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AppGameKit Classic Chat / World Builder - closed ALPHA test

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Santman
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Posted: 8th Jan 2020 18:28
Hi all.

I wanted to thank everyone who was helping bug hunt the world builder / scene editor - it's been extremely useful and I am very grateful.

Unfortunately it was taking up dozens of hours to make everything user friendly and versatile for others which I had to look at critically, and when combined with the fact that TGC requested I not use AppGameKit in its title, I've decided to cease development of a version for wider public usage.

Hopefully TGC will release their own 3D scene editor soon, but until then there are some good alternatives in the forums.

Happy development everyone.
blink0k
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Posted: 8th Jan 2020 19:20
Sorry to hear that matey. I really thought it was a great product. Maybe after a break you can revisit it for wider use?
Santman
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Posted: 8th Jan 2020 22:19
I'm still building it for myself, so maybe.

Gonna see exactly what I can do with it now though...
DannyD
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Posted: 9th Jan 2020 12:52
Very sad to hear that.

I really like the world builder, and will buy if needed, or help & support development

Santman
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Posted: 11th Jan 2020 14:52
Hi all.

A few people messaged saying they were disappionted I took the ALPHA down, so I;ve made it live again today.

Please feel free to come back with any comments or suggestions, but unless there's a show stopping bug I won't be updating it again for a little while.

Thank you for the positive feedback.
Loktofeit
AGK Developer
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Posted: 11th Jan 2020 18:52


"Just went to try the world builder and received this error (please see attached file)" That is the same recursive hellcircle I end up in whenever I click "Install Additional Files" in AGKS. I somehow end up 8 /workshop dirs deep.
Santman
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Posted: 11th Jan 2020 21:39
Loktofeit, I dont see an attachment or an error message?
JosephB
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Posted: 15th Jan 2020 20:51 Edited at: 15th Jan 2020 20:56
Santman,

Thank you for keeping the alpha available. Tried a quick test of building an auto mountain near two chunks. It seems that the process was not able to fully join between the two chunks. I used different images for the base image for the two chunks to easily determine where the chunks (28 and 29) met. I tried smoothing the chunks and fixing normal for each chunk and all chunks, but this did not correct the problem. I tried uploading a file photo, but I keep receiving an error and it will not upload. I have tried to attach the image through Dropbox below, but not sure it will work until I post, so hopefully the image will be there. Edit of original message: image link did not work as image did not show in post, so I sent the link in a personal message to you.


Santman
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Posted: 15th Jan 2020 21:54
Hi JosephB.

Thanks for that - I had a look, that's normal. The auto-mountain won't make perfect seams when it overlaps chunks, but the second icon from the top (meant to look like a sewing needle and thread) will "stitch" all the chunks back together - i.e. it will fix any and all gaps. If you click that, those will be fixed.

I'll fix it to work like importing height maps, and autofix the seams and normals after creation.

Just finished adding built in normal + specular mapping as a selectable shader....
Santman
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Posted: 15th Jan 2020 22:06
And here is a short demo of me with a simple scene with standard shaders, then turning on normal and specular mapping. The specular is even linked to the normal mapping, and opaqued out by shadows, with normal mapping smoothed into and out of shadows. I take a little first person stroll to show the specular a little.

JosephB
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Posted: 15th Jan 2020 23:56
Santman,

Thank you. That worked very well as seams are now together. The shaders are amazing.
Amon
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Posted: 17th Jan 2020 07:20
Where can I download this?
Win 10 Pro - AMD RYZEN 7 3800X Octacore - 16GB DDR4 - RTX 2080TI 11GB
fubarpk
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Posted: 17th Jan 2020 07:38
Quote: "Where can I download this?"

