Scripting Wish List

[Ransom]

It would be really cool if GDGI could add some scripting functions to Get and Set an object's mass via script. 

[Ransom]

Would also enjoy a function to change an object's bounding box max and min.  Currently, you can read or 'Get' it, but to be able to 'Set' it would be great.

[Ransom]

object.GetAnimation(string);
// reutrns null if animation does not exist

and...

AnimationAtEnd( bool);

returns whether the current animation has ended or not.

Thank you, this has been added.

[Ransom]

A function to set the frequency of an entire sound class.  The frequency should be set relative to any frequencies set to a specific sample.  For example, boost all samples in sound class by 5%.  This could be used for all sorts of neat effects; underwater, near-by grenade explosion, slow-mo or speed-up scenes.

AND,

I think all lights, not just spot and directional, should be able to cast dynamic shadows.  I want lamps and ceiling lights to be able to cast shadows if I want them to, but it's hard to make a believable lamp using a spot light.

[Squat]

Area light shadows are perhaps the most intensive operation you can perform in a 3D environment. I agree that it would add a lot to the visuals, but the hit to performance would probably halt any notion of ever trying to use it in a real project. I know this from experience as a rendering artist coming out of Max...adding an area shadow light usually increases the rendering times on any scene by 10-100x whatever it originally was.

However, you can set two opposite facing spot lights to 180 degree cone angles and you effectively get the same thing, albeit perhaps a slight gap in the distribution.

Being able to adjust sound properties to simulate doppler and muffling...aswell as a simple echo effect would be VERY useful.

[BigDaz]

I'd like light emitting materials, that way you just load in a lamp model, set it's material to emit light and that's it. You can do this with the Half Life engine and it's quite a natural and realistic way to light up a level. How easy that would be to implement I don't know.

[pixel_legolas]

You have the luminosity for the maps but that is not for the entire model. You can also copy-paste the lights .opr settings into a models opr and get it to emit light

[Ron]

A couple additional items off the top of my head are

(1) Ability to start a sound midway through the file. For example if you have a vehicle sound that starts at idle and goes to 8000 rpm, the ability to start the sound at 4000 rpm midway through the file. This would be good for shifting where the rpm does not drop all the way back down to idle

(2) A way to program force feedback in joysticks and steering wheels.

There may already even be a way to do the above... both are not critical to me because I have a billion other areas I need to work on already 

[zknack]

Ron,

Why not have an HandleEvent trigger occur at 4000 rpm?

Or utilize the
SoundCondition property to switch between rpms, as well as things like:
wet road or gravel, etc.?

[Ransom]

Ron, as for your RPMs, I would have a steady engine sound (not one that sounds like the engine revving faster and faster) and simply adjust the frequency of the sound based on your RPMs.  I think that would be the easiest way to go.

Squat, using spot lights with a wide cone angle (to simulate an area light) works okay as far as light is concerned, but if you look at the shadows cast, the quality of the shadow map decreases inversely with the size of the cone; i.e, the bigger the cone angle the worse the shadow looks.  I think this is because spot lights don't use split shadow maps (like directional do) and so as you increase the cone angle, you're stretching the shadow map image.  From what I've seen, no adjustments to the size of the shadowmap nor to the shadow settings in the Environment options helps correct the problem.  If spotlights could be fixed to take advantage of split maps, than your idea would certainly be a viable option.

[gekido]

We're going to add point light shadows, but they are significantly more complicated than just spotlight or even directional light shadow mapping.  Basically a shadow map can just use a single texture since it's directional.  because point lights generate light in all directions, they are essentially dynamic cube map shadows - so you end up having 6 shadow maps generated (ie one for each direction) for a single light.

But with that said, we definitely will be adding them.  As well, I'd like to move to a full differed lighting system that we had implemented internally (ie the codes' there, already done), as this will help with some of the performance issues with having a lot of lights in an environment.  Of course differed lighting has it's own issues but the tradeoff is worth it in the long run.  But having said that, it's all experimentation - we may end up having multiple options for the lighting system (ie differed / non-differed) and so on.

I like the idea of modifying an entire sound class's frequency at once - definitely makes sense for things like underwater, or the 'muffled' sound that some games have after an explosion goes off nearby, that type of thing.

For the engine RPM's, basically what I'd recommend is having a couple of engine sounds - low-rev / medium-rev and so on.  Set it up so that when the engine rev's higher than a certain amount, switch between the various sounds, and use the frequency adjustment  to handle the 'in-between'... you could blend between the sound switches using a seperate 'gear shift' sound or something...

dunno, might work ;}

We do have doppler available in for any sounds 'automatically' - check the 'properties reference' in the docs.  No need to fake it.

http://www.gamecore3d.com/docs/properties/sound

Getting and setting mass isn't an easy one, simply because ODE has it's own internal world and simulation that it runs...and it's not the most flexible at the best of times, but can see if it's feasible.

It doesn't really make sense to be able to adjust an objects bounding box though - their bounding box is what it is - ie covers the bounds of the model, and is updated based on the animation pose etc.  IF you want to be able to adjust a physics object's size, that would be different - and would probably just use a standard 'box' object and be able to manipulate the size, but again probably won't work.

ODE runs the physics simulation, trying to keep objects stable, handling collisions and so on - if you suddenly adjust an object's size, it could dramatically break the physics simulation in all kinds of horrible ways. 

What you might want to do (and something that I've had working before) is have multiple collision objects in a model that you dynamically enable and disable on the fly to adjust for different conditions...but then again I don't really know what you're hoping to achieve with this so I'm just throwin ideas out ;}