Miscellaneous tips and discoveries

[Emor D'ni Lap]

This was my favorite thread that existed for years, accumulating some great tidbits of Max & Plasma lore...
until a couple years ago when the forum was plagued by spammers. One evening when I was rabidly cleaning out their junk posts,
I slipped up and included the entire original thread in an irreversible mass deletion.
Yes, I have a backup. But that backup is for the ENTIRE forum, and I'm not savvy enough to know how to restore just one thread.

So here will be a slow attempt to recreate that trove of tips.
I'll start with my newest finding.

[Emor D'ni Lap]

Material animations won't stop cycling?

My current Age project requires lighting changes. Since Plasma realtime lighting is expensive at game render time, and since RT lights are only applicable if the light's source or recipient is animated, lighting changes on static meshes are best done by animating values on the mesh objects' materials.

BUT doing this has plagued me for years: my materials would animate properly, but once started they would. not. stop.  - they would cycle endlessly. Didn't matter whether I'd un-ticked the material's "Loop" checkbox or not, didn't matter whether I added 'Stop Animation' or 'Set Looping Off' commands to the triggering responder.

Even Cyan had a problem with this: the KI-logo glow material in the Nexus is labeled KI-GlowStopLoopingDammit. (!)

Countless tests later (and a clue from Agebuilder Semjay), I came up with a workaround. But it was complex and tedious. More tests after that to pare down the workaround to something more efficient, and here's what I've learned - or what I've learned is true for me, at least: you may have entirely different results if you are using some other Max version.

Setting the responder's Material Animation to [Entire Animation]
   
in all cases either results in this error message when exporting
   
, or in some instances will export to a game where clickables produce a stack error when the responder executes.

However, if we 1) set the Material Animation to the material's named keys (as in your Note Track start and end points) exporting will produce the endlessly-cycling animation:
   

But NOW, that export seems to set some flag in Plasma for your Age file: if you then 2) revert to the [Entire Animation] setting(s), your export will complete without errors and your animated material will play properly, without cycling.

Weird. I think it's a bug. But it's not too difficult to get around, and this two-step process seems to work reliably.

[Emor D'ni Lap]

A few Camera tips:

As always: please forgive me if I'm stating the obvious, or telling you things you already know!

- When you're creating a new Camera for URU - even if it's to be a simple Auto camera where the avatar is pre-defined as the default Point Of Attention - it must be created as a Target Camera: otherwise Plasma export will complain about it and refuse to process it.

- If your new camera IS an Auto camera, or a First Person camera, you can place that camera and its Target in any convenient out-of-the-way location: in these instances the engine is ONLY looking for the settings you’ve established for the camera.

- Animated cameras are cool: they can set up a very cinematic mood in your Age, they can be great for establishing shots, for dropping a little hint for a puzzle clue or a teaser for what’s-to-come.
But: if you want music or sfx during your animation, remember that the in-game audio is NOT what the avatar hears...it’s what the camera hears!
So the trick is to create a specific emitter nearby your animated camera, then parent it to the camera. That way, your audio levels will remain consistent throughout the animation playback.

(of course, this pertains only to the single-player experience:
if you want all players in an area to hear the audio consistently, you may instead want to create a stationary emitter, set its Sound3D Falloff to high numbers, and then contain the sound within a Soft Region)

[Emor D'ni Lap]

Creating compound Soft Regions

(This is generally done for sound regions, and I'm going to assume you've already been successful in setting up a working sound region with an emitter)

I've heard a few times that Soft Regions must not have concavities: i.e. when seen from the inside they would not have any inward protrusions. So if you need your sound to go around any corners, or require your region to have any such irregular form, then you'll need to separate it into more basic shapes without concavities and join those using a Soft Region Union component.

Okay, so you now have at least two separate regions. You've set up Soft Region components on each of them. You already have your Sound Emitter working on one of these regions.

Now you create a new Soft Region Union component. You apply it to each of the two soft regions you've already created. In this new component, you now Add each of your two separate sound soft regions:
   
And you're done, right?

Nope!
It turns out that what you've essentially done is to create a NEW Soft Region that bundles two or more OTHER Soft Regions... even though it doesn't show as an object (in your Selection Floater, for instance). You now must go back to your sound emitter where you'd already selected the region it must emit to. In the Component Utility, remove that previous region you had applied and add your new Soft Region Union: this becomes the new region to which your emitter will emit!

[Emor D'ni Lap]

Semjay reports that she's used Soft Region Unions for lighting effects - and that the component works even when the regions are quite distant from one another!