Ultra Mode 7

[AdamSakuru]

@AdamSakuru
I don't really have a donation link, but if you want, you can send me money to my PayPal boris.blizzard@gmail.com . xD

AHAH!!!

...I always knew you were just a shill.
How could you stoop so low? Advertising your paypal on your own thread?!
(thanks for the link I'll send you some fun-funds soon. And thanks again for your awesome support.)

 

[bblizzard]

*is ashamed*

 

[BreakerZero]

@AdamSakuru Yes, I still have it on my TO-DO list. I was planning to make it so you can set a default color setup, you can setup an override on every map and you can change it dynamically on maps as you please. This would help people that change the map over time, e.g. a day-and-night system that needs to adapt the color.

I don't really have a donation link, but if you want, you can send me money to my PayPal boris.blizzard@gmail.com . xD

@BreakerZero If it's any consolation, driver updates often fix these issues. I played FFXV about half a year ago on my GTX 1060 laptop and it also had some weird issues which went away after I updated the driver on some point. My suggestion is (from professional experience) that you test the final build on the worst PC hardware configuration you can possibly find, preferably one that runs an integrated GPU and a weak CPU in general. Well, the actual best practice would be to test it on as many configurations as possible, but testing it just on a potato PC can be enough.

Oh BTW, I just remembered something that you should definitely check out. Back in the RMXP days some people would experience ridiculous performance issues for no apparent reason. Input would be dropped, lag would occur inconsistently, etc. Turns out their anti-virus was going haywire for some reason. Might be worth a try to disable your AV just to see if you have any positive results.

Other than that I suggest you just run the integrated profiler. It really helped me pinpoint the performance issues in UM7 which is actually how I found the memory leak bug in the default scripts.

I actually do this already - I just recently added an iMac for deployment expansion reasons which is a 2008 model year and by extension a low-end for testing. It's how I determined how I will approach macOS deployment and what I will use to package my game for Mac users.

I am also going to pull back from paid access plans for awhile to assess some additional possibilities for presentation that would be difficult to impossible without significant investment in a paid project (things like punctual moments set to relevant tracks, like an unexpected surprise cued in by that bit from Jaws or a stealth scene in the style of Mission: Impossible). Of course, even that may be pushing it from a presentation standpoint (due primarily to the legislative and financial logistics involved, and I'm no legal analyst nor practitioner to begin with) but I may still throw 'em ideas around for a proof of concept at the very least. For now I am going to drop paywall for testing the UM7 upgrade and go from there. (As for the "situation soundtrack" portion of this evaluation phase... well, that's obviously beyond the scope of this discussion. And it's not like I'm going to cheap trick off a Who Let the Dogs Out joke for the mere sake of it.)

Also forgot to mention this but I'm running off straight system defaults so the built-in defence runtimes are my only big concern right now (and since I'm exclusively targeting actively-supported Windows configurations - meaning nothing prior to Fall Creator's Update and definitely no 7/8 or earlier as a matter of policy - this is not a direct concern meaning that Windows Defender is already my baseline for this).

 

[Espilonarge]

So, I made a small thing...
View attachment 97382
They work just like fixed-direction events, so...
I suggest placing them without the mode7 effect and adding it after, because when placing them with the mode7 positioning gets a bit confusing.

I'm waiting for @bblizzard to make his plugin allow for non-standing events before I shamelessly copy it again for lower-layer doodads

I just wanted to bring up a new issue I ran in to regarding your plugin specifically.

Since bblizzard updated the plugin to allow "looping" on maps, it seems your plugin hasn't adapted this function properly as setting a map to loop horizontally (or both) will cause all doodads to disappear on the left side after a certain distance (tested in both my project and a new "test" project).

 

[bblizzard]

I think I know what I can do to fix that.

 

[Espilonarge]

Sorry to bring up another issue so soon after you started looking in to the one I just reported about but I just ran in to another performance issue situation (very similar to the one I reported about back some time ago to you bblizzard). It seems if a map is set to use looping (horizontal, vertical or both) while using an animated camera distance call (eg = UltraMode7.animateCameraDistance(300, 300)), it will cause the FPS to drop to single digit numbers. Once an animated camera call is finished however, performance returns to normal.

Tested in both my project and a new test project.

 

[bblizzard]

v1.3.3 is up. The fix isn't perfect and you have to be careful that your loopable maps aren't too small, but it should handle the most cases. 100% accurate calculation would have a bit of an impact on the CPU so I used a simpler solution, but it requires maps to be not too small.

@Espilonarge I mentioned this issue in the notes. Try using a higher value for LOOP_MAPS_EXTEND_TILES.

 

[BreakerZero]

Performance improved as well as I just noticed. The annoying delay that I had with the pause menu has also been resolved on my primary test system.

Well.... at least based on map size. If it's the full 256 tiles it's still got a small delay.

