Messages posted by: Tairon96

I have edited my first (and so far only) adventure "a bit":

In my first version I tried to add to many ideas in one adventure. So at last I had to drop to many details. Now have I split it up into a series: The first part is now ready, hopefully

What I would like to know, is the story now dense enough?

Any comments / critics are welcome. ( Sorry for the bad weather down there on Eco-9. The weather controller is out off function

)

Here is the storyboard of the first two of eight acts of the adventure "Windwalkers 1-1 - Eco-9" ...
(I wish I could have made a video instead of this "slideshow", but Spore does not capture speech bubbles nor the cutscenes

)

Descripton / introduction

You receive an emergency call from your friend Windwalker Sir Squall: The wildlife reserve planet Eco-9 is out of control. Find out what happened and how you can help your friends there.

Act 0 - Flight / Landing on Eco-9
Pic 01

Act 0 - Beaming down
Pic 02

Act 1 - Arrival - Just looking around
Pic 03

Pic 04

Pic 05

Pic 06

Act 1 - Arrival - A sub-space transmission
Pic 07

Pic 08

Pic 09

Pic 10

Pic 11

Pic 12

Pic 13

Act 1 - Where is the ID-Card?
Pic 14

Pic 15

Act 1 - Identification at the quarantine zone terminal
Pic 16

Pic 17

Pic 18

Pic 19

Pic 20

Pic 21

Act 2 - Your passenger, does he want to join you?
Pic 22

Pic 23

Pic 24

Pic 25

Pic 26

Pic 27

Pic 28

Pic 29

Pic 30

Act 2 - Leave the quarantine zone
Pic 31

Pic 32

Act 2 - Sir Squall (Chief scientist of the Windwalkers on Eco-9)
Pic 33

Pic 34

Pic 35

Pic 36

Pic 37

Pic 38

Act 3 - Going into the observatory town
Pic 39

Act 3 - What a mess: The town need badly firefighters!
Pic 40

FlareFox7921 wrote:I hid them for act 1,and made them visible in act 2 & 3

Okay, another suggestion: Upload your adventure as a template and fixed captain and give us the Spore-link. Then we could download it and take a closer look at it

Maybe someone will find the mistake or we can confirm it as a new bug.... where is insect spray if you need it most?

Do you have set up a change in behavior during the acts? Maybe you have set them as allied / peaceful / stationary for act 3 (as example) but in the first act they are enemies and are looking for trouble

No, sorry, that would not help. In my adventure the NPC is standing on the roof of a building.

But I have found a workaround: A change in the story: The NPC has lend the object to another person ... and this person is found outside on the ground.

I think I am making my adventure to do the job of the beta-testers. Are they on holiday? Sorry for being nasty, but it is frustrating to find another adventure breaking bug.

Here is the botd (bug of the day) for today:

NPCs won't carry out the give action, if they are not standing on the ground - no floor or roof is allowed! If they hav the chance, they will run away to get to the ground. If they can't reach the ground (inside a building on the 1st floor or above) they will just stand around and will refuse to give the objects they are holding.

Here are both versions of the wall section.

The faulty one: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - And the correct one:

-

(Click on the picture to get to the Sporepedia)

The only difference between them it is the way how the wall fundament and the floor of the parapet walk is made. In the faulty one these parts have been tinted red.

I will upload both versions tomorrow. I already deleted the faulty one

But there is no problem to rebuild it - now knowing what is causing one of these bounding box problems.

But first of all gN8

DVDMaster wrote:[...]If you have a building that behaves this way, what you can you short of rebuilding it to fix it? Can you just remove and reposition the top?

I could copy that misbehaving floor and place the new one at the correct position. The faulty one itself could not repaired. I had to delete it.

Here are the videos:

(They are my first commented videos on YouTube

It was not so easy

First video: How to not edit your floor object!

And the second video: How to avoid this bug!

And the third video shows Iraultza87's perimeter wall I have edited for my adventure. Now there are no invisible steps between the wall sections. Do you want to join for a walk?

I found out, what is causing the problem!

Here it is:

Make a box and then stack another box un top of it. The upper box should be the floor, the lower box is only same kind of fundament.

Don't do this: ...
... resize the lower box in height so the upper box will be moved automatically! If you do this the bounding box of the upper box (your floor) will be messed up!

