R4 Wiki - R4 Tutorials

[rabidhamster]

I thought i'd follow everyone else's lead and use a stupid Wiki thing. There is now information online about Branding R4 scenes and writing image files.



Feel free to add bits - even about usage tips. Please don't screw it up though or I'll just have to take it down and everything will take ages to update again.

- Gordon

[rabidhamster]

by the way, the stuff on branding assumes you're using v1.04 (which only I have atm). Its still of some use though, although the 'thumper' scene doesn't exist

- Gordon

[Rovastar]

I never liked wiki's. And I don't know how much to contribute at this stage although I may fix the spelling mistakes…….now that would be a turn up.

? The thumper scene is in v1.03

But the texture size doesn't have to be 2^n. All the Infinite Fish textures we use are only 200x200.

[rabidhamster]

Yeah, but R4 doesn't like it if they're not 2^n. Loading time increases and the graphics quality is LOADS lower because its being resampled twice.

Yeah. i noticed one or two mistakes. I put it up mainly to see what it'd be like, but perhaps if i can just log on and add bits i'll do more. God knows.

It is a bit shitty to be honest. Not too user friendly, no decent passwording, and hardly phpBB Quality.

- Gordon

[rabidhamster]

ahh, as for thumper, i made it a scene in its own right, with a smooth cubefield behind it.

Ohh. I did some nice new scenes for R4 too AVS-style, with an image warping effect that warps a rainbow around the edge. You'd have to see it, because to be honest you could probably do more with it than i have...

- Gordon

[Rovastar]

I have been doing a couple of cool scenes too but only on my a ATi Rad 7000 and it is a real pain.

I'll be buying a laptop soon though when I get all my backpay. Having to avoid those Centrino rubbish though as they only go to like 1.6Ghz and need a decent GF card FX5600 or something.

I know it is better if the textures are 2^n just that it doesn't have to be. In fact I should really change all the inf fish textures to 2^n

[rabidhamster]

Yeah. i figure if i'm going to tell people how to do stuff i should tell them to do it right tho'

Def. don't get an ATI laptop. As far as i can tell by a friend's laptop, the OpenGL drivers for laptops are just reporting they support stuff and then returning black for all the textures.

Not good really.

- Gordon

[Rovastar]

Wasn't going to touch an ATi.

But I am still worried that the laptop drivers for a GF card will be really shit too.

At some point I'll try and get that ATi 32MB Radeon7000 to you maybe you could test /do stuff *shrug*

And I'll try and test R4 on the Intel 82865G 64mb card (it has pbuffer support apparently) that is as standard in the new HP/Compaq d530's with are the corperate standard and I have access to like 800 of them atm. (But the proxy here doesn't not let me download any exe files so I am stuck for a bit)

[Chris]

We've got d530's at work and I can assure you there is no way the integrated intel graphics is going to run R4. I haven't tried it, but it seriously chokes on simple 3D.

Don't diss the Centrino's. I just got a 1.6Ghz Centrino Toshiba with Geforce go FX5200 and it'll even run Doom3 if I drop the resolution to 512x386.

[Rovastar]

Actualy it did run R4. Ok not enough to be useable in any degree but I did at the time whilst on teh move with a contract I was on manage to make soem scenes with it - I did a few I think I know I did the tunnel and biotunnel overlays. I ran it in a tiny little window about 100x80 at about 20fps.

[Guest]

Link from first post appeares not working - Error 404.

I just installed R4 and wondered - that is what I wanted. And I wanna create scenes and scripts. How can I do that? Where can I find complete docs? And what is Wiki?

[rabidhamster]

Wiki is on: http://www.wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki
I'm afraid it didn't get used much by anyone so when I moved servers I took it off. I'm planning on adding something similar again soon though - but for the entire site. I never took off the post - I shall change it now.

All the documentation I have is either in the R4\docs directory, or in the R4\dll\*.r4 files that are there (thats documentation for each module). I'm afraid you'll have to look on this forum and the scenes that have already been made for more information.

[Rovastar]

I know this is teh wrong thread but Intel now have pbuffer support on there cards for the 82845G (which I presume is worse than the 82865G) as I have just tested it on anew Dell machine.

without pbuffers all the bufsave scene mess up royally but pbuffers are now enabled see intel did listen to my support call to them April last year. They were great at replying too within 2 days.

So hopefully it will work on the 82865G's that are in those HP/compaq machines.

[rabidhamster]

nice. thanks for the info.

[Rovastar]

For the record it wasn't prefect (probably will not get chance again to test it in the near future) it had some 'banding' of colours across teh screen in some scenes but for 90+% it was fine and ran at least. NOt the quickest but on 640x480 and buffer 512x512 mostly not dropping below 30fps I think for the scenes.