This is an archive of CompuServe forum messages from 1985 to 1995, as saved in transcripts by John Foust.
Search Results (66 messages)
#Memorial Day
Message #12800
Am I the only one who works holidays….? Ian
>I'll think kindly of you every time I paint a texture now……. I get a warm feeling 🙂 Now, I still create my textures in 24 bit (KPT and other filters work better). But when I'm done with them, I use PaintShop Pro (shareware), to drop it to 8 bit.…
> and I seem to recall that some of these packages barf on 8 bits If you use 8 bit textures and backdrops etc… tS will still output 24 bit. This just saves memory during rendering. You wont see a difference in the end product. -Ian
>We are about to embark on a large animation to avi project and will no doubt be spending >alot of time talking to Intel about how to avoid this problem. And they will say, run it in 24 bit mode 🙂 Ian
Video for DOS (the shareware one, don't know where to find it… I'm sooooo useful) would be an excellent choice here… creating an uncompressed AVI, and then working it later with Premiere. -Ian
>Gosh! You mean you can play an 1.4 meg/s AVI with the "skip video frames if behind" option on without any jerks? >Aarrgh! Help me pull this envious feeling outa my heart and (pleeeeaaaase) tell me how I can get close to this. I've got >a fastscsi tool that allows…
>20 meg of textures? How do you keep it so small? 8 bit textures. I have compared 8 and 24 bit, and can't tell the difference at 15 fps. I also don't allow any renderings to hit the swap file(not enough time in my life), if they do, I remove…
>I'm interested which data rates you (and the others, of course) can run without skipping frames and what configuration >is needed therefore. I myself use a P90 with 32 MB, Matrox Imp+, 2 GB SCSI and 4096 smartdrv. Since I develop CD ROM games, my limit is 270k per second…
I knew you'd show up and help ! Thanks for the help John, and info on the runtime 🙂 Regards, Ian
>Problem as Terry points out, is the software often costs more than the machine! Aren't there expensive service contracts also? I remember ProE being about $3k a month… -Ian
That would work nicely…! The only problem I forgot… 20 meg of textures! The user would be forced to walk around the "White" House, if the textures and directory structure was not on their machine… -Ian
>SGI is now selling a base Indy for around $5495 (list) with a 100 MHz CPU. There is the new "Indy Modeler" too for $9895…
>Apart from sending them to a nudist colony in the antartic for winter sports any one any suggestions as to where to >start, what software to use etc. Ken, I have some similar elements in my upcoming game Void Pirates. If you have programming experience, go ahead and just code…
>Ian, aren't the Mac QT and QTW (Windows) formats a little bit different? A little bit… they need to be readable by the OS. But you still have to pay the bucks to install the QTW runtime. Everything from Microsoft is free… one of the few things I like about…
Jurgen, >thank you very much. Maybe this can help solve some quality problems. I can't remember exactly why we decided for >Video 1 but I'll try and let you know asap. I use Indeo 3.2 at 270k per second. The quality is nice, and it works well from 2X CD.…
Jurgen, >we do almost all our TS-post-production in Premiere. Best results to us come with microsoft video 1 at 100%. 75% >speeds up things but with very poor quality. >Sometimes we use the 256-colours options to decrease data rates. PMJI, but if you are outputting 24 bit Video 1 avi's,…
Adobe Premiere will output QTW .MOV's for you. Beware, If you are doing something commercial or retail… AVI's are free… Quicktime is not…. Apple gets a peice of everything you sell. Ian
Arthur, I've seen that Premiere sets a duration for sequential images, between 1-30 seconds. I haven't found a way to import sequentials into it without each frame being at least 1 second long. This causes a problem since you want 15-30 of those frames per second. I only output AVI's…
David, > (AVI / Window 426×341 / Full frames) are absolutely ENORMOUS! Simple math shows that 426*341 at 24 bit * 30 frames per second works out to 13,073,940 bytes per second…. yes, it gets big fast. AVI's need to be compressed, to save space. If you don't plan on…
Ken, I got it from WINMM, in the VfW library 🙂 Enjoy, Ian
>Yeah, I've seen that before; that's what happens when you use an int instead of a long! Like in my first game TailGunner…. High Score was Int… it was fun watching it crash on level 7 at 33,000 points, considering I never tested it that far…. I test a little…
> Good grief!!!! How many polys are there in that scene????? trueSpace can't count them, it returns a negative number (-24758 or something like that…) Ian
Rob, Load up NM_MGR04.COB from trueClips (btw, the second largest file on the CD). trueSpace can't even count the faces, it gives a negative number. It will bring your system to its' knees… 🙂 Ian
Marc, I went ahead and loaded the COB file you are using. It took 8 minutes to load on my 66. The problem you are facing here is the COB file. It is a 3DStudio file, converted to COB format. The file IS enormous and complex, contrary to what you…
>The scene "only" contains one of the rooms from the trusclips CD plus a human mannequin. Considering those objects are 3DStudio objects, they have many more faces than they would if created with trueSpace. Please ZIP and upload the scene here… otherwise we will never figure this out. Ian
David, Here's a thought (from a fellow Limey who's seen the drab days of merry old England…), create a fuzzy, semi-transparent TXR texture map (possibly a gradient fill, and use "Intensity" to create it). Place a circle or hex over the large end of the light, a short distance from…
>4.8 MB >The scene is not that complex. That is f**king HUGE !!!! And very complex. My biggest scene for Void Pirates is 900k. It contains over 600 individual objects and calls some 100 textures, and takes quite awhile to move around in on a P90 with a Stealth. Ian
Arthur, 1)The answers to both these questions can be found on page 21 in the tS manual. Rotating a sphere will get goofy unless you set rotation spline parameters to Sharp. 2) Again, setting all spline parameters (Move, Rotate, Scale) to Sharp will remove the problem. Or, say your object…
I my be wrong, but I've seen this error when working on a scene, and inadvertantly (or blatantly) deleting an image from my drive, that the scene is currently using as a texture. Ian
Read my reply to your other message…. Ian
This has been discussed a few times here before, and the key to proper path movement is in how tS works the path spline. Right clicking on the path tool will reveal spline properties for paths. You can set movement, rotation and scale properties, either Sharp, Smooth and Very Smooth.…
>The official PlayStation release party was yesterday–even Michael Jackson showed up and played some games >(after his security people booted me off the machine) . . . Sad… you guys are Gods compared to Muppet Jackson….