I will make a video of that "don't do this" ...

Hmmm, I don't know. Now I have deleted and replaced the floor, but it doesn't help it. The floor is made of the simple box (I don't know it's Englisch name) from the first palette of the buildings menu (1st page, last row, 1st part in that row). Normally there is no problem with that piece.

The thing that disturbs my most: If I turn that building by 180° there is no step on the other side ... but my captain walks that way like he is moving up a light ramp! At the troubling end then he is walking in the air!

If the captain's would not have so much problems with steps and stairs, I would say: "Who cares?!" But so it could ruin an adventure.

I signed "yes", but I wanted to signify something different: One "act" would be enough, if... there would be branching within the story AND scripting events within an act AND more goals within an act.

Just my two cents.

Subject changed from:
"Collision detection glitch! Invisible steps??"
to
"Maxis Team read this! Floor bounding boxes faulty! Causer of problems detected! Tip for GA-creators!"

I was edited yesterday a great interior property made by codyr2391. But problem I found was there seems to be an invisible barrier my test captain could only pass in one direction

In the video you can see, my captain is bounched back as if there is a force field wall (There is none!). So I had to rip codyr2391's bridge apart to use it... Now I just experienced the the problem with an object I was editing today, too!

And I found an explanation for the yesterday's problem. Look here:

My captain (this time my real one) was stumbling between to wall sections. Fortunately he can jump - my test captain can't because I want check if all regions are reachable. So my real captain jumped and after several tries he managed to jump over the invisible obstacle. It looks like there is the complete section higher than you can see - my captain walks in midair!

Before I started today editing this wall section there were now such problems. I used a lot of <shift> and <ctrl> movements for editing. Is this causing these problems???

Is there any one out there who has experinced this problem, too?

I was wondering about after I recorded a video from the start of my adventure there are no speech bubbles included. Also if there a a cutscene because of a mission goal to speak to someone or to examie something, the recording is stopped at this point.

Is is possible to change this kind of behavior?

Maybe these suggestions will be lost within all these posts, but still I am hopefull someone will read it and write it somewhere else ... and this process continues until a Maxis Spore developer has a heart with the community and improves some very essential stuff of the editors:

User-friendliness / usability.

Right now, it seems to me that there are only a few possibilities why the creating / editing stuff within Spore:
* The deveolpers never used a 3d modelling tool (3d-Max, Maya, inventor, ...) (Tip: Buy a single student or other cripple version and take a look how professionals make a 3d-editing-tool)

* The dev team never uses the editors for more experienced creations (Tip: Go and try it out!)

* The lead developer is maybe a bit sadistic

* A mixture of these.

Why do I complain? Here some things to think about, ... before they will make the editors more complex: They should improve the ease of use:

We should be able to

... slide parts along every axis - local, inherited or global (right now we can only slide parts along ONE axis (Z) globally)

... slide parts along every plane - local, inherited or global (right now we can only slide parts along ONE plane (XY) globally)

... fix/lock parts or hierarchy so they can't accidently move/scaled/deleted ....

... hide parts or hierarchy so they do not block the view

... build hierarchy without this snap (and bounching) with e.g. with a drag-drop link (not rendered / only visible if the child part is selected) or by using a hierarchy tree view

... rotate and slide the camera without hopping around: Slide and rotate the camera local(coordinate of the cam), inherited (coordinate of the selected part) or global. If there is a part blocking the view: The part shoudl get transparent and the camera shoudl not try to jump to a "better" position!

... view and edit the values of a part by numbers: Position (inherited / global), rotation (local /inherited / global), scale (X,Y,Z) and the special Spore editing handles.

... scale any part or hierarchy without any minimum / maximum limits. Only if the whole object extends the max size parts outside shoudl be turned red and not deleted automatically (same for sliding parts)

... exchange between the editors. If there are any parts not allowed within that specific editor, these parts could be turned red.

... combine saved objects to a single creation.

... autosave with a cycle of 3 backups

... turn off the automatic align / use a manual align tool

... mirrow parts / hierachy along a axis or plane

Thanks for reading. Right now it is more frustrating than fun to work with the editors. Maybe in a not so distant future a developer hears these complains.

*Still-moaning*

Chris / Tairon96
(I signed)