Offline Ship Editor

[Ethoir]

Replied. Its at the bottom of the page. Moving the core actually changes the bounds. No idea why, but it does. Rotating the ship also changes the bounds, but that I can understand because the \"dimensions\" of the ship are actually changing.



The binvox this is based on was flipped in viewvox on its Y axis with the front of the ship facing down. I had to rotate it 90 degrees on its X-Axis three times to fix it, if that has something to do with it.

 

[kahulbane]

That is the 256 model, it is ok, and imports.

On to the issue we have been working on, as this is bigger than the Star Trek Ship, and almost 1:1.

The BSG from the new series is 1424 ~ m and this shot is from an import that is 1024m. If i get it into the game the 3d molder will get all the creds!

Now on to the teaser.



This is an empty hull that has 81k blocks, and a core, nothing else. =] Now on to the issue we have been looking at that is close to the one above.



As you can see, as you get to the aft part, the ship ends, another part is inserted from the end, and inverted... but the very end little bit is drawn... the tips of the exaust ports on the engines.

Jo has been digging on this for a little while. =]



And just in case anyone is wondering, the editor sees everything perfectly before the saving.

 

[kahulbane]

I imported a 512 m version and it did the same thing... but did not try to fill the space on the back with any thing. Just empty. humm.

 

[jjaquinta]

I found some problems. Fixed them. I posted an update, but there are still bugs.

I\'ve having trouble replicating the problem with anything less than a full model. So it takes, like, 10 minutes to cycle through a test.

I had the ordinates wrong on the chunks in non-zero superchunks. But it looks like the blocks are coming out in the wrong order within a chunk. So I\'m still iterating.

 

[kahulbane]

Yes, I was just looking at the big one, and it is flipped on the chunck to the back of the ship.

My 512 model seems to no post that same section, if that can help.

 

[jjaquinta]

I know I\'ve siad this before, so I\'m not popping the champagne yet. I pulled in a 1024 long Galactica and it seems to render, front to end, correctly. It\'s a little hard for me to tell. It takes forever for my server to rez in the build.

It appears that the offset table for chunks is not invariant. They are put in a different order for -ve coordinates. It just seems a stupid way of doing things. Either it\'s a bug in their code that they don\'t want to fix because it will mess up everyone\'s files, or else it\'s something to do with performance.

Anyway, give it a go and let me know if it works.

 

[Ethoir]

Hollowing an already hollow hull is okay. When I tell it to fill said hull (in advance of smoothing it out), it stalls hard. On a 524x524x524 ship. Will try again with this new patch as well.



Edit: Fill works. But smooth on a 300x300x300 ship that has been filled seems to make it stall for ages. It even becomes unresponsive/frozen after 3 minutes of waiting and I have to kill it in task manager.



Edit X2: The new saving is working. I\'ve imported the 300x300x300 Akira into Starmade with a relocated core and it completely loaded without missing chunks. Now to wade through it and remove excess bits that don\'t belong on the model.

 

[kahulbane]

OK,

Looks great! the back is fully built! and it looks awsome, I cannot get the whole ship in a screen shot =[

Look at the block count and it is only the hull, it is hollow.



There seems to be an artifact on the right side (this side) the pilons that connect the hanger deck are missing a segment on each, I will check the 3d model and the the tool render later. The hanger on the right (in the pic) has extra blocks on both fore and aft on the openings. I though they were semetrical with the left, but I will check this later too.



This is awesome, and when you take in to account the size in the screen shot, it is a very impressive job! You may pop the cork on this one.

Here is a shot of the missing parts I am going to look in to.



Cheers!!

 

[jjaquinta]

I\'ll see if I have the same hole.

Are you sure it just isn\'t the server doing a lazy load? It took over ten minutes for my server to rez the whole thing in.

I put on hollow by default because I found the memory necessary to hold that many blocks was either blowing my computer\'s mind or making things verry slow. I can make it optional if you like.

 

[kahulbane]

hi,

Jo my system at home has 16 GB ram, and 8 cores, so I test locally, my server only has 4 cores and 8 GB ram right now, so I test locally on my system. I am running windows, so I use the command line java lanunch to give it lots of ram =] the only time I cannot give it enugh is when I so an import from 3ds.

The hollow is fine on auto on.

I can go in game and have it rendered in just a min or so, so no big deal to test. I will be on the system later, so I cannot check now. I am happy we have gotten this far.



I will let you know! =]

 

[Silaz]

Since we seem to be making headway with large ships, is there a quicker way to paint ships? To select block by block is painfully slow and hard to do with the current camera movements. Is it currently possible to use your selection tool and then apply paint based on the selection? Additionally, maybe a form of a paint brush of sorts( like 4x4, 8x8, etc) If the first idea is already present, my apologies. Just thinking outloud.

 

[kahulbane]

HI,

Working on this issue with you on the large ships, on the saving of the BP, could we get a progress bar?

I was using the console output to see what the tool was doing, as some ships write more and take a few second to write to disk.

=]

 

[jjaquinta]

I like this. I think two things would fit:

1. A \"radius\" scale on the paint window. Currently we have \"radius-1\'. Change it to Radius=2 and you paint in 3x3 blocks, Radius=3 gives 5x5, etc.
2. When you click \"all\" and have a selection made, it only paints everything in that selection

In other news...

