Week 4 - Atmos fear

Well, here you go.

This is default 

 Amped up the sun for some ray on rock action

 Added snow, increased particles, added red fog, adjusted size and brightness of snow.

 It's all clear now - even the water

Rain added, sun pulled back, brought brightness and atmos to good levels.

All in all, a productive week

inbetween weeks rant

I spent 6 hours (from about 8 to 2am) doing work, and I've come to a few conclusions:

1- Making custom terrain is retarded. Why is everything based on randomisation?
I do realise that not many people have the time to place every square foot of space, but god damn is it hard to get what you want from drawing in GeoControl, or in CryEngine- it's pretty nuts.

1a- When moving terrain.raw into CryE, it's like terrain on steroids, it's about 5x as big as it needs to be, and forget re-sizing it, it's not a congruent scale - so all the valleys and pits lose their edge.

1b- Also, I have the annoying task of making an island out of I and 8. Not the most aesthetic combo.


2- After 3-4 hours, CryE crashed. My file became corrupted and I lost everything. I suppose that's my own fault for not saving separate files.

3- The materials editor is a little whacky. I can only seem to use 5 materials.. Sand, coal, pineneedles, limestone and grass.



I think the scale I'm working on is waaaay too big.
I think I'm going to work on a tiny island.

In any case- I feel like I got nothing done tonight.
F--- my computer for not working with this..

/rant

Week 02 - Now I'm mad

This is easy.

Fixing my PC is hard.

I can't work on this at home. I would be on this 24/7 if I could.

This is the culprit.

2008/2010 C++ installed

DX updated etc...

I gotta format and buy a new copy of windows.. 

Anyway, here's the sprouting seeds

I started with highly elevated tiny islands.

Then used Voxel object brushes to cut-out shapes I wanted

Testing to see if I could stand on these objects (explosions for style)

Added more stuff - this is eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeasy

And I thought I wasted my time learning 3dsMax. 

I'll be a little behind with the homework

-_-

Week 01 - Yeah, u mad

CryEngine Blog

The text that you're reading now, is unimportant.
The upcoming text, however, is not.

Customising the Editor:

1- Hovering over editor buttons should display what they do, as well as the hotkey.
ie- hovering over the select tool will display a note saying "Select only (Q)"

2- The tickboxes in the properties panel (Right hand side) should only display the word true.
It's very confusing when you see the word false and an open box- to me that says that it is true (or not false)

3- When changing values in the properties panel, you should be able to click and drag up or down, wherever you want, to change the value. Clicking on the tiny up and down arrows is difficult, you have to be very precise.

4- Modify terrain needs brush shapes, like square.
It would also be helpful to have a height limiter in the settings, so that you don't create enormous spikes.

5- It would be nice to have a tickbox for entities or objects to react to environmental factors, such as gravity. This might be because I haven't found it yet, but it would be good to control what is static, and what's dynamic.

Moving around:

1- You can use the standard gaming WSAD (or arrow keys) controls for Forward/Backward L/R movement + right click for rotating the viewport. 

2- You can click "Goto position" and enter coordinates.

3- Shift double click will take you to the X and Y coordinates of your click. Z value will not change.

4- You can also right click on the word "Perspective" on the top left of the viewpanel to look at different types of views. Map is cool.

User Interface Panels - Overview.

1- CTRL + G - takes you into game mode. Great feature- huge likes.

2- CTRL + Z and CTRL + SHIFT + Z - Undo and redo

3- Z - Takes you to current selection. Handy for visually locating objects.

4- M - Opens the Material Editor

5- CTRL + T - This opens a list of all the objects in the scene, making finding objects easy.

Lecture:

The lecture was fine. It was a basic overview of what we needed to do, and informed me that UNSW has some new VR tech for use and experimentation. I would like to try this technology inside CryEngine and also add some of my own ideas to the project if possible.