What Happened to the Lake?

Calam · **Posted:** Tue Jan 29, 2008 9:18 pm

When we first began using Er'cana to light the lake, we were told it would take several months to see any difference. Well, it's been a few months now, and I'm not sure what's supposed to be happening.

Is it just me, or does the lake not look one iota brighter than it did when we started? How long is this supposed to take? Why in the world would Cyan give us a project that will take years to complete if their future was uncertain before Season 1 even concluded? How can we spend years lighting the lake if half of us aren't even sure we want to stay till next month?

This is making no sense to me, and once again I'm frustrated. Like the GZ project, I'm left wondering if all those hundreds of pellets I dropped even did anything. By now, I had expected to see at least some noticable difference. I realize this is a forward-looking group effort, and it would take time to finish. I wasn't expecting it to be completed by next Tuesday. But for crying out loud, from what I can see, there is no change in the lighting of the Cavern since we've started, and we've been going for quite a while now

Cyan's plan for lighting the lake is starting to really, really wear on my patience. It's not fair to expect people to spend months doing this and see absolutely no improvement at all. A little glimmer of light would at least give me hope, but we haven't even seen that.

Maybe I'm wrong, and the light has improved and I haven't even noticed. But regardless, with so many other content-related complaints that Cyan has recieved for their work, it seems very foolish for them to engage in a project of this length. We all need to see something happen, some encouraging sign in the near future. Drawing this whole process out just seems like salt on an open wound.

Anna Catherine · **Posted:** Tue Jan 29, 2008 9:40 pm

I realize that in between seasons, there's not a lot Cyan can really do about this. The thing is, if Cyan has any ability to put anything new into Uru at this point, I think it needs to be lighting the lake.

As it is, things are pretty discouraging. I uploaded my pellet score the other day, which I do periodically, and saw that my 'hood alone had a pellet score of more than 4.7 billion. I would bet that some of the bigger 'hoods have scores that are a whole lot bigger than that.

Looking at numbers like that and seeing there has been no change in the amount of light in the Cavern, we can draw one of two conclusions. 1.) Making pellets and using them on the lake has no effect, and is a pointless grind to keep us "busy." 2.) Making pellets and using them on the lake is scheduled to have some effect, but the scores needed to make the complete change are pretty much unattainable, given it seems impossible to make even the smallest of changes.

I get that Cyan is between a rock and a hard place, but this is bad-whoa-bad. Our only consistent and "guaranteed" way to have any influence on the plot of this allegedly interactive game has no consequence, positive or negative. It's hard to get to see the NPCs, and the Bahro War is going on somewhere else and we only get to hear about it secondhand, but the lake was supposed to be something we could all participate in. The one way in which all explorers mattered. Except... we aren't having any effect.

I really, really wish Cyan had waited to introduce this till they could act on it (or if it was always meant to be this way, that they had made the goal somewhat attainable.) Because frankly, it's incredibly, incredibly discouraging in that it draws attention like a neon sign to the fact that players really have no way to influence what's going on. And at an uncertain time like this, that's not really the sort of thing you want to showcase about your product.

I feel like I'm being negative all the time, and I hate that. I just think the ineffectiveness of lighting the lake and how that could affect morale is something Cyan needs to be aware of.

andylegate · **Posted:** Tue Jan 29, 2008 9:40 pm

Okay, let me step in here and say a few things about this.

If any of you have done some Age Creating, you'll understand what I'm talking about. For those of you that have not, you're about to be educated.

Lighting the lake, and making the Cavern brighter, is not a simple matter. It's not something that can be done with a few mouse clicks, and it's certainly no easy task.

Most of the tools that Cyan uses for Age Creation, is much better than what we're using over at the GoW. However, many of the basic ways are still the same.

Objects: Things, structures, grounds, floors, walls, ceilings, LAKES, statues, etc, etc, etc. These are all made out of things that we call Meshes. The meshes start life out as simple objects, such as cubes, cylinders, cones, flat planes or grids, and then get edited to make the complex objects you see in MOUL.

