Materials

[TattieBoJangle]

Sounds good m8 cant wait!

[SolarPortal]

Another update: Textures and materials with spaces will now load into the system. Just need to be able to save the material back now

[TattieBoJangle]

Great new m8 not that i use spaces my self but many of the packs you buy comes with them bit of a pain.

[SolarPortal]

well after an evening of my head spinning, i had to leave the texture with spaces alone as we are having problems saving the uber shaders back with spaces in texture names due to the way ogre handles script variables.

The solutions we have to face are, rewrite the materials slightly differently but this could take a good solid few days or edit ogre source. Personally i would like to wrap up the material rewrite and aim for a release and tackle this a bit later

[lordalmighty1]

posted a reply to what I thought was the right post, but seems not to have been lol, so this is an edit.. :S

ah now I see the new post, sounds good though so keep it up m8, a few days isn't long . well not for me lol

[TattieBoJangle]

so what did you decide yaa or naa wrap up or rewrite

[SolarPortal]

we decided to leave it for a while and complete the material rewrite which is now mostly working and taken over.
I am just testing a few scenes to make sure things are loading.

BTW, i sped the material loading up by 15-25% load. Not amazing, but it does take less time to load models in now.

[TattieBoJangle]

nice m8 cant wait to start using it

[CreativeOcclusion]

Sounds like your on the right track...

[TattieBoJangle]

So do we have a eta now its down to the final stage hahah "impatient"

[SolarPortal]

We are merging code tomorrow hopefully and then we can start looking at a release.
I want to get a version by the time windows 10 is released to stop the updating errors from base version.

The prepare folder for skyline wont be completed fully as it can still be developed mainly, but the material rewrite is now usable in my opinon. I should be doing some blogging on it tomorrow to show the progress.

That's the plan anyway

Edit: I know it has taken a long time and i do apologize for that.

[TattieBoJangle]

I know it has taken a long time and i do apologize for that

No need at all m8 the main thing is you guys listen to us and this is just proof of that, I'm just eager to get going is all

[TattieBoJangle]

Any news on that blog m8 would love to know how its going and when we will have it.

[SolarPortal]

will have a blog up tomorrow m8. We have merged the code and am making tweaks to the "Prepare folder for skyline".
Just a little overwhelmed of workload atm lol

[StarFire]

The material system rewrite has taken its toll and the armies of the four mountains has been all but defeated! The battlefield is strewn with fragmented code and spheres of thought, the remaining troops are in need of a good rest before amassing for the final onslaught.

The material engine and prepare system is in place but we are noticing by using it that there are now new workflows that will need to be implemented. This is alway the case when we add new tools, you generally find new ways to use them that were not thought of or even predictable before the new systems were added.

So the plan is to to regroup and get the new systems stable and get it out to you all as an update so we can get all your new workflow ideas, then we can add these to our own, then put together the full release.

[TattieBoJangle]

I bet it has and I take no blame in the time being here is some motivation

[SolarPortal]

haha, what a motivational speech from Mr. Witwicky lol

[TattieBoJangle]

The new material system is great m8 two requests before it goes to full release.

1. The ability to remove a texture for example I had a glass texture and it applied a bump texture to it I know I could set it all to 0 but would be nice to be able to remove the textures.

2. I get a lot of None_ prefix material this is due to some models being made with say jpg images but down the line they were changed to tga or dds.

Other than that amazing job

[SolarPortal]

Thank you Tattie, i am glad it..... Works! and ....... that you like it! lol

1. The ability to remove a texture for example I had a glass texture and it applied a bump texture to it I know I could set it all to 0 but would be nice to be able to remove the textures.

Yes, i can make it remove the textures if you want lol For now if you don't want a normal map, then type in "Blank_N.png" and if you dont want a specular then type in "white.bmp". Hit return on both options.

We can add a button next to the filenames in the material editor to reset them quickly. I have needed this myself instead of typing them all the time.

I did find it funny that you wanted to remove textures though haha lol

2. I get a lot of None_ prefix material this is due to some models being made with say jpg images but down the line they were changed to tga or dds.

We are also planning on building a "Use DDS if found" or even better to convert textures to DDS. This was meant to be in it for this release, but we ran out of time.

Happy you like the release though as it is some major changes in the way it works but has a much faster workflow pipeline.

[TattieBoJangle]

I did find it funny that you wanted to remove textures though haha lol

hahah I know I was thinking to my self he will be pulling his hair out

or even better to convert textures to DDS. This was meant to be in it for this release, but we ran out of time.

If this could be pulled of that would be amazing

[SolarPortal]

lol yeah.

The DDS conversion happens already for the asset manager as it cannot display any DDS to TGA textures in the icons. So we convert them to a .jpg and store them in the Data/Temp folder. So there is no reason we couldnt do the opposite.

There is only 1 problem i currently know about and that is when converting alpha textures to DDS as on a batch i would set DXT1 compression only. I may need image editing tools in order to see whether it is an alpha texture or not.

But we will see what happens lol

[TattieBoJangle]

Would it be possible to allow the batch scale to use the same format as the scale in the translation as I find with some models I need to find the best scale using the scale tool with the player in the scene then I normally take the size for example

0.14822 0.14822 0.14822

I then mesh edit using they values and all the models in that pack scale perfect. I did try pasting the value 0.14822 into the batch scale but it wasn't for having it

I think it is due to it being limited to a 4 digit number.

[SolarPortal]

The batch scale uses a float and converts any string length into a usable number as long as it numbers.

Have you got it working yet?

oh i almost forgot, that it order to see the changes you need to either reload the mesh in the asset manager or reload the scene entity in the scene.

[TattieBoJangle]

ah I was putting in the full stop

[SolarPortal]

sorry the decimal point is also allowed
Most of my errors were because i didnt reload the mesh for its scale. Another way is too reboot skyline and see if their scale changes.