Karthwasten Claim Cave 07 [Scamp]

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Scamp
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Karthwasten Claim Cave 07 [Scamp]

Post by Scamp »

[hsimg=]http://i.imgur.com/aLaFUdA.jpg[/hsimg]

Exterior Location: -108, 6

Used as: Grotto. Deep inside, feel free to add a lair of someone who doesn't want his presence to be common knowledge. An evil mage maybe, doing some weird sorcery.

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Scamp
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Post by Scamp »

Update:

http://scamp.blogspot.de/2015/03/karthw ... ve-07.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


It's technically finished, but the poly-counts per cell are too high. I experienced crashes and severe framedrops. Needs further splitting in 3 or more cells.

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Post by Yeti »

The Gamebryo engine can't handle your crazy skillz, Scamp (this cave looks awesome).

Maybe the wizard could be a crazy old member of Clan Direnni?

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Post by Luxray »

I love those lit-up skeletons on the crystal floor. That stuff is ace

Frickin' crazy work, Scamp!
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Post by roerich »

What Luxray said. Crazy work. This could go for a mod on it's own.
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Post by worsas »

Maybe the wizard could be a crazy old member of Clan Direnni?
Good idea. The Direnni were exactly that kind of sorcerers, judging from their lore. But his home was apparently built by imperials or bretons (something scamp shouldn't need to change).

How come that all of our good caves are either hidden underwater or on nearly non-findable cliff-backsides?

This particular one could be a quest cave, you are sent to by the mages guild, though. To name a possibility.

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Post by roerich »

Good ideas worsas. He could be one of those thousand year old wizards, though not nearly as powerful as old Fyr. He could have one of the Direnni registers Yeti is talking about in his possession, which he'll give to the player if he gets him some trinket, artifact or rare ingredient he needs. He should be hard to track down, but doable. Not an entry quest.
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Post by Tes96 »

Yeti wrote:The Gamebryo engine can't handle your crazy skillz, Scamp (this cave looks awesome).

Maybe the wizard could be a crazy old member of Clan Direnni?
A pox on gamebryo. OpenMW can handle over ten thousand references in a single cell.
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Post by Scamp »

Thanks guys. As always, you're doing a fantastic job at filling my vague and arbitrary character concepts with actual lore. I'll see if I can finish this up within the next days.

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Post by roerich »

Sounds good! We are really finishing up on KW release interiors. You could add some Direnni-related items, like the scales and alembic.
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Post by Scamp »

Funny, since the scales were probably the first item I placed on one of the shelves quite a while ago. I'll see if I can add some more stuff.

Btw, last night I split the interior into 4x ~2500 ref cells, I'll need to re-link most of the doors and we should be good to go after that.

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Post by Scamp »

It's finished now...

Turns out the crashes had mainly two origins: The glowing, animated Bloodmoon doors I was using fairly often throughout the cave, and the amount of polygons overall. In the end I had to end up splitting the cave in even more different cells, and while I still kept a bit of a view into the other cells behing the glowing doors to leave at least a bit of an overall unity at first, I eventually had to remove all glowing doors and all references behind them and settle for "darkness" as doors to reduce the overall amount of animations played and polygons rendered.
The cave floor also used to be covered with invisible collision walls to improve walkability, but I had to remove all of that as well. A lot of references have been removed to improve performance. There should be no more crashes now.

The final chamber has some lighting issues typical for the engine, I did not see any way to fix it in this particular case. MGE XE's per-pixel lighting takes care of the problem.

I'm sorry if the final cave is maybe a little bit underwhelming. OpenMW ought to fix these stability issues.

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Post by SGMonkey »

The problem is not with the polygon count by any means. The problem is the ref count.

Also, have you tried walking around this in game? It's near impossible. I hope you don't want NPC's in here.

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Post by Tes96 »

SGMonkey wrote:The problem is not with the polygon count by any means. The problem is the ref count.

