Oildrum troubles

[Mumbles]

After a spate of (rushed, and poor quality) C tutorials yesterday, I've now encountered a problem. Lesson 6 was going to start out with loading a scene (the hydro scene included with the loading a scene tutorial), by using the load scene. Then it would move on to parsing the sandbox text file manually, first with a caption that shows which objects are currently being loaded, then finally, some sort of accurate progress bar.

 

But I noticed that all the oildrums it tried to load were missing. They indeed pointed to a directory in Josh's hard drive, which I don't have. "C:\documents and settings\joshua\desktop\projects\engine working directory\meshes\Oildrum\Oildrum.gmf". So I searched around my hard, looking for the correct folder for these oildrums.

 

Turns out the only oildrum.gmf files I have are from an old program that Josh might remember called "chat17" and Lumooja's community project. I have added them both (but not at the same time) to hydro's pak file, and then watched it load...

 

...Or not. The last entry in the console window before it crashes is: "loading texture: ......oildrumdot3.dds" which makes it crash. However I don't uderstand the crash because the model viewer in the Leadwerks SDK folder can read the oildrum without any problems.

 

The sandbox file also points to missing models like "industrial_cagelight" but I can do without those. For the tutorial simply loading the geometry and a few oildrums will do.

 

From the source code included, can anyone see why it might fail to load the oildrum? (To make it smaller, so that it could be attached, the hydro scene, and replaced with a pak that contains the oildrum.)

 

 

Edit: 2010/09/27: Because the issue has been solved and there is an 8 MB total attachment limit, the attachment from this post has now been removed...

[Marleys Ghost]

Do you have the shaders.pak in the app path?

[Mumbles]

I believe so but I'll just check...

 

It was in a registered abstract path. But copying it to the local path does not change the outcome.

[Mumbles]

I just thought about it now, and it was suddenly all too clear. What has been the largest long term complaint to do with new upgrades to the engine (both small upgrades and major upgrades)?

 

...Re-serialisation of the .phy files. I took out the physics file and it worked, but obviously they were jammed in place. Can I ask, Josh: Do you have the measurements for the oildrum (height, radius), as well the number of "slices" (I'm pretty sure that's not the technical name, but I think of it as being like slices of cake). Just to make sure I get the same shape so that I can make one that is 2.2x compatible. Either that, or do you have the exact obj files that you used to make the physics shapes?

 

That and in later chapters, small physics shapes will be generated from obj files on-the-fly since it seems to take a millisecond or so - and if it's part of a loading scene, how cares how long it takes? (unless it's like 10 seconds per object, and several objects - but with small objects, it's milliseconds sort of time.)

[Marleys Ghost]

This might be of help Mumbles:

 

http://www.leadwerks.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5957&hilit=oildrum+.phy

[Mumbles]

I'm a bit dim... But should I get the impression that the height is 1, and the radius is 0.6? (The last screenshot in the thread). Because that's a big help for now (so thanks for that)...

 

But it doesn't solve the number of slices. I would guess at 12 for the highest LOD mesh and 6 for lowest. Would that sound about right? However, I don't actually need to know this becase:

 

1->It's several chapters away.

2->A close approximation should be good enough anyway, just so long as you can't overlap the surfaces on the oildrum.

 

...In any case, thanks, I can now get on with writing up about loading scenes manually.

[Josh]

See the C++ tutorials package in the tutorials area to download the oildrum with phy file.

[Mumbles]

Yep, thanks, that's the right phy file - but out of curiosity will that not give 2.3 readers a problem, or was there a separate 2.3 zip for those tutorials.

[macklebee]

Yep, thanks, that's the right phy file - but out of curiosity will that not give 2.3 readers a problem, or was there a separate 2.3 zip for those tutorials.

 

i believe it will cause a problem... I think 2.30 was one of the updates that required new phy files... along with version 2.32... but its the oildrum.PHY file so its not like its not readily available... you could just put a note in there about them having to use a PHY file from their current SDK... along with the newton.dll...

[Mumbles]

i believe it will cause a problem... I think 2.30 was one of the updates that required new phy files... along with version 2.32... but its the oildrum.PHY file so its not like its not readily available... you could just put a note in there about them having to use a PHY file from their current SDK... along with the newton.dll...

 

I don't provide:

• engine.dll
  
• newton.dll
  
• jointlibrary.dll
  

 

because simply running the project wizard puts all of those in your project as is. But hydro's stuff is not included by default, and there's nothing worse than trying to follow a tutorial if the files don't seem to match.

 

Since the oildrums are not part of hydro's pak anyway. I'll probably include 2 oildrum paks, one for 2.0 and one for 2.3 each with their version as part of the filename - and just tell readers to rename their version to just oildrum.pak, where hydro's sbx will be told to look. I might also reduce what's in hydro's pak because it's nearly 26 MB.

 

In any case, I pressed ahead with the chapter with no physics for the being. All I can say for anyone waiting for it is: it's a long chapter...