SotA Map for Linux

Discussion in 'Archived Topics' started by Aiyarree, Oct 21, 2017.

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  1. Feeyo

    Feeyo Avatar

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    @Undone
    What is the exact error you get when the crash happens anyhow?
     
    Last edited: Apr 26, 2018
  2. Undone

    Undone Trap Master Moderator SOTA Developer

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    Unfortunately the stack trace was less than helpful. It really didn't offer any insights into where to look.

    I'm waiting on the author of the plugin to revisit the problem. However, if someone wanted to buy the asset and hammer away at it I'd be happy to work with them. Otherwise I could reach out to the author and see if he would mind me sharing the source to a select few for this specific problem...

    edit: I reached out to the author about sharing the source but he's out of the office until the end of the month. Will ping some of you if he tells me it's ok.
     
    Last edited: Apr 26, 2018
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  3. Feeyo

    Feeyo Avatar

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    @Undone
    Sorry to bring this back up. But I really would appreciate it if you (port) will start working on a native mini map system.
    Lately there are loads of mini map issues even on Windows. Having a integrated browser into the full memory heap in the game can really not be good for performance.
    Not sure why you are not doing a native system there, there are loads of mini map unity assets for cheap that will work for all SotA players.

    Having a developer working on a mini map for 2 days straight should be enough to have a fully working system integrated into the client.
    Please do not see this post as a rant/complain, just a heads up to make everyone happy.

    I will even donate some money to you guys to get this done, I am sure other players would do the same to receive a native mini map.
     
  4. Alley Oop

    Alley Oop Bug Hunter Bug Moderator

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  5. Feeyo

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    Thanks, I guess I missed that comment somewhere. You just made my day awesome with those quotes Alley Oop :D
     
  6. Kaffien

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    Awesome. I can't wait to test it.
     
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  7. Undone

    Undone Trap Master Moderator SOTA Developer

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    Unfortunately it's a bit more complicated than that. On the surface this sounds simple enough but there are a number of additional things we must consider. First is the web version has a ton of content that would be lost as it may not exist in game (labels, custom pois, etc). Second is all of our map images were made with different scales; this means that importing those images into the game would require us to go through all 300+ scenes and not only figure out the proper center coordinates, but also the correct scaling. The other option is to render a different camera to act as the mini-map. The issue with this however, is that would cause significant performance issues as we would then be rendering the scene twice.
     
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  8. Feeyo

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    I do understand that you will lose a few features and that using the web version gives you so many more options/features as you just need to program them on the "website" to incorporate it into the in game minimap. Actually you do not need to create "images" of the the scene and import them. As when having the top camera will already create a 2D render from the scene. And only render always from above the player. This also already fixes the coordinate, scaling problem. Also I do not totally agree with the performance hit on having a top camera rendering some content, you will not render everything twice.. As you can work with layers in unity and also doing a render texture that will show you the content of the top camera in real time. This solves the problem that you stated about importing map images.

    To be honest, I have taken the time to study the plugin that you are using for unity, that uses a modified CEF. I do not believe there will be any GNU/Linux support ever. There are a lot of dependencies in this project that just makes it almost impossible to support that plugin. (The developer of the plugin, CEF, Xorg, Chrome version, libc, etc etc).

    I also took the time to create a scene from scratch with mountains, tree's, gras, houses and loads other (free assets) from the unity store and experiment with a minimap system based on the top camera + layers system. Performance hit was minimal.
     
  9. Browncoat Jayson

    Browncoat Jayson Legend of the Hearth

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    Cameras can also be set to filter content, so the overhead camera could only include terrain and prebuilt houses for example, eliminating the need to render the most expensive things in the scene (player decoration, lights, characters and npcs, etc)
     
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  10. Feeyo

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    Correct.
     
  11. Feeyo

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    BTW: I found a developer that has created an nice video series of 6 that explains it all on how they did it in another game.
    FYI:
     
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  12. Undone

    Undone Trap Master Moderator SOTA Developer

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    Technically this is correct in the sense that we will not render everything twice. If something is visible by both cameras however, we have to do the additional work to render it from the point of view from the other camera; this includes drawing, frustum culling, distance culling, etc. There are also a number of performance systems in place that assume the game is rendered from a single camera which would very likely create visual oddities in an overhead camera. You also have to consider that to mimic our current setup we would need a minimap that is capable of zooming out to view the entire map. None of our 300+ maps were designed with that in mind which means you would see floating mountains, empty land behind the tree line, or anything else one might consider "the man behind the curtain".

    In simple scenarios it may be a minimal performance impact but Shroud is far from simple when it comes to scene complexity. While I appreciate your enthusiasm on the matter it's never as simple as it initially seems.
     
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  13. Jesterhead

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    Hey Undone, thanks for your work thus far and your updates regarding the matter. I have a quick question: Let's assume the worst happens and a realization is made that any possibility of porting the plugin to linux is either too costly/inefficient/etc. Is there any kind of Plan B on the drawing board?
     
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  14. Undone

    Undone Trap Master Moderator SOTA Developer

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    The plan B is bringing the map images into the game and overlaying information onto the images similar to the old purchasable maps. This has been the plan B from the beginning but the amount of work to make that happen is an issue. We would also have to figure out a way for it to not bloat the size of the game as each map is ~80 megs which with ~250 scenes comes to about 20 gigs uncompressed. With compression we can get that value down quite a bit but at the cost of visual clarity on the maps themselves.

    If you really want to help and have the spare cash to purchase the asset feel free to send me a PM and we can chat about it.
     
  15. Feeyo

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    I understand your points with "the man behind the curtain" unexpected behavior from the complex scenes. Although the empty land behind the tree line is also there with the normal camera :). And do not think that would really be an issue at all. But yeah I understand the new problems you will be creating implementing it. I am just a bit frustrated that I am kinda forced to play on the M$ operating system while "Linux is supported".


    Plan B does not sound too good though. Its going to impact performance a lot I guess, and paying €71.47 euro for an asset just to chit chat about it is a bit too expensive for me.
    Troll mode on:
    And also I am not sure if he exactly knows what he is doing if I read his release notes:
    quote"
    - It's a lot more work to make, but that's not your problem.
    - Probably a number of other little things.,
    - It's slower, but a lot of effort has gone into improving its performance; hopefully everything will run just awesome now.
    /quote"
    Troll mode off.

    EDIT:
    Just to let you know I think you are doing a great job with SotA. And I am loving the game, it has been a long time I have enjoyed an "mmorpg" as I am liking SotA.

    I will try to experiment with other options we maybe could use to implement some kind of the same solution as you have now. Keep you posted.
     
  16. Undone

    Undone Trap Master Moderator SOTA Developer

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    It wouldn't have a significant performance impact as you would only have one of the big map textures loaded at any given time. It would just take up more space on your hard drive.
     
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  17. Feeyo

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    If that is the case then it sounds a lot better.
     
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  18. Kaffien

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    I'd be willing to do do a fresh install of Linux to help test it out.
     
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  19. Ben_Hroth

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    @Feeyo, @Undone

    Between Jakub White releasing the map on the sotamap web site and selling it to Portalarium, he released SotaNavigator.exe.

    It was a standalone program that parsed the immediate text log to find current location and then plotted it on a map. Umuri's Sotahud also does something similar.

    Could we use a standalone program for Linux to at least tide Linux owners over and release pressure on a totally integrated release? I liked sotanavigator and think it wasn't a big difference in play when integrated with "M".
     
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  20. Ben_Hroth

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    Addendum, did Portalarium purchase SotA navigator as well? Could they open source it?
     
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