Textures: This is what makes the stuff look real. This is the "Paint" that is on the meshes, so that a coble stone street, looks like a coble stone street. Water looks like water, a Cave wall looks like a cave wall. Textures take a LOT of PAIN STAKING time to get right, and to make the object appear good.

Lighting: This is no easy task. There are many, many different ways to light an Age, and guess what? It's not just, slap in a few lamps and turn them on. You have omni lamps, suns, spot lights, area lights, etc. And these lights are not the only thing that light up the Age..........so do the textures.

So it's a combination of both Textures and Lighting that give an Age it's appearance. This is no easy thing to do! You can make a light really bright, but if your texture is not set up right, it will look like it had no effect, or worse, wash out the texture.

Look at the lake in the Cavern. Nice, huh? Look at how the Great Arch and surrounding is reflected on the water's surface......
Do you now what it takes to do that???
No, there is no "Make it reflect stuff back" button that you can press. To do it in Blender, we have to make Enviormental Maps. And that is NOT very easy to do.
The water really isn't reflective. Go look in it. Go look in the water anywhere in MOUL..........do you see the reflection of your Avatar?

Nope. You don't. That's because we are given the ILLUSION that it's reflective.

So what does this all mean?

It means that in order to light the lake, Cyan has to COMPLETELY rework the Cavern as far a lighting and textures go.
EVEN for a gradual lighting, you would have to redo many, many, MANY textures and adjust the lighting of many, many lights (there are a LOT of lights in the cavern. Upon importing a map of Ae'gura in Blender, you'll see just how many).

Even a light brightening of the lake would cause all the work to be done.

So.......should they have already had all this ready before announcing that if we drop pellets it will help light the lake? Sure, I would think so.

But they also warned us that we might not see any difference for a long time.

Now you now why. It takes a long time to change things.

Calam · **Posted:** Tue Jan 29, 2008 10:57 pm

That's nice, Andy.

But it completely ignores my point.

I'm not saying lighting the lake is hard or not hard. I'm saying, if they're going to tell us pellets will light the lake, then they need to LIGHT THE LAKE. Otherwise they're promising something they won't deliver. I don't really care how they have to do it. If, in fact, they haven't reworked any of those textures, and the lighting of the lake isn't gradual, then why the heck tell us it's going to happen?

And if they have edited the textures to work with a new light-source, and if the process is gradual... Then why make it take years?

Either way there's really not a whole lot of logic behind this, because either way, we aren't really haven't any affect on the lake.

It all just feels kind of dishonest to me.

Jairden · **Joined:** Thu Dec 14, 2006 5:52 pm **Posts:** 181

I have to say that, in my own personal opinion, the lake seems considerably brighter, at least when looking from the docks or the top of the great stairs...not sure how much, but I don't really feel the process is going that badly.

Tweek · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 12:11 am **Posts:** 2633

Actually it can be pretty simple to do, for example;

Here is the cavern as it looks in MOUL:

http://uru.patchallel.com/images/aegura_0005.jpg

Here is how it is in my modified Uru Restoration game:

http://www.dnijazzclub.com/temp/dni.jpg

All it took was a single texture replacement and it all looks brighter.

D'Lanor · **Posted:** Tue Jan 29, 2008 11:38 pm

Changing the fog rendering settings will go a long way as well as the adminKI has effectively demonstrated.

[spoiler=in-game KI shots]

[/spoiler]

Gondar · **Posted:** Tue Jan 29, 2008 11:51 pm

Changing the colours and lighting is an old trick....

It is actually relatively easy. A vault setting, correct? The only problem is it doesn't immediately update to anyone there.. unless it's forced carefully. Cyan can get around that however I'd guess.

