In my experience, most models I've converted with Poly2Vox and imported into Slab6 needed to be downsized by half (in Slab6) twice in order to bring them down to a reasonable scale.

we're looking at about max length 20 so that's 80 in poly2 and halving twice in slab6 doesn't look good

halving down twice to 30 is what looks the best, any less just looks too weird (from the models i tried at least), might as well make something from scratch

Izzy's cars are definitely better-looking, although I'm pretty happy with the scaling and variety of my models.

Yeah, Izzy's models are more realistic, but yours are at a better scale and probably have better playability, what with the 1/2-space at the bottom you mentioned, the pickup truck bed, the interiors of the vans, and the tailpipe that makes it easier to climb up.

@nothings: Sweetness. Yeah, I forgot to mention it at the time, but the pickup and van are both designed so you can get into the back without breaking or building anything. The pickups have the proper bed heights for use as forts (at least if you're using the rifle. Firing the SMG while standing up really isn't pretty).

How's it working so far, nothings?

I'm about halfway through my checklist on the previous page. There's really nothing to see different from the ones I posted before. (Man, flying around those in voxed, I really want to just make some kind of non-AoS voxel game where all of this stuff is at its natural scale. Voxel GTA or something.)

I haven't figured out what to do about the balance of vehicles (it's a little weird to get just as many open vans and closed vans as everything else, so you get 2x as many vans).

Also I've been thinking about the possibility of some kind of recoloring, like the game does for the blue/green player models, to add more variety, since having 1/5th of the cars be red sports cars(?) seems a little goofy. (Although it probably doesn't matter once you're playing, as opposed to looking in voxed.)

If we just had 2x or 3x as many car models of the same style that would probably suffice (since I can't really mix yours and izzys). But recoloring might be good enough.

If you'd like me to make some more models, let me know. There's a few possibilities for new cars (hatchbacks, minivans, a shorter SUV, a pickup with a longer cab, etc) I can explore. As to recoloring, you're free to make them whatever color you like, or ask me to recolor them. I only included one color for each model since I had assumed that recoloring would be a much simpler task than producing the model shape, so more colors would probably be a good idea.

Plus, by changing the amount of different colors available for each type of car, you can change the ratios of the different cars to each other (Basically, you make twice as many sedans on the map by getting twice as many colors for the sedans as for anything else). That might prove to be the simplest way to control the ratios, rather than toying with the gencode (other than to adjust it to spawn the same total amount of cars despite having a larger amount of models to use).

Would you like me to just try and work up a "final" (we can hope, anyways) library of cars with multiple colorations? It shouldn't be too hard for me to do, and it'll fix the ratios and increase the variety. I'm thinking of making sedans and hatchbacks more common and the larger types of vehicles less frequent.

Yeah, you don't even need colors to balance the ratios, you can just make multiple copies of the kv6s, but unaltered, to change the balance. That just felt like a kind of lame way to do it, but it certainly would work. (The generator actually already takes the total # of cars to generate on the command line, so that's not an issue.)

If it's not too hard to recolor in slab6 than that's probably simpler than trying to do it in the generator. So yeah, I guess we might as well head for the final set of cars. People can still always make new sets of cars and run them through the generator if they want, but this will be for the "official release".

I was thinking it might be fun to make some kind of image map thing to draw little unique logos or something on the vans just as a nice little flourish, but I'm not sure what a good source of small images for that would be. I don't want just a random hodgepodge of user avatars or google image search results -- I don't want to say 'hey, 100 people each give me 1 tiny image', I don't feel like that's going to give a good result. But it feels like there ought to be something interesting to do there.

You should do as much or as little as you feel comfortable with; it's your time being spent, so whatever you want to do is fine with me.

OK. I think I'll get to work on that. Of course, I've just picked up an unfortunate Dwarf Fortress addiction, but it shouldn't take me too long to recolor some stuff. Plus, there's a snowball effect for time taken... the more models I make, the faster the next model will be to produce.

OK... lost a fortress and made a bunch of stuff. Here's a new set, with 10 sedans, 5 hatchbacks, 4 vans, 3 SUVs, 3 pickups, and 2 sportscars:
http://filesmelt.com/dl/Vehicles1.zip

Could you generate a map with this setup and upload a copy for me to check out (and let me know what you think as well)? This should fix the proportions up, and add quite a bit of variety.

@1337101: here's a map with the new vehicles http://silverspaceship.com/aosmap/garage6.zip -- looks good.

It still looks a little repetitive (esp on the map), since that's just the nature of random numbers, so I tried adding in mild recoloring -- there's enough color variety that I don't need to turn red cars into blue, but turning them into different variants of red might be nice. http://silverspaceship.com/aosmap/garage7.zip -- which I think does look nice in terms of being less repetitive, even if the headlights and axles and tailpipes and such all get inappropriately recolored (but the recoloring is pretty mild). Although it turns all the white vans into pastel colors that look dumb. But i'll probably leave it in as an option (but not the default).

I've done all the tasks on my previous list except the new clustering algorithm and adding the missing interior spaces. That'll get done over the next couple days, and then I think we'll be ready to release unless you want to do more with the cars.

You're right about six... although it's defnitely an improvement over the previous setup. The ratios seem about right, anyways, which will give me a good reference point for further sets.

I like the color variety in seven, to be sure, although it won't work as part of the generation code with what it does to white vehicles (those vans look like a bunch of easter eggs, and not of the "guns hidden in the back" variety).