 

[bblizzard]

Lol, I have no idea how. I didn't really change much of the code. And the code I changed was just related to screenX and screenY coordinate calculation. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[BreakerZero]

Then scratch that. Updated my statement accordingly, seems it still has a thing about 256 max-size square maps after all.

 

[Espilonarge]

v1.3.3 is up. The fix isn't perfect and you have to be careful that your loopable maps aren't too small, but it should handle the most cases. 100% accurate calculation would have a bit of an impact on the CPU so I used a simpler solution, but it requires maps to be not too small.

@Espilonarge I mentioned this issue in the notes. Try using a higher value for LOOP_MAPS_EXTEND_TILES.

Sadly, it did not fix the issue that I mentioned. When I quoted Waterguy's post, I was referring to the plugin that adapts Yanfly's Grid-Free Doodad's to your plugin (not the events themselves) so until Waterguy can update their plugin, doodads will keep disappearing on the left-most side of the map (especially "larger" doodads that are around 128 pixels or more and it's far more noticeable the further back they are towards the maximum draw distance limit) and simply increasing the "LOOP_MAPS_EXTEND_TILES" setting will not affect Doodad's.

 

[bblizzard]

Aha, you're right about the doodads. I only fixed it for events. Yeah, the doodad script will need a custom fix for that. It probably has issues with looping maps when UM7 isn't used as well.

 

[Sushi_Witch]

I just made an account to ask this, but is there a way to fix the desyncronization between lightsource location(Terrax) and event location??
Example:

 

[bblizzard]

@Sushi_Witch I took a quick look at the script. I think the easiest way would be if the author of Terrax Lighting included a compatibility patch for Ultra Mode 7. It should be simple enough. Something like "if (UltraMode7)" with a "UltraMode.mapToScreen()" should do most of the trick.

 

[Espilonarge]

@Sushi_Witch I took a quick look at the script. I think the easiest way would be if the author of Terrax Lighting included a compatibility patch for Ultra Mode 7. It should be simple enough. Something like "if (UltraMode7)" with a "UltraMode.mapToScreen()" should do most of the trick.

This is pretty much the same issue I ran in to with Khas Ultra Lighting plugin as well (they're only designed for the X/Y coordinates on a 2D "flat" plane instead of an X/Y/Z 3D "Mode7" styled plane). Sadly neither Khas nore Terrax have been on the forums in the past several months and it may be difficult to get in contact with either of them about making a patch-plugin so it may require someone else having to do this.

I can manage without adding any lighting effects on Mode7 maps (as I've currently using them for just the intro and overworld maps) but if someone figures out how to make either plugin compatible, it would be very useful (especially at night time with towns on overworlds producing lights in the distance).

 

[bblizzard]

@Sushi_Witch @Espilonarge Tell you guys what. Put me a demo together where I can directly reproduce the issue and I'll put together a patch for both plugins.

 

[Espilonarge]

@Sushi_Witch @Espilonarge Tell you guys what. Put me a demo together where I can directly reproduce the issue and I'll put together a patch for both plugins.

I've cobbled a demo together of both Terrax's Lighting plugin (it includes Mogs TimeSystem plugin for time-testing purposes and compatibility) and Khas's Ultra Lighting plugin with the UltraMode7 plugin. Simply move around and you'll see that the "light source" will shift by the standard X/Y plane instead of utilizing UltraMode7's X/Y/Z styled plane where the "crystal" events are located (or to put it another way, the "light source" is acting like the map is still using a pitch value of "0" instead of "60" set in the Map Properties).

Terrax Version - https://www.dropbox.com/s/tow0t1dc7jid8ur/Terrax Ultramode7 Test.zip?dl=0

Khas Ultra Lighting Version - https://www.dropbox.com/s/y2ju6j20n7ge5i1/Khas Ultra Lighting Ultramode7 Test.zip?dl=0

PS - The reason why I made them separate demos is to avoid any compatibility issues between the two (both use different ways of generating lighting effects). I personally use Khas's plugin though as it provides the ability to use "images" as a light source rather than using MV's "Pixi" defined shapes that Terrax's plugin seems to use.

An example of Khas's plugin using "frosted rainbow glass" lighting.

 

[bblizzard]

Yes, I did mean separate demos. xD I'll take a look at it over the course of the next few days. Darksiders 3 just came out so I'm obviously a bit "busy". xD

 

[Kachiko]

I read through the last couple pages and haven't seen this mentioned, so I'd like to ask - would it be possibly as a future feature to...
let's say set an event up as a 'wall', and have that event turn along with map rotation?
So that the sprite would turn with it instead of directly facing the camera.
Sorry if this has been talked about already, and thanks for all the fixes! Super happy I checked in!

 

[cisba]

I read through the last couple pages and haven't seen this mentioned, so I'd like to ask - would it be possibly as a future feature to...
let's say set an event up as a 'wall', and have that event turn along with map rotation?
So that the sprite would turn with it instead of directly facing the camera.
Sorry if this has been talked about already, and thanks for all the fixes! Super happy I checked in!

I look forward to this, and the animated tilesets