MM RC3 observations

[Mraah]

ORIGINAL: benpark

Has anyone else gotten the MM to work with the new beta version of GE? I tried rolling it back, installing the old version and nothing works to get the GE map to show in the main screen.

I don't have the new beta of GE .... however, if I'm running GE in the background with RC3 it will not allow RC3 to build the map. I have to close GE to get RC3 to build.

Rob

[rickier65]

Ben,

I have to admit, I've not tried running GE while running MM. So I don't know. I know MM been pretty solid for me lately.

Rick

[rickier65]

ORIGINAL: Mraah

Suggestion - The objective flags don't seem to autogenerate ... The only flag it built was the one I made it build by giving it a unique name. Any thoughts about creating "canned" or default objectives? There should be ~ 30-40 objectives to give the full effect. I have an idea that will position 49 default flags using random/default names if you want to hear it ... but I'll wait for your comments [;)].

Rob,

I've genned up templates about half a dozen times now and I'be gotten Objectives each time.

Rick

[rickier65]

ORIGINAL: Mraah

3. Ok, this next one is really bad ... To make a long story short ... Do not adjust the Water Structure position in the structure list !! During the "Exporting Map Placeable" build it will loop or hang on the convertEXE ... Bad enough that the only way to close the convertEXE is to shut down windows.

Ok ... now for the long story ... Here's what I did :

1. Load up an RC3 map that has structures.
2. Create a Water Structure.
3. Build the map.
4. After the build is done, reposition the water structure to the top of the list.
4. Create an autogen structure, ie trees or whatever. When you click the map to drop the location it will change the water structure icon to a building (note, it changed mine to a building but unsure what yours will show).
5. Now, everything seems normal ... Click to build the map ... Wait for it to get to the "Exporting Map Placeables". Sure, it takes a few minutes but in my experience with RC3 in shouldn't take 10 minutes [&:].

Rob,

I tried to duplicate this. I followed your steps above on my test map. When I repostioned the pond, and created an autogen structure, the the water structure icon didn't change to the new icon, I did notice that the on-map pop-up still read as the name of the previous number 1 strucutre, but the on-mpa icon and the thumbnail still showed water structure.

I built, and it went fine. EXCEPT I hand't noticed it but when I repostioned the pond, it didn't carrry the length and width with it. So my water structure disapeared since it hand no surface extent.

I repeated this again, but this time entered in the length of width after repostioning and it worked fine (the popup refresh still didn't work, though I noticed after the build it was identified correctly in the pop-ip.

I only ran through this 3 times to try and reproduce, and only autogened some wheat afterward, so it might be the combination used. But I didn't experience the build crash.

Rob, is there any chance when you went to create the new autogen that you accidentally modified the existing water structure (turned it into a house for example and it choked becasue it had 4 parmeters instead of the normal 2? I know more than once I've went to add a new structure and realized I was over-writing the currently selcted one. Just a thought.

Rick

[Stridor]

Rob,

You have managed to find 2 bugs which I have fixed for RC4.

The first bug about being offline was easy to fix.

The second bug about the secondary water levels turned up a bug that I found because your post pointed me too it (not that it was causing your reported problem). Essentially if you tried to move the water structure once it was defined in the list, it lost it's length/depth values and gave them to another structure, but as I said this bug doesn't apply to your problem.

Your problem occurred because you had assigned "deep water" structure to your autogen forests (all 4000 odd trees). This meant that MM had to go and auto draw 4000 little blue boxes for each tree! That meant a looooong processing time. In some case you do want to associate a structure type with an autogen structure, but in general you don't! You certainly don't want 4000+ trees being underdrawn - that is not what the system was designed for.

As a tip, if in the future you find that MM is in a loop (this should be really rare), then in task manger go to processes and kill "mshta". That will fix your problem without having to reboot.

Now the bad news for you is that your mapmaker save file is corrupt because of the bugs above. This means that you will need to throw it away and start again. Don't try and reload it into RC4 as it will kill it.

In terms of auto naming of objectives I think the current system works well but it obviously needs some explaining.