As for the background, beautiful Tweek! Didn't know it was all there! Give that and give a brightening, scaling up of the ambient light.. and thankfully for the cavern a lot of the shadows are actual shadows and not faked texture.. which means you can brighten it up and have it adapt. Give or take, of course..

Trouble is it's more than likely the actual brightening is gonna be a story thing.. so they can't get away with it until they start up again.
Wish we had another whiteboard to read.. GD lied, you know. Whiteboards don't lie, they just don't show static ideas. Times change. Events probably won't. (Notice how everything on that whiteboard happened with only some timeframe adjustment?)

D'Lanor · **Posted:** Tue Jan 29, 2008 11:56 pm

Gondar wrote:

Changing the colours and lighting is an old trick....

It is actually relatively easy. A vault setting, correct? The only problem is it doesn't immediately update to anyone there.. unless it's forced carefully.

No, it has nothing to do with the vault. But you are right about the adminKI method... it didn't last. A simple update of two lines in one of the client files however would do the trick.

Edit: The main problem however is that the algae are supposed to give the cavern a day/night cycle. That would be somewhat harder to implement.

b-guy · **Posted:** Wed Jan 30, 2008 1:27 am

Considering that some of the other Ages have either day/night or weather cycles (I'm thinking Eder Gira and Eder Kemo here), I'm pretty sure Cyan knows how to implement. If they were smart, they would have planned for this sort of thing when they were building the Cavern originally. I thing the delay has more to do with story timing than with technical issues.

andylegate · **Posted:** Wed Jan 30, 2008 1:51 am

ROFL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Check it out! D'Lanor's got snow in his city! hehehe.

dtierce · **Posted:** Wed Jan 30, 2008 2:02 am

Then I guess its just my imagination that it is getting brighter. It is definitely lighter around Aegura than it is around Bevin.

Calam · **Posted:** Wed Jan 30, 2008 2:36 am

Actually, now that I think about it, I don't think adjusting the lighting in the City is that big of a deal at all.

Think about it. We have KI-lights. Sometimes other people's KI lights are visible even after they've turned off, as we've all noticed. When they're running around, they effectively light up the area around them, moreso in confined areas. And it looks just fine.

This same principle would (or should) work the same with the lake.

vidkid7 · **Posted:** Wed Jan 30, 2008 7:06 am

Except the catch is, a small localized light is a lot easier to render in real time than a world light. In order to change the world light, the ideal scenario is to be able to fade between a series of "baked in" textures and shaders that affect how the entire area looks.

As for the lake and the pellets... I'm still pretty confident that the pellets are doing something. I just think there's a curve to it. As in... it's going to take a very long time to start noticing a change, but then it'll slowly pick up speed. Also, thinking realistically, keep in mind that we have no frame of reference for the points that the pellets give us. It could take Millions of Billions of points before we see any reaction. As in... maybe we need more people in the cavern and dropping pellets before we can start thinking about it realistically happening. Or maybe it's like Laxman said, and it's less about the number, and more about keeping the production steady. That's why I try to drop 1-2 batches daily.

It's sort of funny... we're a community that congregates in a game based around exploration, but as soon as we're confronted with the unknown (Pellets, Season 2, Guilds), people tend to get very negative. Let's just chill out, keep doing our best, and see what happens.

VixBlu · **Posted:** Wed Jan 30, 2008 7:42 am

Jairden wrote:

I have to say that, in my own personal opinion, the lake seems considerably brighter, at least when looking from the docks or the top of the great stairs...not sure how much, but I don't really feel the process is going that badly.

I have the same expierence, although i do not have proof, it is just a sense.
The 'sky' really does look brighter form citypoint-of-view, so my guess is that the algae do lit up (more) the clouds aove the city (lake reflects ons clouds).
The sky in the hood is still as black as usual, probably the ceiling is much higher, the lake deeper, no clouds will form there, so no reflection from lake to sky to lit the hood.

What Happened to the Lake?

Who is online