Take a look-see at what I did!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDOaJfS501Y

That's awesome Fligg. I made some spooky candles do that in my mod, great ambiance.
Actually, are those Lights, or just "glowing" textures? They don't seem to be illuminating outward light. Looks cool though.

They are lights. The radius is 1000, and the color is pretty much the same as the orb itself. I'm not sure if the light just isn't being rendered because of the nature of scripted lights, or if the environment I'm using there just isn't dark enough. Still experimenting with it. There are a lot of oddities to take into account when it comes to scripting lights.

That is a really cool effects. Is it possible to set up to fade in and out gradually depending on distance rather then just suddenly flip on or off? And also I think it needs better textures. :S

Yes. If I remember correctly I had to make dummy candles that did nothing, and then Enable/Disable an Invisible light on top of the candles.
Otherwise you have to move the candle/plant an inch, as you know. Invisible lights don't suffer that glitch. If I remember correctly.

I might be able to work out a fade, but I'm really not sure how it will work. It's going to involve quite a number of lights of varying magnitudes, and switching between them. But again, if the light isn't being properly illuminating because of the scripting of it, it may not work.

Well just try setting it with as few levels as possible, maybe try 3-4 levels. It doesn't need to be completely smooth transition just enough so that it isn't instantly on or off. :S It would be cool if it were an actual light, however, I think even if it is only glowing it would still be a nice effect.

@Fligg: Looking great!!! Maybe light doesn't show correctly, because lightball is covered by the plant-mesh. Have you tested lightball without plant, does it emit light?


Well, I got a video too, making a series of animated plants now!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcD7OFfW3To


TheDaywalker :rock:

Thats pretty cool, looks like a dangerous plant.

Also needs better textures though I am afraid. :S

@AOF: I just dragged and dropped some textures on it to be able to show video. I will make some handpainted textures when I got some time left. I gave the plant collision, so when you set it up as activator and player gets in contact with, he will get damage by script with "hurt colliding actor". I will create some even more stealthy and mean plants though. This one is to kinky, needs some large teeth and stuff...


TheDaywalker :rock:

Well, that could startle the hapless adventurer just wandering through the woods.

You can take a look at how Bethesda got those purple crystals in Morrowind to glow and fade in and out. That method might provide some insight. Also, a radius of 1000 is pretty frickin' huge. If that's the range you're going for, it's fine, but just wanted to make sure you knew... we've placed tens of thousands of lights at TR, and we usually never go above 256. Again, if you're going for a huge radius in an exterior area, 1000 might be fine.

Using the old disable/enable trick I was able to get the lights to actually illuminate. Now I'll see what I can do about the fading thing.

The range of 1000 was just for testing. I'll let TDW figure out what works best for the real environment.


Edit: I'm leaning towards having the lights fading out being something of an impossibility with this engine...at least with any semblance of realism. I tried to fade it in by having a series of 5 lights with a smaller radius, but it flickered and looked awful. The only other thing I can think of at this point would be to try and put a negative light over it and replace that. It's a long shot, but it's the last bit of effort I have for this.

What if you overlapped the lights instead of enabling/disabling them in turn? Since each light in the sequence will stay on while the others are enabled/disabled, that might eliminate any flickering.

One problem is that enginewise a single model can only be the target of, I think 2 lights + sun and some other ambient stuff (could be a bit off here) so lights would not overlap the lighting to it's surroundings but would replace each other.

How about having one smaller, darkest mesh at center, then an outer mesh that will fade in/out using the fade scripting function. This way it will still appear mostly solid because of the black base even when the outer mesh is fading?

If fading light can't be done by scripting, then maybe it can be done by manipulating it with a further mesh. Picture this:

You have a lightsource, which is covered by an invisible sphere, meaning texture has alpha channel 100%, next NiFlipController lets sphere flip to the next texture having only about 80% alpha, next has 60% and so on. If you determine the values inside nifskope that flipping the textures looks fluid, you should have a fading in and out as you like.

What has to be tested is:

Does light shine through seethrough meshes or is it interupted?


TheDaywalker :rock:

8 lights, one of which is reserved for the sun, so it should be the nearest 7 lights placed in the world. Every light has ambient, diffuse, and specular colors it can project.
We really need MWSE lighting commands in MGE. I'm not sure how the MWSE function syntax works, or I'd add them. :S



The light will not be darkened by putting a sphere around it. The sphere itself will be lit, but since the MW engine doesn't calculate shadows, that won't prevent anything else from being lit. To test it, put two room side pieces next to each other, and put a torch in one. The wall between them won't stop the torch from illuminating the floor of the other, unfortunately.
There is an Ni-node that involves lights, and as far as I know, that will illuminate the mesh it is in, but only that mesh. So an NiLight doesn't count as a light to Morrowind, but to the mesh it's attached to, it is a light and should illuminate it. You could use activators, keyframe them (with note tags) to fade that light in an out, and using the curves in Max, make it fade smoothly or quadratically or whatever you please. It won't cast light on other objects, but it should light up that plant. Then you just have to play the animation.

