OpenZone 5.0

[Windcatcher]

It's only been one day, but there was a bad bug that I needed to fix and a useful new feature:

1. Fixed a bug in loading water areas from .SCN files.

2. When importing .3DS files and using "oz_water", "oz_lava", or "oz_pvp" objects to define water, lava, and PvP areas, they don't have to be aligned along the axes anymore or even have to be rectangular. The only requirements are that the side polygons that define them be vertical and that the tops and bottoms be flat (not sloping). Areas defined this way will be classified as "irregular", and their extents won't be changable in the water properties dialog.

3. Updated the help file to reflect the change.

I can't believe it's up to 5.0. Anyway, enjoy.

WC

[Melwin]

Why don't you make a single Open Zone thread so I can sticky it, and just update thread/title accordingly when you push out a new release? :P

[KhaN]

I can't believe it's up to 5.0. Anyway, enjoy.

I really hope that OZ / DB will go up to 30.2

The water fix perfectly work, no more problems with waters, and no more need to do multizone waters to have a water zone not straight, which is, lets say it, a huge help (no more 183 water zones to animate, weeeeeeee)

But i now run into another problem. Players, cant fall from islands, bridge, it appear there is an invisible bounding box (which i never added), around every mesh. I need to know if OZ was setup to work this way (which sound logic to me), but as i dont need it for AP, maybe you got an idea on how i could bypass this (Yeah, i wanna see newbies fall from islands and die ...)

Best is to show a shot, zone geometry is islands / bridges connected together where people can walk (but cant fall, argh).


Another problem is how OZ handle Lights when imported from 3DS. When i setup a light into 3DS mesh, and then import it into OZ, the light isnt intensive as are lights created under OZ, remember its why i added multi factor. I dont know if it can be "fixed" but 3DS Light should be quite the same as the ones created with OZ.

Killspree, i seen your zone screenshots with lights, how you done this (having like projector lights), that light only some zone of a room for example, im really curious.

[killspree]

I placed them with the lighting option. However, it seems some zones(outdoor for example) have natural lighting provided by the EQ Client in addition to anything you place in OpenZone, so it may be a bit harder for folks to notice the placed lighting in any outdoor areas.

The lighting you saw in my screenshots was with the lighting radius set to 100. It's really useful for torches, braziers, campfires, etc. Just place the lighting object around the same level as the fire texture or whatever of your object you want it projected from and then set the radius.

Zone is looking great btw.

[Windcatcher]

Yeah I noticed that the gamma setting in the client really screws up the realism. IMHO zones look way better (more realistic) with gamma set to 0.

WC

[killspree]

Something I've been noticing lately is that occasionally when placing water with OZ, some texture areas under the water are horribly distorted.

[KhaN]

I got the same problem with OZ 4.9 version, when adding water, sometimes, under the water, mesh structure was fucked up, with distorted textures, big holes, but OZ 5.0 fixed it, well, ad least it fixed it for me.

Maybe WC made some change lately in a version he sended me, he is taking a break atm, and if you are still having those problems with OZ 5.0, give me your mail and i will send you latest OZ version WC sended me, hoping that would solve the problem.

[killspree]

I'm gonna play around with it a bit today and I'll let you know if I have any problems with it.

[killspree]

Ok yeah, it's happening when I create the ground mesh in OZ still...going to do further testing to see if I can pinpoint what's causing it. It didn't occur until I changed the underwater texture to something other than the above water texture.

Edit: It looks like the problem is caused by changing the underwater texture AFTER you've created your ground mesh in OZ. It's working fine and there's no distorting unless I change the underwater texture after the mesh is already created.

[killspree]

Something I just noticed is that zonelines are extending beyond their horizontal ends. I noticed this in one of my zones I exported with version 5.0. I have the zoneline going north-south in a small path in a mountain, and it passes through the mountain wall farther than openzone shows it passing in both ground editor and with the "show zonelines" box checked, while in-game.

I'll just change the zoneline to go west-east for now as a temp fix but this definitely seems like a bug.