Ryandor.com

Okay... after much trial and tribulation, I have finally gotten WolfPack to successfuly compile on Slackware linux...

I had to throw that in there first, because I'm fairly proud of myself. It was a pain in the arse.


Here's a good question though. Did the Orbsydia tools completley blow Dragon out of the water?

I guess I've been out of the loop long enough that I'm not really sure all of what Orbsydias tools do better than Dragon does now.

So can someone maybe give me a hint?

Is Dragon worth using anymore?

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Better Deader

I think a lot of people still use Dragon, and a lot of people do not like Orbysidia? that is the general feeling I get.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

I use Dragon for 2 reasons. 1. It works and the instructions are excellent and 2. My pc is old: I simply don't have the processing oomph to compile with UOLandscaper.

As I understand it, UOL is a very real time saver. *shrugs*

Orbsydia recently removed the files from public download. I'm not sure what that was about. And they may already be back up. I have received assistance here when I asked questions. Not so much on Orbsydia. That's my two cents.

Punt disliked them enough to remove his tools...

http://www.ryandor.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 4602#14602

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

Syd, you forgot to plug SMC

UOL isn't punt; it's Orb, more specifically DKnight. It is still being worked on, although they've been promising version 2 for quite some time now, it will be out eventually and it does sport some impressive improvements over Dragon.

punts latest tool I haven't had a chance to look at, but I think we all know of punts programming skills and I would expect this one to be of the same high quality as the other tools he has released.

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This space for rent.

I no longer support SMC (or any of my other UO-related tools). Lack of interest combined with some mild legal issues caused me to take them down. Nobody was willing to feed my ego early in the development, so I had no motivation to improve them, and so the fancy GUI do-everything-in-one-quick-step version was only ever half-finished. Punt is taking my place pretty quickly, and doing a better job (he knows a hell of a lot more about C++ than I did when I originally wrote those tools).

Oh, and I was not trying to imply there was any connection between Orb and punt ? I just used him as an example of someone not liking that site to back what I said earlier.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

To generate maps there is a pretty common workflow, that has a variety of tools available.

Initial map -
Create an image to be converted into a map. Tools available for this function: Dragon, UOL, or WorldMaker Map Generator (although it utilizes UOL transistion files).

Create Structures or region decocarations for incoperation into a map (such as a dungeon, house, etc). Tools available for structure generation: UOAR, HouseBuilder or WorldMaker Multi. Note: House builder and UOAR editors are focused on buildings. There are some restrictions incoperated into the editor due to that context.

Incoperation into the map generation step tool (placing structures onto the image of your map for inclusion into the generation): WorldMaker MLT Placer and WorldMaker Map Generator.

Edit a mul formatted map: WorldForge or WorldMaker Map Editor.

Incorperation of structures previously generated into a map via an editing step: UOAR (RUNUO Only), HouseBuilder (via multi.txt mul patchers), WorldMaker Map Editor (mlt data formats, other formats will require UOAR Extractor).


As for Orbsydia, my personal reasons for removal of my tools was based on my realization that Orbysida is more focussed on fawining of its UOAR and UOL tools, and secondary solving user problems. But that does not reflect on the capability or quality of tools Orbsydia creates, either good or bad.

Nah...Orb stinks!

Actually the multi house tool thingy was pretty cool and I do use it though its a bitch to figure out all the shortcut keys since they never inclosed any instructions...

SMC worked good Syd, I just found it to late in the game. By the time I realized what it was and how to use it I was pretty much through my map making frenzy...

I havent tried any of Punts new toys even though I downloaded the new worldforge a while back and have been meaning to give it a test but real life is keeping me so busy I'm luck if I have time to keep my own site up to date but its a good kinda real life busy, helping Vets and other not for profits which I love. Now that winter is here and the riding season is over I can get back to playing more.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

With so few UO emulation sites on which you can actually carry on a decent conversation, I'm personally glad there are sites like Orb and Ryandor around.

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-= HellRazor =-
Shattered Sosaria is coming!
http://www.shatteredsosaria.com

LOL

I think you might be confused Punt, I actually have been around the game for quite some time now. I was a former frequenter of these boards quite often. I think it's safe to say I've added my 2 cents on everything around the time I was here.

I used to post as Nazgel, but I had Ryandor change it to Nezgruhel because everyone kept confusing my handle with Nazgul... from LoTR. And while I like LoTR, ever since the movies it seems like every fan boy on the face of the planet has assumed I got my handle from J.R.R Tolkien... when in fact I invented the handle when I was quite young, before I ever even knew anything about LoTR.

