(Outdated) MpEditorUnlimiter

[PeriSoft0]

phil13, just wanted to put up a quick reply and thank you for the work you did with the blockmix tool - it's fantastic, and even if it becomes deprecated, it will probably have been the reason for blockmixing being 'officially' added to begin with!

I've been getting back into TM after a several-year hiatus (I think I last played TMU in 2009 or so) and to the detriment of my free time discovered the track editor; the blockmixer changed it from a terribly limited exercise in frustration to a fascinating and wonderful exercise in frustration!

I'm a total nitwit when it comes to the standards for TM tracks and so forth; I don't get the whole "make it so you have to be perfect to finish" thing; I like having to use my brakes; I'm a hardcore simulation nut. So the track I'm working on is totally different from anything I've ever seen in TM - literally.

This means that either people will love it, or I'll be tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail.

So, couple of preview shots just for fun. It's not quite ready to spit out into the world yet but it's getting there. As is probably fairly obvious it's blockmixed to all getout; in some cases I'm probably using four things in one block. It's getting to the point where the complexity means it spontaneously breaks and deletes bits if I do the wrong kind of editing, so that's pushing me toward sewing it up; hopefully it will load consistently! That said, I've done my best to make it extremely clean and smooth as far as block selection goes.

Anyway, thanks again for your work, phil. It's appreciated!




(Had to chop this one in half to satisfy the forum...)

[Nerpson]

It seems that it's quite beautiful!

[Chris92]

As a tech driver, this looks fun as hell! If you need a tester for that track, do not hesitate to contact me!

[TheM]

That map does look indeed really nice! And that without even looking "blockmixed".

[Demented]

That map does look indeed really nice! And that without even looking "blockmixed".

That's the way I like to see blockmixing done. Very natural.

[TMarc]

That map does look indeed really nice! And that without even looking "blockmixed".

That's the way I like to see blockmixing done. Very natural.

me too

[PeriSoft0]

Crap, now the pressure's on, isn't it?

I'm working on cleaning the thing up a bit now. On my other machine it was acting odd - undo and redo have side effects when the unlimiter is on. Sometimes this is useful; normally if you mix a block you can only delete the most recently placed block, but if you place another block over it, and then undo, you can delete the block 'next level down'; presumably it's shuffling the contents of the block during the undo/redo operations. (Oddly, sometimes you have to rotate the block you place before it will trigger a reshuffle that brings the old block to the 'surface' so you can erase it. And it seems to have to be a different type of block.)

But on one computer I'm using, at this point, using either undo or redo appears to go through the level and clip most or all of the blocks that have been mixed, which means that a whole bunch of track pieces disappear if I undo or redo. But only on that machine. The only difference I can think of at the moment is that I was using that one in offline mode; while that doesn't immediately suggest a reason to cause such behavior, I have experience with memory hacks like phil presumably uses here and I've seen stranger things happen...

Doubly-interestingly, this appears to happen whether or not 'block clips' in the unlimiter is enabled at the time of the undo/redo.

Luckily, it also turns out that doing a save / load cycle will 'clean up' the block stacks, so if you have road piece A at location L, and then mix road piece B over it, you can delete B, save, exit the editor, load, and then delete A. It's more cumbersome than undo/redo, but in the case of my other computer, has the advantage of not turning the track into swiss cheese!

Another caveat: This sucker is heavy on the ol' GPU. It's somewhere in the mid 6000s at the moment, which isn't enough to give my home machine any trouble (SLI'd GTX 580s driving triple portrait 24", everything maxxed except AF) but stuff a couple of generations older might get a bit upset.

Anyway, I'll probably stick a link up here when I get something representative done. I'm not terribly good at *driving* TM, so a track I find interesting may be horribly tedious to guys who are quick. We'll see!

[phil13hebert]

Hey PeriSoft0 ! Thank you for your great words

As for the bugs, I am aware of them. It's normal that a undo/redo affect the other blocks and same for the other bugs.
I know what cause these bugs, but I don't know how to remove them (my knowledge isn't good enough).
Let's hope that the official blockmix that Nadeo will bring will be better than my tool

[PeriSoft0]

Hey PeriSoft0 ! Thank you for your great words

As for the bugs, I am aware of them. It's normal that a undo/redo affect the other blocks and same for the other bugs.
I know what cause these bugs, but I don't know how to remove them (my knowledge isn't good enough).
Let's hope that the official blockmix that Nadeo will bring will be better than my tool

Haha, one hopes they have access to somewhat better documentation...

I wouldn't call the undo/redo stuff 'bugs'; memory editors are blunt tools by nature. And believe me, if the undo/redo thing weren't around to enable deletion of 'orphan' blocks, there's no way I'd have gotten this track done nearly as quickly!

It does seem like there are some situations where the block-clip enable/disable isn't working as expected, as with the difference in behavior between my two machines on the later stages of this map. But as I said, I'm really pushing the limits of what's advisable to do, so it's not at all a reflection on your tool; I'm not the kind of guy who goes out in a car, shreds the tires, and blames the chassis.

(By the way - my 'real' name is just PeriSoft; I've got a TM United account from ages ago, so I can't use that username on the forum. But I can't log in with it, either, because its password was set years ago and doesn't meet the requirements for the forum!

And after all this security, the forum is perfectly happy with a new password like "Aa1"... go figure.

I have to say, having seen some of the difficulties with blockmixing so far, I can see why Nadeo didn't put it in to begin with; it's a real Pandora's box of cascading problems if you want a bulletproof solution. It's kind of amazing (and a testament to Nadeo's coders) that it works as stably and as well as it does when you go behind its back and force it to let you do nasty things to it; it would have been really easy for them to cheap out on the data structures for the blocks, but their code is obviously clean and open enough that it can handle things it doesn't expect. I am officially impressed!

Once this thing is done torturing my computer doing the shadows I'll link a beta version for anyone here who wants to have a go. I'm interested to see what people who can play the game think as opposed to an old sim racing nut who's better at breaking editors than driving arcade racers...

[PeriSoft0]

Crankin' up my post count here. Another quick screenie. There are two other sections to the track, too; I tried to work with the lighting and surroundings to get a feeling of going from place to place rather than just driving around. A lot of the visual confusion is from stuff I put in to diffuse the light and block some of the fabric-tent-thing lights, which seem to have no switch... Not very environmentally conscious to leave all that stuff on all the time, is it?

If anyone at Nadeo is listening, individual control of lights and the ability to add invisible, arbitrarily-spec'd light sources would be absolutely wonderful. For me, at least; I assume there'd be a period where servers were full of tracks lit up to the gills, but such is life...