Skitch2
Site Admin
Joined: 26 Nov 2006
Posts: 28
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 Posted: Sun Nov 26, 2006 6:25 pm Post subject: Things you will need!! |
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Ok. Before you all leap into the brain melting world of the Max 2 Re-Volt editing role, we need to think about what we need to setup or install before hand.
You must make sure that you have.... Wait for it..... Max and Re-Volt installed on you PC along with the great tools that are the ASE2 RV tools.
I always Stick to using Max 5 for RV work as it seems to be the most stable version i have used. I have tried max3, max4, max5, max6, and max7 and they all seem to work fine but on the later versions like 6 to 8 tend to crash when it comes to vertex painting and that aint no good to me so i will be staying with Max r5.
Cygwin.dll needs to be put into your system32 dir and i place ase2w/ase2prm and Mkmirror into my stripped down nhood1 folder.
The Nhood1 folder: Open this folder and rip out everything apart from the 10 bmps (a-j), and the ini file, everything else goes.
The INI file: open up the ini file and set it up like shown below.
;--------------------------
;Revolt .INF file structure
;--------------------------
NAME 'Toys in the Hood';The name of the level as seen in-game
STARTPOS 0. 0. 0 ;Start position of the car
STARTPOSREV 0. 0. 0 ;Start position of the car
STARTROT 0 ;Start rotation of the car (0 - 1)
STARTROTREV 0 ;Start rotation of the car (0 - 1)
FARCLIP 80000 ;Far clipping distance (draw distance)
FOGSTART 80000 ;Fog start (slightly less than FARCLIP)
FOGCOLOR 0 0 0 ;Fog and background color
VERTFOGSTART 0 ;Vertical fog start (as in rooftops)
VERTFOGEND 0 ;Vertical fog end (as in rooftops)
WORLDRGBPER 100 ;RGB percent of original world gouraud
MODELRGBPER 100 ;RGB percent of original model gouraud
INSTANCERGBPER 100 ;RGB percent of original instance gouraud
MIRRORS 0 0.60 0 512 ;Type - mix - intensity start - distance
MP3 'nhood1.mp3'
REDBOOK 4 9
I will explain theese setting later.
That is you now setup as far as the RV side goes. In the next post Ill show you how i set up my 3DS Max.
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Skitch2
Site Admin
Joined: 26 Nov 2006
Posts: 28
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| Posted: Sun Dec 03, 2006 7:06 pm Post subject: |
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Ok Here is some input from me about the frame rate in Re-Volt Tracks.
People who make Extreme trax will know all about Vizboxing yea?
If ya dont here is a quick refresher. Say you are sat in your living room and the world around you is a RV .W file. The door to the stair well is closed. Why should your Staircase be rendered by the Graphics engine when you cant see it? that is Vizzing, removing whats just outside of your visual range so it takes the pressure of off the GFX engine.
There are a few ways in which Re-Volt handles vissing, the vizboxes we put in by means of the Makeitgood cheat are the last ones in the line.
The first sort of vissing is the Farclip! This is Re-Volts way of reducing the strain on the rendering engine. It does this by clipping the polies at a set range or distance from the car. You can test this by setting your farclip setting in a tracks ini file. Set the fog start to something like 2000, then set the farclip to 1500. Save the file and run the track (do this for a Stock track) You will then see how the farclip hacks away at the polies and it will also show you how the fog settings in a track, cover this harsh clipping.
This Brings me on to Frame rate. Most track makers back along, seemed to think that the lower the poly count is in a track, the better the frame rate will be. In Re-Volt its not the case! It all comes down to the mathamatics in the tracks polies. The Farclip works by covering the whole poly before clipping it, so if you use a very long poly as part or your road, the rendering engine has to render the poly even if it is past the set range of the farclip, but if the poly is short and you use many polies in the road the farclip can cover and clip the polies at a much faster rate and render each poly for a far shorter time, this not only improves the frame rate of the track but it also enables you to keep the resolution of your textures much higher, thus a much higher quality track.
In Max and by studying the Re-Volt Stock tracks , I have come up with a few settings in the polys of my tracks. If, in a road like the nhood road surface, i make the polys 500x500 max units I can utilise the farclip to its best. So all of the polys in my track are set up like this..... 500x500...250x250...125x125.. 62.25.. 31.5 and so on, i never stray from
this formula. So a road tile in max would be: 1000x1000 units in size and with a grid setting of 2x2 this gives me a tile of 4, 500x500 polys. The rise of a curb stone would be 31.5 high and the walkway would be 250 units wide. All of theese figures are halves and quarters of the original 500x500 poly.
When i release the tutorial i will go through all of this more indepth.
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