VAriables

[Rovastar]

What variable can be changed in teh render section.

I was under the impression that all values in R4 could be changed in teh render section.

Alas this is not the case.

I have been playing with the medusa module having problems with some.

med.tailLength

doesn't work onthe fly just in teh init section

med.halflife though is fine in both,
etc, etc

ANy list/way of telling what is what.

Also what the hell is going on with the tails variable for the medusa.

The amount of 'tails' 0 = 6; 1=12; 2=loads; 3+ = 6......

[rabidhamster]

Sorry - some can be changed some can't - i haven't made it very clear which ones have i?

The amount of tails is quite cool - there are only 3 options i think - they just adjust the number of tails on the medusa. R4 just has 3 preset shapes which is why they correspond to wierd values. The last option gives you a quite impressive amount of tails - i haven't actually used it in any scenes yet

[Guest]

OK I thought as much.

It is a shame though that there are limitations. Would it be a *big* performance hit to change them on the fly.

I mean I understand that constant change per frame would be a pain/performance hit but I would liek the option.

I remember this issue in R2/E and I complained. Only because I wanted to do more stuff with them.

I would like x and y co-ordinates for modules too stuff like the snake, medusa, etc.

They are all centered at the moment. If I can have x and y for say the medusa (and others) I could (with the distance parameter) make the medusa seem to fly around 3d space.

I have too many ideas....

[Rovastar]

The above post was mine.

[Rovastar]

Oh you said the amount of tails was predefined by you in the code for the shapes. Any chance of an editor/access via new variables maybe equation parameters to this cahnge this.

[rabidhamster]

For the medusa etc i'll see if i can change the viewing parameters to be the same as stuff like model - eyex/y/z etc. Maybe also make the amount of 'kick' selectable.

A point about one of your posts - haven't tried your scenes yet, but... sounda=bass, soundb=mid, soundc=treble. If you want left and right channels separately then you can use the specLeft + specRight arrays. if you look in data/native.r4 some of this is in the comments.

For the medusa tails, i suppose i could add an option to change the angles they come out at - not too sure what you'd do with it, but still :p

I've tried to make everything changeable that can be easily - mostly, things require a lot more calculation. For the metaball radius in involves calculating a big lookup table, and for the medusa it would just impose the performance hit of having the maximum amount of tail length which isn't too great. i can add a parameter for how much they expand though if that makes you happy

[Talesin]

Well, it'd be interesting to combine a model and a medusa to give the skull waving hair, or to make a squid fly and spin around the screen, or to make a bunch of them into those seafloor tube anemones... maybe even flying through a biotunnel or monkey rip tunnel lined with 'em, for those with beefy enough cards to handle it.

And having a single wriggling 'finger' could be put to similar uses.

[rabidhamster]

done
if you look in 0v09 the medusa can be told how many tentacles to have, but also you can set up the normal direction of each one. Have a look at sparkwheel.r4 for an example of this. There aren't very many comments in there i'm afraid, but you have to specify a vector for the direction of the tail.

'kick' now works as other things - you have to set it to some sound value to move the medusa tails - if you leave it at 0 the medusa stays where it is, and dynamically changing the tail direction will wobble them about.

You can also move the snakecube around, but i haven't added any options for tail positions on that. I may do later, but i was considering having the option for custom 3D models (maybe on cubefield too) because the rounded cube model would just look great

[Talesin]

[rabidhamster]

[Talesin]

[rabidhamster]

[Talesin]

[rabidhamster]

[Talesin]