Also, have you tried walking around this in game? It's near impossible. I hope you don't want NPC's in here.
I'm getting 40-60 frames per second with MGE XE enabled in all 5 interior cells. My laptop only has an i7-4700HQ processor. I never have problems with caves with high object placements. One of my P:C caves had over 4,000 objects in it and I still got over 60 fps in it.

By the way, Scamp, there is a wooden cave door that opens but leads to no where. Not sure if that was meant to lead to another cell and you just forgot to remove it.
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Post by berry »

Tes96 wrote:By the way, Scamp, there is a wooden cave door that opens but leads to no where. Not sure if that was meant to lead to another cell and you just forgot to remove it.
I'm pretty sure that's the entrance to the cave, supposed to connect it with the exterior.

Now, that cave is a masterpiece, Scamp, but I'm sure you're aware of that ;) loved that chilling skeleton on the bed :D I didn't have any problems with walking around that place per se (by that I mean collision matters and so on), but rather with the big number of teleporting doors and cells. They are pretty damn confusing, yeah. Perphaps we can have the dialogues warn the player that this mage doesn't like visitors and often plays with their minds/perception to make reaching him harder? I certainly felt like that was the case when I was here :(

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Post by Scamp »

SGMonkey wrote:The problem is not with the polygon count by any means. The problem is the ref count.

Also, have you tried walking around this in game? It's near impossible. I hope you don't want NPC's in here.
May be the ref count, too. I'd be interested in knowing where you got this information from. I only noticed that removing just a couple references, no matter which ones, prevented the crashes from occuring. However, I don't see how the number of total references would matter to the engine in any way. Seems a lot more plausible that a higher number of polygons to be rendered would bring the engine to its limits. Anything you know about gamebryo that verifies your statement?

Also, yes, I have tried walking around this in game, and I also spent about 2 hours fixing the floor in various areas that were causing issues. I've been doing usibility studies at university, and I realize that quite often things may seem to be perfectly fine and without any issues for you as a developer, while actual users detect more problems than you thought there would be in the first place. However, in this case I'm pretty sure you may not have tried to walk on the right paths. It is intentional that a corridor may partially blocked by a rock, you'll have to go to the right of left to be able to proceed... I can assure that it's nowhere near impossible to walk in this cave.
Like I said, I did have collision planes everywhere, but with you claiming that it's just the ref count mattering to the engine, you should be able to understand why I had to remove them. The cave was not designed with the idea in mind that one should be walking on bare rock surfaces, hence I had to fix quite a lot of areas, and now it should be fine for the very most part.
Tes96 wrote: I'm getting 40-60 frames per second with MGE XE enabled in all 5 interior cells. My laptop only has an i7-4700HQ processor. I never have problems with caves with high object placements. One of my P:C caves had over 4,000 objects in it and I still got over 60 fps in it.

By the way, Scamp, there is a wooden cave door that opens but leads to no where. Not sure if that was meant to lead to another cell and you just forgot to remove it.
In case you were referring to SGM, he was talking about the difficulty of physically getting around the cave, not the framerate. The framerate is stable now, and there a no crashes. Tes96, you may have missed the part where I said that I split the cells multiple times and reduced the ref count tremendously. It's no surprise you're getting a stable framerate NOW...
I agree with you though that it may not be the amount of overall objects after all. Your P:C cave may have been using a lot of objects with less faces, hence adding up to a quite smaller amount of overall polygons rendered.

Also, yeah, I totally forgot to remove the loading door. Reviewer can remove it. You'll just have to remember to use coc ingame every time you want to exit the cave. :roll:

@berry, cheers. Glad to hear I'm not the only person having absolutely no trouble getting around in this place.

Edit: Replaced "tcl" with "coc". That's what I meant anyway.

