site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2995 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 28, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

For the life of me, I can't remember the name of the guy, but when I was getting into 3D programming, there was a series of OpenGL (or was it DirectX) tutorials that some dude wrote, and everybody was using. It looked kind of like this one, and it took you through all the relevant math, and showed all the basics from rendering/manipulating 3d models, to texture mapping, and taught cool effects. Personally I'd go with something like this for a start.

I don't know, but I was planning to do this as a separate (probably C++) program that just loaded all the resources and analyzed it rather than doing it in Skyrim itself. The idea was to start off learning how the assets are stored, how the data structures for the models work together

With this alone you'd have your hands full, I think.

It wouldn't, it would just try to identify all of them and leave it to someone/something else to decide if it is meant to be there or not.

Well, even then you need some criteria to try identify them. Otherwise you'd be showing people the entirety of the game map.

I don't know much about 3d graphics at the moment, but I believe a naive algorithm for detecting what I'm looking for would be to cast a ray from a spawn location straight down until it intersects a surface, then do a breadth-first search of all adjacent surfaces recording any that are adjacent to (roughly, share an edge with) one without a renderable texture.

Yeah, you can do that (and in fact I distinctly remember Morrowind having a scripting function for it), the issue is that you can cast an infinite amount of rays from any point. You can get around that if you know what you're supposed to be looking at. For example, to determine if an NPC can see you, you can cast a ray from it's head on to the center of the player's model (or to a few points defining it's boundaries). If something breaks the line of sight, the NPC can't see you, if not, he can. Then you write the AI code to react appropriately. But if you're sweeping the entire map, and casting rays from everywhere towards everywhere, you're going to make your CPU weep tears of blood. And coming back to identification - if you don't know which rays are supposed to be broken, and which are not, the entire exercise is kind of futile.

Ideally it'd sweep over every worldspace in the game.

That would take approximately forever.

Yeah, you can do that (and in fact I distinctly remember Morrowind having a scripting function for it), the issue is that you can cast an infinite amount of rays from any point.

I don't think I communicated the intended algorithm well. This is just intended to be a batch program that you point your load order at and it spits out a file listing all the "holes" it found. I would only cast a single ray per worldspace, straight down from the (first, if more than one) spawn location to identify a surface to start the breadth-first search. My assumption is that this initial surface would almost certainly be part of the composite surface surrounding the playable volume of that worldspace rather than something floating within it, and thus "flooding" over it with a breadth-first search would suffice to identify holes.

EDIT:

Well, even then you need some criteria to try identify them. Otherwise you'd be showing people the entirety of the game map.

I do have a criteria to identify them: a surface with a texture adjacent to one without a texture. It is classification of them that I defer on. The definition of "adjacent to" is a bit complicated, but basically shares an edge with and if you rotated them around that edge they'd come together without intersecting another surface.

So to make sure I got it right: just a scan from the top to make sure there's no holes in the floor / the ground?

Yes, though I expect for interior worldspaces it'd wrap around to cover the walls and ceilings as well.

Oh ok. I think that should work for interiors (though the math of it is beyond me at the moment)... For exteriors, I thought there are not holes in the ground in TES games, that the map is literally a heightmap defining where topography of the ground?

This is true, but static objects (eg, boulders on mountains) intersect that heightmap and thus would be traversed by my search, and if they don't intersect it properly a surface without a texture on that object would be found.

surface without a texture on that object would be found.

This is another thing I glossed over, what exactly do you mean by that? Are we talking about a floating rock in your example? Which surface wouldn't have a texture here?

I'm probably not using the right terminology here. Consider the real-world example of a bowl turned upside down and lowered into water. The inside of the bowl is painted red and the outside blue. My goal is to identify whether any red is directly accessible from the outside. Because the bowl is upside down and in the water, the (EDIT:) directly accessible surface of the water only intersects the blue surface of the bowl, and thus the red is not accessible from the outside. If the bowl were on its side instead, the red surface would be accessible. Most static objects in Skyrim (and probably the other games as well) are topologically similar to bowls in this sense, where they are only partially textured with the intent that the non-textured stuff (corresponding to the red part of the bowl) is hidden behind other textured surfaces.

Oh! You're talking about normals. The surfaces do have a texture, but to save resources they're only drawn on the "forward" side (defined by the normal vector). I think you can actually use that for validation, though I still can't think of an obvious traversal algorithm that could do the check. It might be a solved problem for all I know (or not, lol), but I can't think of the right terms to google it. I'll let you know if I find anything.

Before jumping into Skyrim, I'd try to do a proof of concept in something like Unity. You can import a bunch of meshes there, set them up in an invalid way, and try to write a script that detects it. If it works, you can try looking into applying it to Skyrim.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats