwidth, I could break it up into multiple pages (likely 3 for the minimum) instead of having it all as one single page.

xoNoid: The link is good, but Conitec's server appears to be down at the moment. Please try again Monday.
ulillillia: I also believe that breaking up the tutorial into several pages would make it an even easier to follow contribution.

A5_Champ,

How could I forget the A5 users? With the new syntax changes (ent_move, trace, and so on being removed in the following A6 release) the code will be more A6-oriented; however, I will try to have some sort of a compatibility table, explaining the needed changes (where it is possible).

Hi ulillillia,

Please make the tutorial as good as possible; the number of pages doesn't matter too much. My email account might handle 8Mb attachments, so please email the tutorial to george@acknex.net when it is ready; if I can't get it maybe you can upload it somewhere and give me the link.
I can always replace the old tutorial with newer versions of it.

Have a nice day.
George.

I could use yousendit.com instead for the large attachment. This is the total size though, not the compressed size (which might not be that different as PNG images don't compress well). I'm just wondering if you can handle an extra 8 MB on your server or webhost. Webhosts usually have like 200 MB on the cheap end and 8 MB is quite a punch on that (4% of the total). Good webhosts give like 6000 MB of disk space - 8 MB on this is not really noticeable.

I'll split the document up in a way that seems decent. The minimum will be 5 pages, my target is around 10 pages.

Amazing work. I cant wait to see the next AUM in the future.

Hi ulillillia,

Yes, yousendit.com should do the job; pm me the link when you have done that. Please note that I'll be away for 1 week starting with Tuesday (I'm taking a small vacation) so you might not hear from me. Don't worry about Conitec's server; I believe that it can handle at least a few Gb.

Well, I've made an update to the tutorial and fixed a few grammer errors and made some clarifications. I'm still finalizing it, however. As I've said, it'll be around the middle or end of August before I'll declare the tutorial acceptably close to finished. I think I've got a way to cut down on the file size of some of the images, but I'll have to test it out first.

I´m surprised of the new layout...

ulillillia: try to play with the compression factor if you are using jpg images. Another idea would be to use gif files (this works best if the size of the image is really small).
Anakin_Skywalker: the new layout will surprise you in Aum51. I'll continue to "use the source"

I tried playing with the compression factor. Even at JPG quality of 50, it not only looks bad, but it's still 200-something KB! GIF files won't work as the colors are seriously messed up, even worse than JPG.... It also seems like I might have to rewrite certain parts of the tutorial due to the fact that I didn't know that it was the width and height of a texture that were limited and not only by memory. It uses 4096x256 which won't run on my video card, but hey, there's actually an advantage to this - learning how to make texture modifications, something that I haven't covered yet. And using a really small image isn't likely. The screenshots are 1600x1200 at full size. The thumbnails are 400x300 and are a different file. It's the gouraud shading that's causing this and I don't know how to disable it short of having to make heavy edits to the images to remove this (the best way in terms of compression and quality) or use color reduction (the fastest way, but won't look as good and might not compress as good either.

I would make the screenshots smaller; something like 1024x768 or 800x600 should do the trick. Of course that it all depends on the level of detail (not LOD ) that you want to obtain. Gif files work well for small images; they reduce the number of colors to 256, so they might not look that well if you have many different colors in your pictures.

O I want to see it now... *g*
I hope it will make life easier... new layout, new tips, new understanding, better game!
Or as master Joda tells ya:
Fear you mustn´t have, new layout leads to new tips, new tips leads to understanding, understanding leads to a better game, a better game leads to suffering, dieing!!!


XD

I don't like running at 1024x768. I got the big monitor so I can run at 1600x1200 (and now I'm wanting to go higher, but don't see anything that can go much higher). I don't know about 800x600 for the size but making the conversion. 256 colors is too few which is why GIF won't work. It's the gouraud shading in MED that really causes problems and I don't know how to disable it (to get true color which would compress a lot better).

I'm pretty sure that Med has an option that allows you to see the models without gouraud shading (only "textured" or so).

Even having it as "textured" still has this gouraud shading (change the angle of the camera and you'll see it), but it's not as intense though. The best I'm going to be able to do is to apply a color reduction to help with compression, getting the equivelent of 16-bit color which is acceptable for most cases (especially without dithering). GIMP isn't working for me right now so I can't test it. It simply won't even start or it takes 15 to 40 minutes just to get it to load frequently having to use the "end task" feature to retry after failing. I've submitted a bug report, but haven't gotten anywhere yet. I also need it for my 2D game as I have big changes that need to be done and can't as I don't have any useful software (stuff 4 years old lacking features is not acceptable).

Still, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Many of the other large screenshots aren't bad in terms of file size, usually not much more than 120 KB each. Screenshots 31 (major), 36 (minor), 39 (moderate), 40 (minor), 42 (moderate), 43 (moderate), 45 (severe - 550 KB in PNG), 46 (severe), 47 (severe), and 48 (moderate) are the worst. Note how these are only the later ones. 200 KB and above I declare as "hazardous". Though I'm not sure if it's 46 or 47, but one of them, in PNG format, was over 1 MB which I'd declare as super severe and color reduction is practically required. It's the 1 MB PNG file with the 200 KB size at JPG quality of 50. Either that, or I could use the 5.6 MB bitmap image....

It looks like you could use high(er) quality jpg files instead of png. Keep an eye on the size (in pixels) though...

There is no need to use 1600x1200 screnehsots as most people don't run this resolution anyway. Also it does not fit to a website.

Make your screenshots smaller instead of sorting them according to severity.
It can't be THAT difficult...

Hey George,

Suggestion for future issues. I like snow and there have been a lot of questions and some scripts regarding it. How about some coverage of every aspect of this -a snow mega pack. Maybe over multiple issues as you did with the game with a complete interactive collection of scripts that covers all aspects by the end of the series. Some have been touched on and might be variations of stuff you've done before.

-Snow fall script, blizzard/whiteout, light/heavy etc
-Foot prints/puffs of snow when walking
-Snow accumulation (maybe using growing meshes, switching textures or even deforming mesh as in this past issue).
-Growing icicles
-Freezing water effect (like small pond)
-Snow on tree
-Vapor from breathing
-Snow drifts (http://www.coniserver.net/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=UBB3&Number=547583&Searchpage=1&Main=520698&Words=snow&topic=&Search=true#Post547583)
-Driving snow - in an interview of flight simulator I believe someone discussed a way to create the illusion of snow streaking towards the camera against forward motion of plane. The users two overlapping cone models with the wide end at the camera lens and each had an animated snow texture so it looked like snow was blowing past on either side fast.
-etc

Thanks for your wonderful work.

Hi George, I have a suggestion for you. How about a Really Simple Syndication ()? A new AUM every month can allow RSS readers to catch into what's new from AUM. With this, I could make an application with a notifier (in VS2k5) to notify AUM readers of new magazine from you.

Hi Burt,

You've got some really interesting ideas here. I'll try to write the code for at least some of them in one of the following magazines.

Thank you, George !
I started with 3dgs from scratch (jan 2005).
Your GREAT work save my time