1. It is a good idea to help MM with unique names. Eg "Franks house" not just "Frank_00123" you can do this with forests as well. Simply do up an auto forest and then pick a single tree and place in the forest and give it a unique name "The spooky forest" etc

2. In terms of autonaming, MM looks for large continuous areas (read: square) (the area of which can be defined in the xml) of things (like forest, roads, marsh, etc) and names them depending on the compass direction of the area Eg. "North Road". It can do this multiple times. But if the area is too small it won't consider it Eg. "The Western Forrest" which turns out to be a little patch of green. I notice in your terrain map that it has high spectral entropy "ie it doesn't have large contiguous areas", so for this map the autogen objective system won't work well. In this case it will need help from point 1 above.

In terms of platoon max/min sizes, well you can change them if you like. I found that fitting larger tank platoons to roads was tricky, so I went with 3 as the minimum, but play with it if you like.


I hope this has answer your questions.


So before you get RC4 please remember not to move a water structure (up or down the list), and if you are offline, well ... sorry for that one you will need to wait for RC4[;)]

Regards

S.

[Stridor]

Ben,

I have the latest GE running with MM no problem.

Can you access basic google maps ?

http://www.google.com/maps

?????

I don't control the GM code just link to it, so weird?????


Regards

S.

[Stridor]

Rob,

Because this whole offline thing is bugging you, I have RC4 hotfix here.

Enjoy

S.

P.S. Remeber you still need to delete that old map you gave me, it is corrupt - sorry, don't try and load it with RC4.

[benpark]

I had GE running in the background, closing it fixed the problem. Thanks for that tip.

[Mraah]

Stridor,

Thanks for the hotfix!! It wasn't driving me THAT crazy [;)].

Thanks for narrowing down the "loop" with my map ... again, another procedural error. I noticed that the more bling you add the program the more I'm subject to these procedural errors [:)] ... I'll need to take it slow.

Ok .... I'm at work now but I'll check some things again when I get home.

First of all ... I got a blue screen in SE when I used the kharkov_tree_02a (RC3, from yesterday)... Since you made alot of changes for RC3 (including directory changes) I assumed something wasn't pointing in the right direction. Now, granted, it could be something else ... like a bad structure assignment name.

Again, I'll need to check when I get home. I'm going to do a full install of RC3 again to make sure all the parts are deleted ... including those bad maps.

I do have one question ... When I add a tree structure do I need to give it a structure name ... ie, light woods or heavy woods? Also, speaking of this, you only have Light Woods and Heavy woods ... there isn't a structure name called "Woods".

Thanks,

Rob

[Stridor]

ORIGINAL: Mraah

Stridor,

Thanks for the hotfix!! It wasn't driving me THAT crazy [;)].

Thanks for narrowing down the "loop" with my map ... again, another procedural error. I noticed that the more bling you add the program the more I'm subject to these procedural errors [:)] ... I'll need to take it slow.

Ok .... I'm at work now but I'll check some things again when I get home.

First of all ... I got a blue screen in SE when I used the kharkov_tree_02a (RC3, from yesterday)... Since you made alot of changes for RC3 (including directory changes) I assumed something wasn't pointing in the right direction. Now, granted, it could be something else ... like a bad structure assignment name.

Again, I'll need to check when I get home. I'm going to do a full install of RC3 again to make sure all the parts are deleted ... including those bad maps.

I do have one question ... When I add a tree structure do I need to give it a structure name ... ie, light woods or heavy woods? Also, speaking of this, you only have Light Woods and Heavy woods ... there isn't a structure name called "Woods".

Thanks,

Rob

Rob,

If SE ever blue screens press the show log button in MM and it will tell you why. It will almost certainly be due to a bad model or link.

You are right there should be a Woods option, I will add it.

There are 2 reasons why you need to set a structure type.

The first is that it tells PCK what type of mountable object the thing is. This only applies to foxholes, trenches, houses and dugouts however.

The second is that it tells MM what colors to draw on the AI map (that is ontop of the terrain to AI color conversion).

For non mountable objects PCK uses the AI colors to determine terrain types (as you know).

Let's do an example:

You put down a house which is squad 1 level 1. MM knows to color the bound box of this house structure RED, so it does that.

Each time MM needs to color in a boundbox for an object it takes a few seconds.

Now imagine that you want to autogen a small village of say 5 houses. Then you would set your values and MM will do all the coloring for you.