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Post by Tes96 »

Scamp wrote:Also, yeah, I totally forgot to remove the loading door. Reviewer can remove it. You'll just have to remember to use tcl ingame every time you want to exit the cave. :roll:
That's the spirit, Scamp! :mrgreen: After all, any player character who has achieved CHIM can 'coc' themselves anywhere in the world by whim.

In regards to actually walking around, I can walk just fine as well. If you run in caves, it makes it much harder to get around, often causing you to get stuck.
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Post by roerich »

I think that's the door leading out of the cave.
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Post by Tes96 »

roerich wrote:I think that's the door leading out of the cave.
It didn't dawn on me at the time when I was playing it in-game. I just thought "boy, what a blundering mistake on Scamp's part". :p
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Post by berry »

Actually doors of that cave seem to be quite messed up - you enter one of them, turn back, activate the hole you supposedly just came through and reappear in some different place. Is it intentional? That's neat concept if so, but needs more highlighting, for now it's immersion breaking and frustrating. Plus, I don't think "Crypt" section of that claim can be reached without "coc" at all.

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Post by Scamp »

Messed up doors is pretty much the definition of this cave. It's a puzzle, berry. It's also supposed to be frustrating, you saying so just means I have succeeded in making this maze hard to solve.

I see you treat the doors as "holes". They are not holes. They used to be the animated "mystical gates" used in the final level of Bloodmoon. I had to replace them with something that doesn't allow looking through them, however, in order to reduce the ref count. Maybe if you look at them as "mystical gates", as they were originally called, it'll be less "immersion breaking".

You didn't just "coc" to the crypt now, did you? That's not how you solve puzzles. Try harder. :P

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Post by Tes96 »

Scamp wrote:Messed up doors is pretty much the definition of this cave. It's a puzzle, berry. It's also supposed to be frustrating, you saying so just means I have succeeded in making this maze hard to solve.

I see you treat the doors as "holes". They are not holes. They used to be the animated "mystical gates" used in the final level of Bloodmoon. I had to replace them with something that doesn't allow looking through them, however, in order to reduce the ref count. Maybe if you look at them as "mystical gates", as they were originally called, it'll be less "immersion breaking".

You didn't just "coc" to the crypt now, did you? That's not how you solve puzzles. Try harder. :P
Yeah, but most players won't see them as mystical gates (as interpreted by Berry and me) since they are merely big black squares, which in caves, generally means a hole through which to crawl (also evident in PassageScript "Do you wish to crawl through this hole").
Since you were intending these to be magical, i.e. a portal that sent you somewhere else, and transparency was the problem, why didn't you use the mystical gates as originally intended and then place the "In_Lava_blacksquare" behind it? That would have solved your problem. Like so. I can add those in during review if you wish and let you check it out before submitted to Finished.

@Berry, I can get to the crypt with out using the console. There are multiple entrances/exits; be sure to try all of them. It is a tricky cave to navigate. ;) Crypt leads to chasm, but the portal that you come out of will lead you to Abyss, and the Abyss will lead you back to the Crypt, if you use the right doors.
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Post by Scamp »

I'll be quick to ask you, if you don't mind it too much, that you limit the overall amount of adjustments to this cave (or any interior...) to an absolute minimum during review. Even though I don't see the particular need for a visualization of magical teleporters, since i4-313-Red uses simple wooden doors for the very same thing, I will make these changes you requested. I agree the cave was perfect in its original form. It is unfortunate that the game could not handle it.


EDIT! :o

Now has glowing doors! Behold! Tes96, this was a great idea and I'm letting you know (again, since we talked on the IRC) that I appreciate it. Fortunately, the glowing gates come with collision, so it didn't take very long to make these changes.
Note: I also brightened up the interior a bit in all cells but the crypt, which should remain muggy and gloomy.

Oh, and after some further testing I can definitely say that I have absolutely no trouble walking or running in this cave whatsoever. I was using a Dunmer, but the difference when using taller characters such as High Elves really can't be big enough to consider the cave impossible to traverse.
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