Still very much in testing phase and as
Quote: "World Builder - closed ALPHA test
"
suggests the testing people have been selected
MerryChristmas Everyone
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JosephB
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Posted: 21st Jan 2020 21:05
Santman,

After stitching the seams, I tried to draw a path on chunk 28 and that worked fine (I auto generated a mountain covering the area where chunks 28 and 29 meet). I then tried to generate some grass, but I was not allowed to select a texture any of the three layers, so the grass would not generate. I also tried to place an object, but the objects will not load to make a selection, even though the objects are in the media folder.
Santman
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Posted: 21st Jan 2020 22:45
Hi JosephB.

I'll need to look at the grass, not sure what's happening there

For the objects, they no longer load by default, it now works off of a library system. So go into object mode, you should have the default cube....left click on the preview of it, and the object library will open. From here you can click any blank slot to load up to 5000 objects. Once loaded, they can be selected by clicking the thumbnail preview. Right click the thumb nail preview for options.
JosephB
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Posted: 22nd Jan 2020 15:49
Thank you. Was able to select and place a couple of objects, however, there were no textures. I tried to place some textures, but I was not able to select a texture for either object. I tried selecting a blank slot, the object in the viewing area, the texture level, and using left or right mouse buttons, but I could not get the system to load a texture. Also, while in that edit mode, there is a view pane of the object in the right-hand corner with instructions that state to hold the mouse left button down and move the mouse to adjust the view. When I hold the left mouse button down, the object auto-rotates and I am also able to rotate the object while moving the mouse. The auto-rotation makes it difficult to set a specific viewing angle.
Santman
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Posted: 22nd Jan 2020 17:29
Would a quick video on how the libraries work help? The ones I did before got loads of dislikes so I just erased them.
fubarpk
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Posted: 22nd Jan 2020 18:21
Quote: "The ones I did before got loads of dislikes so I just erased them."

that's mean who would do that

would it be much harder and more time consuming to produce a pdf document or such
I prefer documentation than videos myself particularly if they use picture illustrations, videos
can be great but the problem I find they click something or do something and you have to stop
rewind zoom etc just to see what was done (partially cos I don't see as well nowadays with age)
the problem is particularly an issue with trying to reproduce code (ok irrelevance) and a
document you can copy and paste to try stuff
MerryChristmas Everyone
fubarpk on Itch...………...https://fubarpk.itch.io/
fubarpk on googleplay..https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=fubarpk
Santman
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Posted: 22nd Jan 2020 19:28
Hey.

I quickly put this together to show the flow of how objects and textures work.

Fubarpk, no not at all - plan to do just that but at the moment the options and menus are changing quite a bit - you'll notice for example in the video that multiple meshes are now supported so entire scenes can be built outside the editor with multiple meshes, then imported and setup quite easily, but it's not yet in the one available for testing. Once it's more "final" I'll add a documented user guide.

JosephB
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Posted: 22nd Jan 2020 20:13
Thank you. The video was extremely helpful and I was able to get the objects textured. Also like how it seemed to properly rotate the rocks to match the ground angles.
Santman
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Posted: 26th Jan 2020 17:50
How useful would it be to get the update that supports multi mesh models? Note, this (due to AGK) only works well with .X models - see my other post for issues with other types of models.
Santman
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Posted: 26th Jan 2020 21:19
JospehB,

Found the grass issue - it appears I inadvertantly turned off the grass functions while adding code to stop drawing when over a menu. Will upload a fixed version soon.
Santman
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Posted: 29th Jan 2020 21:33
Hi all.

World Builder ALPHA 0.827 is now live. Key highlights: normal + specular highlight shader now inlcuded (as well as the sample model below - feel free to play with it and change the time of day / camera to see the specular in full effect), and multi mesh objects are now fully supported.

There's also some interface imporvements and bug fixes.

Let me know of any issues.

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Santman
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Posted: 1st Feb 2020 22:15
Hey all.

Can I ask, what frame rates are you getting with a new, empty world? With water on I get around 250fps, with it off about 450-500fps.