>Also, I have talked to some of you who say that they have amassed huge amounts of models/scene data. Who is >the scene king/queen? Void Pirates currently has a total of 271 scene files with over 500 textures among them. >We have thought about adding object management through layers in…
I would really enjoy seeing the size of this scene file…5 MB?? 10MB?? I don't think you are going to find any smooth panning with a scene that requires 100 MB to render. Ian
Well, if tS is using 100MB to render the scene, I would definately say that the size of the scene is what is slowing it down. My largest render to date took about 56 MB, and that scene had over 50000 faces and 400 objects. >not bad (well, actually, this…
This sounds like a slow video card problem, what card do you have Marc??? Ian
>Ian.. Nice demo.. Looking forward to more from the full product! Cool! Someone actually looked at it (besides Rob…)! I wish I could show more, but it would be 100's of megs… Look for it around Sept. 1st ! Regards, Ian
>Hey, that's what we're all about here.. Open communication! Just ask Ian.. hehehe… actually, John and I had our differences about 5 months ago arguing about MacroModel and tS… I think I lost though…. 🙂 Ian
Shane, >ps. I just ran WinBench 4.0 and tested the graphics speed and I ended up with 12.2 mil Winmarks (the other >numbers in order were 9.37, 5.45, 6.14, 18.4, 19.3, 16.1, 9.06). This was on my 486dx33 at 640x480x256 with my >ATI Graphics Pro Turbo 4meg VLB. Does anyone…
Marc, Open the settings dialog, and turn ON NoEcho… you will see a big improvment in redraw speed. Ian
I would expect it to look like AutoCad 13 for Windows, tool palette style stuff. As for a date I heard Winter mentioned, but I don't know if that was 95 or 96… Regards, Ian
>BTW I am confused about your comments on 3DS, its a dos program, as far as I know there are no other versions >planned, so you would probally have a long wait for a Win NT version. 3DS 5 will be Win NT…
>But the question is whether trueSpace displays wireframe animations at rate that is comfortable to view, or at a >standard rate such as NTSC, PAL or as fast as possible? Does trueSpace attempt to control the rate (frames per >sec) ? It plays them as fast as it can in…
Wireframe speed depends on video card speed.
Robb, > Once the windows are covered and the daylight has FADED, the artificial lighting (wallwashers and down lighting >on the table top) would FADE down as the projection screen descends; after which the slide image FADES up >onscreen. You'll probably want to wait for trueSpace 2.0, since it allows…
Robb, What you describe is fairly simple. The camera movement is easy, just draw a path you want it to follow. tS can animate as many objects as you want, wherever, and whenever you want, so the doors and projector are a snap. The client image on the screen will…
VOID PIRATES Demo
Message #11541
Well… The Demo is done! Void Pirates is my latest CD-ROM game coming out this Summer. The Demo contains a slide show, and a playable section of the game. All graphical work was done with trueSpace. There is a full description of the game in the demo, plus a readme.wri…
VidEdit comes with the MS Video for Windows Developer Kit (Jumpstart 2.0a). It is free from Microsoft. You have to ask them though, and it can take months to ship. Go WINMM and ask around for the INet address, as I don't recall it. You can also pick up Sirius…
#11440-
#TS 1.04 file save bug
Message #11454
>I was rendering a 4 second (120 frame) animation to TGA files. I stopped TS after frame 43. I went to resume at >frame 44 using the same file name and telling TS to only render frames 44 – 120 in the dialog box. TS unfortunately >while rendering frame 44,…
#11433-
Sound problems.
Message #11452
>>> Look on the Jumpstart CD and find VidTest (in the vidtest directory). >>I tried it – doesn't look good for my video card… Check for new drivers…. that card should do better than that. I use a Hercules Dynamite Pro VLB on my pigdog 486/66 (cuz my P90 does…
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