Haha I always was intending on sending you the files. I always assumed I'd hit a wall that I couldn't pass and I'd have to call in backup, but I've been able to churn along pretty well thanks to the mass of knowledge in the search box and the answers you fine folk have given me in this thread.
Plus, it's been really comforting to know that at any point I could just pass off the stage to someone who knows what they're doing and have it turn out well.
That being said... Shaders still confuse the hell out of me. I've pretty much been just going into other stages and finding something that looks like what I want, then pulling their shader/material and applying it to my mesh. I can't find any good descriptions of what the items in a shader do, or what to change to make something look a certain way. How do I make a shader appear emissive? Stuff like this I can't find any information on in the forums. If someone has information about shader creation I'd be very interested in seeing it.
I was thinking that it would be handy to either have a big writeup saying how shaders work, or have a folder of premade shaders where you could have a metal(Shiny) shader and a cloud(Transparent) shader and a water(animated) shader all just setup ready to import into a stage.
Or, how do I get a texture (like a giant light beam) to be semi transparent, and look neat from any angle?
The other thing that's been confusing me is how do I get multiple CHR0 animations to play, or how do I queue up a string of them to play? Right now I'm only seeing one able to play at a time it seems, so I end up just making a 6,000 frame animation that should loop
There isn't any hacky workaround? Could I force spawn a hatched pokemon or something? Hide it inside the stage, only care about it's sounds? Or have we not found any way to trigger any sounds at all in a stage?
So now the stage has a (very WIP) animation of the stage splitting apart and the ball rising up and "spinning" (The texture on the ball is animated, I didn't want to make the ball actually spin because it creates a weird effect along the left and right visible edges of the ball) I also tried to create water for the stage, borrowing heavily from the Rayquaza lake water, and tried to add in "reflections" to the water.
Yesterday was a lot of engine related learning, and a lot of "How the heck do I split this thing apart and still make it look good?" I think I did alright at that part
@Chaos_Knight: I agree, I intend on animating them to slowly pan to the left, loop it with the day/night cycle to have the clouds only really thick during the bright blue part of the day. Thanks for the feedback sir!
Mewtwo2000, how did you accomplish that day-night transition in Geurdo Valley? I'm assuming your job of it is more clean than mine.
I have my one scn0 that has a 10,000 frame animation that loops. Every 2,000 frames hitting the next main point of the day cycle. (Morning, noon, evening, dusk, midnight.)
Also, in my stage there's a weird issue where when someone gets hit with a smash attack at high percentages it kills all of my UVs for a frame or two, does anyone know why this would be happening? It's been happening before I got any of the transparency or lighting or anything to work too, so I don't think it was something I broke in a shader.
You can see it happening at the 2:25 point in my video when Samus dsmashes me and again at 2:30 when I fsmash her. All of the meshes I imported do that at the same time, players aren't effected. Does anyone have any idea as to why this might happen?
I was having limited success with Yoshi's writeup (Stuff kinda worked, but... i eventually just went through a bunch of brawl stages, looked at all the shaders/materials used in similar situations that I'd need and tried to replicate them. It's not perfect, but it gets the job done for now. (Example of not perfect, the clouds don't dim with the lighting changes in my stage)
Anyhow, I played with the lighting a lot today. I wanted to try to figure out how I could make a day/night cycle in the game and I think I came pretty close. I was running into a wall of errors when trying to add animated fog to the mix, where it seems like the fog item would just constantly get corrupted. Set a value in a fog item... have it work. make any tweak at all and it'll just show solid black across the whole stage aside from the characters. Was not cool.
In the process, I got tired of going through the flows of injecting my maps into a virtual SD card to use in Dolphin... so I made a macro using AutoHotKey that lets me click one button to go from saving in brawlbox to loading my map in about three seconds. It's pretty glorious, expecially for stuff like this, where I can't see my changes until I launch the game.
I'm too happy with myself to spoiler this one. You'll all just have to suffer.