Is anyone else getting significantly lower than this?
JosephB
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2020 00:49
230 FPS with show ocean (looking at sky and ocean), 430 just looking at the ocean. I get about 830 FPS with no ocean (looking at the grid and sky) or over 1,100 (just looking at the grid). I have an i5-4670k CPU @ 3.4 GHz with 16 Gigs. My graphics card is a GeForce GTX 1070 with 8 gigs.
fubarpk
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2020 20:28
Just Like to say love the heightmap addition
MerryChristmas Everyone
fubarpk on Itch...………...https://fubarpk.itch.io/
fubarpk on googleplay..https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=fubarpk
Santman
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2020 22:01
JosephB, good to know. I have a 1080, but a much older processor, so that's about right. Someone reported 18fps, which is really slow for the hardware they had, though it was old and all integrated.

Thanks Fubarpk, adding that was a good call, makes it easy to get a head start. Are you using my samples (Googles samples), or are you doing your own?
Santman
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2020 22:05
As a side, I found a NASA height map of our actual moon, the creator you can see from Earth....was fun adding it in and then texturing it.

Gonna add landscape normal mapping soon.
fubarpk
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2020 02:34
With the below image as a heightmap I get around 20 FPS with water off
and around 10 fps with water on but that would be my system ide imagine

System
intel core i5 6500 (@ 3.2 ghz)
8 mb ram
64gb Windows 10 OS
Nvidia Gigabyte GT710 2gb ram (a cheap replacement for the other one that stuffed up)


Quote: "I found a NASA height map of our actual moon"

Very cool I have the actual height maps in alsorts of different formats for every inch of earth
and did use them in a game called killerskuds I first made in darkbasic and then converted
to to c++ equivalent GDK.

MerryChristmas Everyone
fubarpk on Itch...………...https://fubarpk.itch.io/
fubarpk on googleplay..https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=fubarpk

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Santman
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2020 09:57
Fubarpk, that's a really low frame rate for your machine from just a landscape. I have a laptop with an nVidia 7xxx (cant recall), but was still getting 100+ fps, though not used it in a while. Will need to have a testing session tonight - a mobile phone should run it considerably faster than 10fps!
fubarpk
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2020 10:22
I may have some strange processes hogging cpu I will have to have a check
(used to live in msconfig) It was allot better with the 8 series card until I think
one of the fans stopped working properly so had to downgrade as I kept getting
green boxes pop up on screen and then a crash when I tried to do pretty much
anything. Ideally would love to do a reinstall of win 10 when I find the cd but until
then I have to make do with killing cpu hungry processes
MerryChristmas Everyone
fubarpk on Itch...………...https://fubarpk.itch.io/
fubarpk on googleplay..https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=fubarpk
fubarpk
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2020 10:45
Recap
I thought killing all of the adobe process from startup may have helped
as since I installed Autodesk theres been a difference but it didn't seem
to effect the frame rate that much but it did build the world allot quicker

MerryChristmas Everyone
fubarpk on Itch...………...https://fubarpk.itch.io/
fubarpk on googleplay..https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=fubarpk
Santman
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Posted: 7th Feb 2020 09:06
The CPU will be the bottle neck for things like editing and fixing normals, but the GPU will be the bottle neck for the gramerate as theres no real game content running, so its updating a few essential variables every cycle, but beyond that just pushing out the graphics. It's probably the landscape shader does something your hardware isn't optimised for, or something similar. I can optimise it a bit moving forward, but the editor will always require a higher spec that its output due to all the temporary data it needs to hold in memory.
Santman
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Posted: 7th Feb 2020 09:07
A full user guide for the world builder will be out this weekend, with a couple of minor tweaks. What do you think I should focus on next?
Amon
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Posted: 7th Feb 2020 11:29
Hi santman! Can I get a copy of this world builder please?
Win 10 Pro - AMD RYZEN 7 3800X Octacore - 16GB DDR4 - RTX 2080TI 11GB
Santman
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Posted: 8th Feb 2020 11:03
Hi Amon.