If you want, I can take the amount of cars to "ludicrous" levels and make hundreds of car models for a huge increase in variety... how many cars total does the garage usually have? By making more models than will be used in a map, I can make repetition a lot less common.

If noticed a bug as well... sometimes the longer cars (particularly the vans) generate "merged" with support pillars. Is it possible to redefine the dimensions of the parking spots that are partially occupied by pillars to prevent this?

ludicrous amounts of cars would be great

every single stall doesn't have to be unique though, it's normal to see identical cars in real life

i imagine 30 or so uniques would be plenty

We have 27 at the moment, so I don't think 30 would be quite enough. I should probably just start producing a lot more color varieties for the cars that look good in other colors (AKA "Not the vans").

27 already, wow

well, i think it looks pretty good as is, but some more variety certainly won't hurt

one of the models has a hole in the front:
http://i.imgur.com/VllDA.png

and the pillar problem you mentioned:
http://i.imgur.com/q2kH4.png

I think someone must have griefed that car. I checked the model with hollow-fill and it said the car didn't have any interior cavaties (and there certainly weren't any exterior ones).

I blame the second picture on bad driving. Obviously the driver was a terrorist who wanted to shoot up Doc for conning him out of some plutonium, and was paying too much attention to his AK and not enough to his driving.

no, not griefed. every car of that specific model is missing 4 blocks in the front. it will look fine in slab6 and voxed but any blocks that don't have vertical or horizontal support will disappear when loaded by the server, which is the case for those 4 blocks of that model.

That may be a bug in my loader. The kv6 format isn't very clearly defined, so I think I'm not generating solid interiors when I should be, instead all the car interiors are hollow, and I'm losing the supports on that one.

The pillar problem is kind of a pain. Currently I have code that detects if spaces overlap pillars and it suppresses generating a car in that space entirely. However, if I do that if the pillar overlaps the space by just one voxel, then a fully populated garage has way too many empty spaces from pillars. So I used a kind of fuzzy rule about whether the pillar was too close, which seemed to work ok, but I guess it's a little too aggressive on some of those spaces. So I probably need to change it to try to track the pillars and suppress cars that overlap, instead of spaces that overlap.

i didn't realize the models themselves were solid inside. i'm glad the loader makes them hollow because it's better for gameplay. but you're right, that's why the bumpers on the sedans don't have support. i added two voxels under the bumpers to fix that: http://aloha.pk/files/aos/fixedsedans.zip

all the other models look fine

I should probably still fix the loader to make the vehicles solid. Then make it a command-line switch whether it creates hollow vehicles like now, or solid like they should be. Except I don't really WANT to fix the loader since this is all an undocumented part of kv6, so it feels like kind of a waste of time. But I probably need to do this for other reasons, to have a proper kv6 loader for other generators.

Thanks izzy, I've swapped those models in.

I'm going to change the recoloring code so it doesn't affect black/grey/white, and that should fix the pastel truck problem.

@nothings: OK, sounds like a simpler solution. Would you still like a few new models to add some shape variety as well?

yes, please :)

Yeah, it can't hurt. But it's also no hurry, since you can always add more vehicles even after my code is final. Even if there's an "official" release it's not like there can't be an official update.

and then some deucebag goes and griefs the whole thing.

...

have you seen that actually happen?

because if you read the thread, you'll see us discussing all the various anti-griefing strategies built into the map to prevent that.

(i just checked and the one that's running now is still solid)

From the tests I've seen nobody has ever even managed to destroy a significant chunk (say, all of the area in between four pillars) of even a single layer. Plus, I'm sure that even if you mined out all of the bottom pillars, the top of the garage is well over the 4,000 block limit required for a structure to float freely.

EDIT: Was just on there and someone had, indeed, griefed out about 120 blocks of area from the top level. Still, that's on an Aloha server, and the Aloha servers are generally known as the most poorly moderated servers on AoS (and possibly in all of online gaming, it's that bad. I have yet to see an admin in one of the servers. Poor form, guys!). Hopefully the griefing will only be an issue on poorly-maintained servers. Servers like Gregery's or CheeseToast's shouldn't have such an issue with this.

I don't think it had happened when I posted before (I had looked on the map at least and didn't see that, but maybe I missed it).

I think expecting admin on AoS servers is unrealistic in the long term. But that that level of destruction doesn't bother me too much anyway. It's a far cry from griefing the whole thing.

To me it kind of screwed up the map.

I should step away from gameplay now anyway before I have to ragequit. There's a lot of griefers and trolls (even more than usual) on at the moment... and of course, no matter how good the game, server speed, and map are, add in a bad playerbase and no admin presence that I could find, and you've got crap. I'll get back to building some models and playing Dwarf Fortress, where I KNOW the goblins aren't hacking (I wouldn't put it past the elves, though, nasty creatures).

Overall though, yes, I think the map design is fun. It adds a bit of a fun element since even with the intel it's still tricky to pinpoint the enemy's vertical position. Raids are very much the fun element here. You can expect some fun without even leaving your spawn, and as a bonus it's not like the spawncamping in Hallway... the structure prevents spawncamping (or any camping, really) from being a big problem, so while you ARE slightly more likely to get spawnkilled, you'll also get a fair shot or three at revenge.

If anything I'm more concerned about the widespread griefing of the stairs that I saw when I was there.