I still have to do player shadows, the effect of the tower splitting apart, and if the day/night cycle thing is working... I might try to push the effect further. (Add lights to the town at night, make the small pyramids on my tower into some sort of lanterns or something that'd light up at night) not too sure yet.
Has anyone else done a day/night cycle? I'm guessing someone has, but I just hadn't ever seen one in brawl that animates as the stage progresses. (That being said, my knowledge of the contents of the Brawl Vault is pretty limited.)
@DSX8 - Yessir! I plan on handing things to you after I struggle for a while. I want to learn the engine so that I can be self sufficient. Plus its fun to struggle some times and its been interesting to learn. I plan on trying to put together a Maya stage guide for noobs when i finish this project. Basically every wall that i hit and couldn't find answers to online should be documented somewhere.
Theres another problem that im having right now where when someone gets hit by the sweet spot of an attack and there is that bright flash on screen it causes all of my UVs to get distorted for a frame or two. It was strange because i played four matches against my roommates and none of them even noticed it, but it was glaringly obvious to me.
@Eternal Yoshi, thanks for the writeup. I'll give that a shot. I need to make both semi transparent objects (clouds) and also hard masked items (tres). What do I need to do differently between these two, or can I just use the same shader that you provided?
Played a lot with the engine today trying to figure stuff out.
I for the life of me can't figure out transparencies, animated textures, or an easy way to do lighting/fog that doesn't involve launching brawl each time to see my changes so that makes things a bit ugly at the moment. #Noob
Also, I started playing with trying to figure out how I'm going to light the lighthouse and introduce this stage's gimmick.... haven't split the mesh apart yet, but I did this instead.
Preview video of my mockup of the animation in Maya.
Also, realized that I'm the only person who doesn't spoiler tag all of my images. I'll stop being rude now.
@jjookkeekkiidd, I'm not too sure about the red yet either. It's easy enough to fix though that I'm not too worried about it just yet. I wanted to go for a color similar to what's in the game's overworld map. I assumed the fog would fix it as well. I'm just bad with fog/lighting in this engine though right now haha.
Here's the overworld from Golden Sun for comparison.
Made red "Babi Lighthouse", redid the side towers, recolored the floating circle platforms, Optimized everything, redid all of the mountains, Optimized everything some more.
I also added/moved some clouds.
I'm currently at 49,880 triangles. Just for you Eternal Yoshi.
I looked at the Battlefield background as some form of inspiration when thinking of what I wanted to do for my background, but I was tired of seeing so many stages with reused backgrounds (how many stages use the waterfall or crevice background from SSE?)
This made me want to create something somewhat high quality that would be unique to my stage.
also, I'm glad that the stage scene seems to be picking up (I have an extremely short frame of reference). There was a solid page or so of just me posting updates haha. It's nice to have other people's work to look at too
I'm loving it too LlamaJuice... which is why I have to tell you that the stage as is with those poly/edge/tri counts is almost guaranteed to lag in 4 player situations.
I would simplify the background or lower the poly count/fidelity of the surrounding area while still finding a way to make it look good. I would say look at other Brawl stages for how they handle it in unrestricted pause camera in game.
The stage itself is excellent.
Like I said, I would recommend 50K or less.
Thanks sir! I've been pretty conservative with my polycount, trying to keep everything pretty low poly while still looking good. All of the mountains put together are only 5,000 triangles for example. I could squeeze it down to 50K probably, right now I think everything in the stage put together is close to 65K, but I can trim it up a bit and get it down to 50K. Most of those mountains don’t have any faces showing on the backsides, for example, and each town is a total of around 150 triangles. I was told that with the new tristripping magic that we’re able to have up to 80,000 triangles, and when I was looked through the stages included with Project M3.0 I saw that Skyloft was able to run fairly well with 100,000 triangles.
I plan on making the mountains and such look reflective off of the water as well, and so that’ll be another chunk of polys that I’ll have to go through haha.
@Syvkal, looks good buddy. I like it better without as many beanstalks going up. The color variation is also really nice. The one thing that kinda stands out is the green/blue stalks in the top right corner are the same mesh and very close together, so it looks strange to have identical curve in the stalk that close together.
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