At the moment it's just running with a closed group of Alpha testers, but it will be available to a larger audience soon. Watch this space.
DannyD
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Posted: 9th Feb 2020 01:56
Thanks Santman.. just getting better and better
User guide will be very handy.. thanks for the time
JosephB
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Posted: 10th Feb 2020 18:54
Quote: "A full user guide for the world builder will be out this weekend, with a couple of minor tweaks. What do you think I should focus on next?"


I was trying to locate the original post about the WorldBuilder, but could not locate it and I do not recall the original plans, so this may not fit into those plans: maybe ability to add animated NPC.
Santman
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Posted: 10th Feb 2020 20:21
Hi Jospeh.

Theres an NPC menu, it lets you add NPCs and set them path etc. Were you thinking of more detailed animation?
JosephB
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Posted: 11th Feb 2020 00:16
I have setup a couple of NPCs, but I have not determined how to change their size as they are a bit larger than the static models, especially when they are first selected. Also, I do not see any animations as they just seem to stand unmoving. I was hoping for some idle animation and maybe an animation as though they might be talking to the player character. I have not yet figured out how to set the paths yet.

Thanks.
Santman
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Posted: 11th Feb 2020 00:48
That's the user guide (draft form) uploaded at the start of the thread - it will be in each program fodler in future updates too, and I will keep the most current version at the top of this thread.

Let me know if it helps, and if there's anything that's wrong, not clear...or spelled incorrectly!
Santman
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Posted: 11th Feb 2020 00:57
Joseph,

Currently you cant change the NPC scale, but I will add that. The NPC section is quite complex as it was set up for myself, and I wasnt always sure if I would keep it. To set paths, use the staging option....it open a sub panel that let's you define NPC actions such as MOVE TO, FACE AND WAIT. For movement commands, click the cords to set the position and then click in the world, add a new order and repeat to fade. Movement nodes will be connected by arrows on screen showing the direction of movement, and orders will loop when finished, essentially returning to the starting position / first position set.

Now that models are done (multi mesh and spec shader) I will get to adding to this. I also want to add a simple cut scene editor - I have the basics working for my own game, just no interface for the builder yet. Generally, features start as internal only for me, then I build an interface around it. Defining animation is not possible yet, so its expecting specific animations at specific frame ranges...use the stock character I supplied and it should walk about though.
Santman
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Posted: 15th Feb 2020 20:42 Edited at: 15th Feb 2020 20:49
Hey all.

That's a new version live now, now with painting objects - choose an object, set a few parameters....and paint multiple instances of the object freely across the landscape.

Guide at the start updated, new version should be live now.

Next big update will be export code so you can take any creations you;ve built to your own games.

DannyD
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Posted: 17th Feb 2020 01:10
Thanks Santman.. gettting better and better everyday.. I LOVE IT!!!!
DannyD
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Posted: 17th Feb 2020 01:10
Thanks Santman.. gettting better and better everyday.. I LOVE IT!!!!
fubarpk
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Posted: 17th Feb 2020 01:15 Edited at: 17th Feb 2020 01:15
Becoming a very professional product

fubarpk on Itch...………...https://fubarpk.itch.io/
fubarpk on googleplay..https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=fubarpk
Santman
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Posted: 17th Feb 2020 10:06
Thanks guys, mich appreciated.

Baby steps, just some menus to tidy up and it'll be getting close to a beta level.
Mesher
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Posted: 17th Feb 2020 23:01
As always - done remarkably well with this potential product for future developers to use - will be very handy for any sole developer to get into the scene.

Well done and keep up the good work


Santman
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Posted: 20th Feb 2020 19:58
Hey all.

For all those testing the World Builder, I was hoping to glean some feedback. Specifically;
1) How easy are the controls, and what could make it better?
2) Is it too complex to design and paint a landscape?
3) How useful is the guide?

This will really help me as I consider what way to take it now, so I do appreciate any feedback offered.
Santman
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Posted: 20th Feb 2020 21:28 Edited at: 20th Feb 2020 21:43
Well this was easier than expected...if you so wish you can now use an alternative shader for the landscape that allows four diffuse textures and four full matching nromal textures for a far more real look.....


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