For autogen tress you normally set them to an area by a specific terrain color which then gets mapped to "woods" by MM. Therefore MM doesn't need to undercolor each tree and because they are not mountable they will be set as structure type none. This makes the build time fast. If however you set each autogen tree to "woods" structure type then MM will draw that color under each and every generated tree. If you have generated 4000 tress then you are looking at 8000-12000 seconds or a long time.

However the system is flexible. Imagine that you want to hand place a few trees "off" the normal woods color as defined by the terrain map. Well in this case you can set them to "woods" and be happy in the knowledge that MM will correctly color code them for you.

I hope that helps

Regards

S.

EDIT: In essence the system allows you one of two options

Either

1: Place objects on the map and MM will color code them for you depending on the structure type attribute
or
2: Color code areas of your map for MM to subsequenly autogen things onto.

And you can use MM to do a bit of both depending on how you design your map.

[Mraah]

Stridor,

Ahhh ... gotcha ... understood. The autogen of 4000 trees set to "light woods" explains (what I thought was) the convertEXE hanging ... doh[8|]

Ok ... now ... here's an idea regarding the water structure ... How to making running water :

Could it be as simple as adding in a few lines of code to point to the terrainX for mesh information ?

Here's how it works ...

1. The user inputs the water_structure values to read : null,null,null,null or 0,0,0,0
2. User inputs the sink value.
3. When MM goes to build the structure it does an IF/THEN/GOTO command ... like this ;

IF water_structure data = 0,0,0,0 THEN goto terrainX mesh ... build.

It will use the sink value to make a duplicate terrain mesh ...

(M_Hto - sinkvalue) = new waterX M_Hto
(M_Ht1 - sinkvalue) = new waterX M_Ht1

... that's lower than the original terrainX mesh.

Obviuosly, you would have to "cut-out" the original terrain to see the water.

I understand that it would double the # of polygons for the map but it's still half as many polygons of a HIRES map.

I worked out the mechanics (on paper) of doing this manually by setting the water_structure to 500,500,500,500 ... then, replacing the new waterX with another terrainX that's has it's M_Hto and t1 values set to 1.5 less than the original terrain.

[8|] ... [&:]

Thanks,

Rob

EDIT : Change the "basic" language to read ... IF water_structure data = 0,0,0,0 THEN goto terrainX ... GET terrainx ... build.
EDIT : Obviously that's not real basic language ... call it Mraah Language [:D]
EDIT : You see, by GETTING the mesh it doesn't have to build it ... that was done already ... just make a dupe and sink-it.

[Mraah]

Stridor,

I found another bug last night that I forgot to mention ....

The map window will not show (or scroll show) the MAP and HEIGHT MAP image if you change the MAPPING assignments of colors.

This bug appears if you do not click ADJUST after you load a terrain map. By clicking adjust immediately after loading a new terrain map it will cycle the height map on properly ... from then on the whole process works.

So, basically, the process to cause the bug is :

1. Load a HM
2. Load a TM
3. Change the Mapping.

I found this out for sure my loading an HM and TM from Google and immediately changing the mapping.

-------------------------

Now, another question (about water structure)

Currently you only have one water structure using one water image. I want to use a different water image ... is this possible now or does there have to be more water structure's in the folder? ie, water01,02,03,04 ?

Thanks,

Rob

[Mraah]

Stridor,

Question ...

Is MM suppose to use the konvix program to compress the mesh that MM builds?
Or, is that switch suppose to be "text" so you can view the data more readily? ... meaning in the final build you'll compress the X.

...........................

Off topic ... The screenshot below is from Hill621 map ... I sunk the field next to a hedge (post editting using MS3D) ... I'm just playing around to get the effect I want .... still needs some tweaking.

Rob

EDIT : Makes a nice blind for a hull down vehicle ... BenPark's Plowed_Field (spring) is a nice texure! ... Also the hedgework by BenPark !

[benpark]

The ground texture in the screen shot is "Plowed_Field_spring.bmp", and I actually made it (adapted from the existing "snow field that came with the game). Ryan's field one is great, too.

Excellent use of the map maker. Looks like Normandy already.

[Mraah]

ORIGINAL: benpark

The ground texture in the screen shot is "Plowed_Field_spring.bmp", and I actually made it (adapted from the existing "snow field that came with the game). Ryan's field one is great, too.