Edit: And this project looks really interesting, I'm tempted to dip my fingers in, but I'm not sure where... Fligg's got the scripting handled, and I'm no artist (mesh/texture-wise). :chinscratch:

I think your help on simply improving MGE will benefit this project just through simply being. Maybe if some specific mge request for this project specifically could be brainstormed =)

I hope it is an addon, some of use cant use MGE and it would be a shame not use this wonderful mod because it required MGE

peachy, you know as well as anyone else that I have a lot on my plate. If you wanted to take over some of the scripting, go right ahead. I'm mainly focusing on the lighting effects for the time being. Then I'll work on riding scripts. I'm sure there are other bits of scripting that are needed....

Just had a thought. How much work will it be to add a third set of legs to Cait's horses and elongate their snouts a bit? If we have a direhorse model that is based upon those horses, adapting Pegas riding scripts will be a piece of cake. There's a great vid I found on YouTube that shows the direhorses in action quite a bit, I'll link it should you need.


Overlapping the time between changing lights still caused a flicker, it also created times of increased brightness. Overall, it simply didn't work. Neither did canceling it out with negative lighting. As far as scripting effects go, I'm out of ideas here.

TDW, could you animate the "off" lightball so that it has a slow transition from the on to off textures? Then we would have the light disappear right away, but the color texture will fade out when I re-enable the "off" lightball. I think that would be a suitable solution assuming you can accomplish that.


Isn't it interesting how this particular movie captured the imagination and talents of MW modders in such a way? It's neat that we've found a world that is as imaginative and unique as the one which we've been playing around with for years now. I for one have found a fresh breathe of inspiration for modding. :hehe:

:goodjob: - was thinking the same thing myself

Arighty then.

@ Pandora team: What all needs scripted, what could be scripted, what should be interact-able? Any thoughts of this-should-do-that-when... or such?

I'll take a look at how MWSE commands work, but it may take adding another iterator function for light objects, which I don't know how to do. Actually affecting the lights in DirectX can be done, so you could force a light to apply to everything, but that would just make a mess. I'd recommend trying it with lights in model (add a light and export) and animating those, it'll probably work way better.
If you want texture stuff, just animate that material's transparency (I'm pretty sure you can do that).

Tiny stuff would be plants that make sound when you touch them and ones that dissapear (animate to dissapear) when you touch them. Those are the things on the top of my head, which in my head sounds pretty easy hehe but maybe someone else has a more fitting task for a guy of your talent =)

@peachykeen: I could really need another scripter, cause I got tons of ideas for this project!!! Plants reacting to being touched by the player with sound, like Mireneye already mentioned is also one of the things I'd like to have. Let me make a short brainstorming and I'll post a list of my ideas, so that you can check if they're possible to make or not!!!

@Fligg: I could animate the mesh to fade out, but this will not have any influence on the emission of light!!! About transforming horses into those dire horses: Well, I'm not a firend of that idea. I could easily copy all those animals from the movie, but that is especially what I wouldn't like to do, because of copyrights. Give me some time please and I'll make at least a few custom creatures, that have a similar look but are no excact copies.

Actually I'm working on a flying dragon type creature. Will take me some time though. What'd be cool was, if I could use an existing animation of one of the dragon mods that were already released. So I could make my creature fit the animated skeleton of those. I'm rather new to modding, being active just one and a half year, but if somebody of you does know where to contact one of this authors, please let me know!!!

Topology svcks, I know that, I'm still experimenting with design:

http://pic.leech.it/i/b5b9e/5ea4a045newbeast.jpg


TheDaywalker :rock:

Don't worry about the light, I'll see what I can do with some invisible light objects. Even if I can't get that looking good, there will at least be somewhat of an illusion of it fading out, better than it is currently.


I'm personally of the opinion that we aren't going to have any issues with copyright violation either way, but I'm not going to beat that dead horse again. I think that we can make something that is inspired by the creatures in the movie, that bears somewhat of a semblance to them without being them. The reason I suggest the horse is because I won't have to modify any of the math for the scripts to work...that's the biggest issue when creating a riding script for other creatures, the reason why mods like Urbana Ranch weren't as spectacular as they could have been. :shrug: