More Moondial Madness!!!

They have the tabletop @ 10$ and the regular size @30$. Both of these are less than the current second-hand trading market for Darkstarr Moondials.

The -biggest- one at 600$ will only fit in either a Keep sized lot (required a 5000+$ pledge) or a Player Owned Town (ranged in price from 900-6000). Those are marketed towards players who have put in a lot of money, and the idea is that the world is not full of these giant moondials (similar to high pricing for airships).

Don't focus on the biggest possible one in the game that will not fit in most people's lots. They have a range of pricing, and a range of sizes for a range of players with a range of income for vanity objects.

 

right, the point being that Im one of maybe ~300 people in the game with a keep and/or PoT to place one of these in. I'm saying its insanity to pay $600 bucks for these kind of things. $600 is a lot of money and can get you a lot of good stuff in real life (hooker and blow party for example... joke). At $600 my guess is that they sell 5. If they priced the thing at $100 they probably would sell 100.

you realize for them that this is the exact same thing, all they have to do is scale it size relative to the world. So they start with the big one and just change a field for scale. Aka, the $10 one is the same as the $600 one, only the ratio has changed.

 

Yes, but paying for a keep lot and city home to place on it in game is equally insane ! Luckily you might be able to buy one second hand for igg. That will be what, about 2 million gold?

 

Interestingly enough to mention,...it's actually a bit more complex than that with everything except the geometry...(which does indeed use a single FBX mesh)... Simply scaling it up was good enough for the geometry alone (though I quickly discovered I had to make more and more complex geometry for it when it was decided to scale the largest one four times as big as I originally intended), but in reality, making the decision to scale it up by such large amounts for each larger version caused me not only to have to refine the topology for crisper details (several times), but also re-create the glow-map for the higher res needs, and then re-define all the parameters for the built in light-source effects for the glowing moon specially-tailored to work correctly for each of the differently-sized versions...

That, in and of itself, wasn't "too" hard to do (just took several revisions of experimenting before each one's different light actually shone correctly for the different scales), but then, when I had to pass each version on to our VFX guy, Damon, he informed me that (since particle systems don't scale up their individual features when the Prefab they are attached to gets scaled), he had to go in and essentially create unique particle system effects for each of the scaled versions individually, so that not only the new visible scale of the particles themselves was properly set, but also the parameters in which they functioned (distance, diameter, range, velocity, etc.) were properly tuned to have the same apparent visuals when seen at their different sizes in the world...

As I quickly discovered, the same issues applied to me and my use of the special shader devised by Justin to make the constellation details "shimmer" at their various sizes, in that I had to create four different materials to account for the wildly-varying settings and parameters I had to establish so that the shimmering effect looked correct at all size variations (the experimentation and math that went into that still gives me a headache, since, like a food recipe, it's not always a matter of just multiplying the ingredients to maintain taste consistency when making varying amounts)... Literally any time we made decisions to change the scale of these things as we experimented with them, poor Damon and I had to go back in and essentially "re-do" the host of VFX associated with each of them separately to account for the scale changes... YAY!!!!

So believe me when I say,...a LOT of work went into making sure these objects maintained a consistent state of visual "goodness" at each of their different sizes, and it got more and more difficult to maintain that consistency the larger we decided to make them.... And that's not even counting the four different "resource management" events-series required for each of the four different Prefabs that have to be set up, uploaded, properly named, and properly outfitted to act as deco objects through our resource pipe-line... Heh!

Now, this isn't me justifying the cost of them one way or the other, it's just to demonstrate that there was actually a significant difference between the work put into one size, versus the work put into another different size.. Their scale wasn't as much of an issue as their differences compared to one another, and the fact that there are four of them that needed to remain visually consistent...

Scottie ^_^

 

@Scottie, do you know if these will be on the wheel during the telethon?

 

Heh! I have no clue! I'm not even sure if Berek knows, at this point...

Scottie ^_^

 

I'm still gonna hold off and hope there's a sale at some point.

 

50% off on any Moondial being on the wheel sounds like a good idea to me.

 

@Scottie

Re: your entire post above: Holy Sheet WOW! The art of course is stunning...now I'm gonna tr to get this out so it sounds right...

I realize you aren't in "sales" but brother....if ever a man justified the value of anything... you just did it.

Well done Sir, well done!

-sol

 

Love it!

 

20% off right now, hurry. I'm glad I waited for the telethon.

 

Yup, got it.

 

yup!

I think it's a bit buggy to place

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/keep-moondial-placement.91071/

 

This thing looks great in here!

 

Has anyone determined exactly what should be facing due north?

 

line the sun up with the sun.

 

Is that really important?
Because i just smacked mine on the table and it seems to work fine ^^

 

I am not sure,but I would think it has to be line up a certain way to be aligned with the sky,but I wanted to be certain.

 

You could certainly choose to align it, but it's not necessary, since it's a functional miniature of the entire cosmology itself,...self-contained, as it were... As such, you just gaze at the moondial (as long as it's on a map with a sky) and you can see exactly which moons align in the sector of each constellation as centered on (and facing) the world-sphere...

Enjoy!

Scottie ^_^