Bimevi Journal

[Whilyam]

Bimevi's plans have changed substantially. Trying to expand this Age physically just doesn't work. So look forward to little restoration changes and perhaps some continuity issues (no Nexus book or similar link out).

[Whilyam]

Just detailing the Bimevi update.

- Statue is restored
- Floating firemarbles working.
- Clouds now move
- Lighting is improved

With this update, Bimevi is probably mostly finished.

[D'nial]

A couple of small details:

The sprites for the firemarbles look a bit wonky, and the spinning pentagons and statue "head" tend to poke through them. I've seen this in a lot of Ages, but it's much more noticeable in Bimevi.
The textures on the leaves of the trees don't look so plant-like.

Apart from that, your Age looks great, as all of yours do! Keep up the good work!

[Whilyam]

Sprites I'd like to fix. I know it's a pass index/whatever setting to get them to draw in front of the spinning pentagons. Problem is I can't get them to work right and work with the water and the grass and the shoreline and the bushes and so on. If I have some time, I'll try and fix them, but it's difficult.

Edit: As for the plants, not-plant-like is what I was looking for. A combination of them being alien plants already as well as the effect of some events in Bimevi's history made them the way they are. Very tough exterior to trap water inside.

[diafero]

I would not even be sure if these sprites can be fixed at all - the problem is that they are intercepting with another, solid object. For the Uru engine, each object always has to be either in front of behind of another one, so that objects as a whole can be drawn in a certain order. If two objects intercept, you need to split them at the interception to make them 4 objects which can be sorted. However, in this case, the interception constantly changes...

[Whilyam]

But Cyan's done the same sort of thing with the lamp glares elsewhere. The Nexus, Kadish, etc. They all draw over their lamps even though they appear to intersect. I thought that, by setting the pass index values, I could get Uru to draw the glares over the lamps no matter where they were viewed from.

[Jojon]

My head hurts, thinking about Paradox's post about the hierarchy of drawspans and their sub-groupings in Plasma, but for a rather inefficient solution, maybe forcing both the glare and the non transparent object, it supposedly emits out of, into a blend span (through the DrawExtra/Transp button) might make passindex "take" on them both?

Otherwise; might there be room to move the mesh, so that it is physically in front of or behind (depending on desired effect) the "light fitting", thus not intersecting with anything other than fellow players? :P

[D'Lanor]

Paradox has now documented this for the wiki. See Managing Transparent Objects and Drawable Flags. I'm afraid your head is going to be hurting more after reading that.

Setting the flags as described requires the bleeding edge PyPRP version.

[Nadnerb]

The reason sprites in cyan ages don't appear to intersect with the lamps they're attached to is because they don't. The actual sprite doesn't rotate around it's center, but rather rotates around the lamp, with the sprite object being offset forward, toward the viewer. Also, sometimes they do appear to intersect objects, such as the base of the lamp when you view the lamp from below, because they rotate into the base of the lamp when the viewer is in that position. This doesn't really have to do with the pass indexes or drawable spans.. it is possible to stop specific objects from reading from the z buffer, but that would make the object appear to be in front of _everything_

[Whilyam]

So I should try moving the sprite a little farther away from the center point so it rotates farther away from the center?