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Better Deader

BTW, I wanted to add, I've used your tools alot in the past, the ones listed on punt's toolbox. Very nice.

Are you currently building something for initial map generation? Is WorldMaker your tool?

If so are you able to grab it from your website?

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Better Deader

That has happened to me twice now. First with ?Syris the Virus? and now with ?Darth Sydius?? While ?Sydius? is not the correct spelling, it sounds phonetically correct, and I get many hits to my web sites because of people looking for Star Wars stuff.

I also came up with the whole ?we are inside a computer? idea way before the Matrix. I loved telling people that theory; I thought it was clever and somewhat cool, but now that the movies came out, everybody just starting thinking I am a crazed fan of nerdy action movies. The movies were fine as far as movies go, but they ruined that whole idea for me, even more so by the number of flaws and added dramatic effect.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

Yeah, I know the LOTR problem, I suffer from it myself.
Gandalf is referred to as Gandalf Stormcrow only 1 stinkin time by the King of Rohan. Even in the books, which I read not so long ago, just 1 time and all of a sudden every fanboy wants to be Stormcrow. I actually picked it up from MW2, was my favorite mech and when I moved on into Meridian59 I thought it sounded like a good fantasy name.

Anyway, we are getting way off topic here...before some moderator comes and yells at us or something... ...oh wait, I am a moderator, nm...

I just got an email that we are getting a sneak peak at UOL2, while Khaybel does love to make a lot of hype about everything I would imagine it means we might actually get UOL2 sometime soon.

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This space for rent.

Ooo I loved MechWarrior! Stormcrows were good for running circles around the large junkers and cutting the legs out from under them

Yes I digress...but hey! Its what I'm good at!

My name has never been confussed with anything so thats not a problem.

As for UOL2 I never managed to get UOL1 working so have no idea what it even looks like.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

UOL actually does a lot more than Dragon, using 2 images gives you all the terrain groups you could want and potentially every terrain in every altitude (although to make the altitude map intelligible DK split it into 4 groups of 64). Having the capability to do 3-way (or more) transitions lets you do more complicated things (like caves).

Unfortunately it is a memory hog and map0 is impossible to compile, even with a gig of RAM. It works quite nicely for the smaller maps though.

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This space for rent.

SMC did that, but with a true-color image for the tiles (limitless). Compiled map0.mul in about 45 seconds on a 1Ghz with 128MB RAM. *plug after all*

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

I am confused , but by the response. I did not mean to imply any indication of depth of experience or not. I was mearly providing a summary of "current" tools available for the various parts of the workflow of map creation.
It was not intended to indicate anyones experience or lack there of. I am not sure what the reference to adding 2 cents is in context of my response.

http://www.ragedcom.com/punt one can get the current version of all my tools in the WorldMaker suite. The mapgenerator is dependent on UOL transistion files, but can compile a complete map0 size map in about 12 mintues and never exceed 80 mb resource utilization.

Mine kept both images and the map in RAM. Even on 128MB, though, it was very fast to do this, because the paging mechanism in Windows does a decent job.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

This keeps the two images in memory (but they are 8 bit, I haven't successfully seen windows open them on my system as 32 bit images).

At any rate, 45 seconds is rather impressive. I have been unable to write to a map and static file (including index) for a map 0 size in that time (when sectioned as trunks).

In terms of capability, MapGenerator pretty much mimics UOL in terms of capability.

Really? Well, I dumped it from RAM in one fwrite. I did not use streams, though I did experiment with filemapping. Filemapping is slower if creating the file, faster if only changing it. The key with large files, though, is to dump them in one operation, not a series.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

Yea, I am well versed in caching and writing operations. I toyed with different sized, but again, if one saved the entire map0.mul and static mul in memory, along with the image (4096*6XXX *2 (alt and terrain)) would easily exceeded my memory restrictions I put on myself (80 mb usage).

Anyway, I found the total processing time to be acceptable and usable, and its memory usage with the limits I wanted (along with sharing, I have waits where I release and allow windows to process other events).

Why the memory restriction? Certainly, the expense in page flipping is much less than the extra time it takes to do it in chunks. Virtual memory in Windows is pretty darn fast, and most people have at least 128MB of actual memory these days.

As for sharing, my console-based versions didn't, but then, I figured a minute of selfish hogging was okay. The un-released GUI versions used threads and did play nicer? I was playing around with thread priorities and things like that (both with the Win32 API threads, and some other thread libraries), but never learned enough to make it both play nice and run very fast.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

Ah, sorry for the confusion. I just though maybe I had come across as a total noob. I was just trying to clarify it if that was the case.

Sorry if I offended you. I wasn't trying to.

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Better Deader