• I updated the Hull options to be constrained by the current selection if there is one. They\'ve also been changed from volume based to dimension based. That seems to be how everyone is working. Note, when you are doing selection hull generation, it does not erase the existing hull.
• The basics of Undo/Redo are there. They aren\'t perfect, and don\'t capture everything. They may also run your machine out of memory with a large ship. But they are there for people to start playing with.
• Nudge is there. You can invoke it by the typographically awkward method of using ALT+WASD(QE). It will move the selection around the screen. Note, though, that this is destructive! If you move it over another portion of the ship, it will wipe it out. I have to scratch my head about how to fix that.

 

[MichaelSeph]

There seems to be an issue with \"Mods\" features now with the \"Hmm\" message slowing the process, on big ships (more than 256m long, so it uses superchunks), repainting all of it would take merely 5 seconds, let\'s say up to 10 until it\'s also visible and stops having a visible FPS loss. Now I can wait 5 minutes and it still won\'t even color a detail of the ship, which is just 1/4 of it, on the same ship I repainted in the first example. I\'m not even sure if it does the work, hence my CPU stays at about 2%, RAM doesn\'t budge, and the graphic card isn\'t giving signals of extra load.



Even if it works fine, would there be an option to disable this less stressing loading system, to go back to the 100% resource usage method ?

 

[kahulbane]

I was looking back at post #242 and in the pic from the tool that shows the ships stats and silhouette, It is missing the same part on the right side that we were discussing before. I have not gotten a chance to get back on my home system to look at things, but thought that was interesting, as that was versions ago, and many versions of my models ago as well.



Look at the center silhouette from the front view, you can see the pilon is chopped. So we may have just over looked it the whole time as the back end was so big.

I will let you know what I find Jo.

Cheers.

 

[Kildar]

I would like to add to MichaelSeph\'s comment that there does seem to be a slowdown in your latest version. I\'ve only used your tool a few times beforehand to import .obj files, and with the addition of your reflection functions (my .obj didn\'t render symmetrically), I\'ve decided to take advantage of your feature and abort my manual reflecting. However, whereas the import once took maybe a minute, the new import has already run for 30 on a 550 and is hung up on 35% complete. It\'s currently using up one core (perhaps some multithreading someday? I know it\'s a bitch. I may take a shot at it for you someday when I have time) and memory usage for it is hovering around 300MB.

Great work here, and I\'m really looking forward to trying the new features and being able to seamlessly import large designs intact.

Edit: Nevermind, it seems I just have to open up a smaller ship file before using import. Purging current ship data from memory could be a quick wordkaround. Speaking of opening files, I\'m sure you have plans to move import into the File menu without having to load another blueprint first to Modify. A very very insignificant UI feature that should be at the bottom of your priorities, but just putting it in the back of your mind.

 

[jjaquinta]

Good idea. I generalized my progress dialog stuff. It\'s not perfect, but at least you get some indication for most of it.

 

[jjaquinta]

The \"Hmm\" message was just a placeholder when I started writing the progress dialog. It got cleaned up with the last posting I did.

Progress is proclaimed and posted based on how the interior code is instrumented. When one external operation takes several internal ones, most of the time I just picked the one that I think takes longest to instrument and display progress on. I\'m not always right. (E.g. import instrumented two processes: the importation and the centering. Turns out centering takes almost no time.) Some times there are longer process which weren\'t instrumented and you will see pauses. Also, Java Swing has multi-threaded UI, and so work in general can slow down the UI or refresh rate. (Contrast with SWT, which isolates the two and gives better UI refresh.)

In any event, none of this changes the actual time it takes to do any operation. Just the apparent time.

The CPU is a very poor way of measuring program load, especially in multi-core machines. RAM doesn\'t give a useful picture for Java programs because of garbage collection. And since the program doesn\'t use the graphics card, that\'s not going to tell you anything either. So you needed monitor all of that, it won\'t shed any light on whatever it is you are having probelms with.

I\'m not sure what you think would be helped by ripping out the resource optimization stuff. It\'s faster, with a smaller memory footprint with the improvements. I can\'t see what would be improved with its absence.

 

[jjaquinta]

Actually in the update I just did I changed it so that when the program starts up it loads the Isanth-IV default blueprint. That saves you the headache of having to open some ship before you can do an import.

Menu placement... enh. Right now Import is a mod, and I\'ve got limited places that mods can be surfaced. Edit menu, Mods menu, and the Mods button on the color palette. I can add more places, but I\'m starting to slowly re-implementing Eclipse\'s menu extension model! I\'ve got to stop and think at some point if I just don\'t want to go ahead and move over to being an Eclipse RCP propgram.

 

[Kildar]

I can\'t seem to get reflect to work at the moment. If we want to reflect half of a ship (say along the length), do we select the Y and Z axis in order to form a plane, or would I select the X axis which would automatically do so? Being able to select a side would be nice as well.

Edit: Reflect does work, although it took both sides of my ship and swapped them when I wanted to replace one half with a copy of the other. I suppose I\'ll have to figure out the selection method.