Excellent use of the map maker. Looks like Normandy already.

Doh .... I made the change, sorry.

I found MS3D easier to make mesh changes .... fragM like's to export the map mesh "lower" than it's suppose to be ... again, another fragM mistery for me.

EDIT : Yes, Ryan's texture is good too ... I'm using it in another field ... I might even blend them a bit for others.

[benpark]

Are you doing the small elevation changes in MS3D? I'd like to make some gullies alongside roads, but haven't tried to do such small changes in the MM.

[Stridor]

ORIGINAL: benpark

Are you doing the small elevation changes in MS3D? I'd like to make some gullies alongside roads, but haven't tried to do such small changes in the MM.

The hires mode helps here, but if you want to do really fine work you will need to do it in a real 3D editor.

Regards

S.

[benpark]

Okay, here's a weird one, which I think is related to my tree problems-

I'm getting a crash in the Hi-Res MM mode on trying to load a map I use for testing models. It wants two texture files to be there. I've removed everything from my mod folder entitled "Trees" (and the folder), as well as the two thumbnails I was using for testing them quickly with the MM. I don't get this error in the regular MM. So there are no files in my PzC folder, nor .xml that would let the HR MM know they are there.

I probably only selected these textures in these locations in some testing on fM, so that program may have wanted to see them in that locale, but I'm confused as to why the MM wants them.

The basic reason for the crash (according to the error report), I've removed the hundreds of other instances of the same errors:


2/16/2009 12:07:14 AM: Manager Adapter value: 0
2/16/2009 12:07:14 AM: Create device.

2/16/2009 12:07:14 AM: HardwareVertexProcessing
2/16/2009 12:07:14 AM: MultiSampleQuality: 2
PresentationInterval: Immediate
FullScreenRefreshRateInHz: 0
PresentFlag: None
AutoDepthStencilFormat: D16
EnableAutoDepthStencil: True
Windowed: True
DeviceWindowHandle: 0
DeviceWindow:
SwapEffect: Discard
MultiSample: NonMaskable
BackBufferCount: 1
BackBufferFormat: X8R8G8B8
BackBufferHeight: 477
BackBufferWidth: 696
ForceNoMultiThreadedFlag: False

2/16/2009 12:07:14 AM: Create Flags: HardwareVertexProcessing
2/16/2009 12:07:14 AM: Device Type: Hardware
2/16/2009 12:07:14 AM: Begin Device Resize:
2/16/2009 12:07:14 AM: Device Reset
2/16/2009 12:07:14 AM: Begin Device Resize:
2/16/2009 12:07:14 AM: Begin Device Resize:
2/16/2009 12:07:14 AM: Device Reset
2/16/2009 12:07:14 AM: Begin Device Resize:
2/16/2009 12:07:14 AM: Begin Device Resize:
2/16/2009 12:07:14 AM: Device Reset
2/16/2009 12:07:14 AM: Begin Device Resize:
2/16/2009 12:07:20 AM: Can't find file with media id: C:/Documents and Settings/Benno/Desktop/3D Stuff/Trees/tree1.dds
2/16/2009 12:13:16 AM: Can't find file with media id: C:/Documents and Settings/Benno/Desktop/3D Stuff/Trees/EU03a_bill.jpg

[benpark]

Anyone else using the "smoke plume" particle? Every time I place it, there is a second instance that I don't see added in the MM- just in the SE. It is off map, under the map.

I ran a template to make a scenario with the map with this problem, and it had spawned men onto it...

[rickier65]

ORIGINAL: benpark

Anyone else using the "smoke plume" particle? Every time I place it, there is a second instance that I don't see added in the MM- just in the SE. It is off map, under the map.

I ran a template to make a scenario with the map with this problem, and it had spawned men onto it...

I recall early on in some testing I had buildings that would get get MOVED off the map - think it had something to do with placing units ?? Don't recall but I do recall someone explaiing that they were being placed at the map ordinals (actuall game coord. 0,0,0) but I don't recall details.

I haven't made any maps with smoke plumes - thjough I keep meaning to try it out.

I think Stridor may have gotten busy with his new work, but hopeully he'll still stop by. He can usually shed some light on some of these mysteries.

Rick