B Info Scenes M&B BRF and mesh quirks Knowledge Base

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fisheye

The below are tips and info gleaned from many others' experiences as well as my own. Please post your info and I will add to the list.

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Avoid using pure black (0,0,0) in the alpha channel of any texture DDS; this causes the model not to render on certain GeForce models. Use a dark grey instead.

Meshes with the name meshnameXX where XX is a number are combined into one mesh "meshname" for display. This is to support multiple materials per mesh. Hence you can have thirsty_lion1 (a mesh with only the floor faces, using the floor material), thirsty_lion2 (a mesh with only the wall faces, using the wall material).

Convention for multiple different meshes for the same type of object is to add a letter to the name, e.g. hood_a, hood_b, hood_c...

Viewable meshes must be triangulated.

Collision manifolds need not be triangulated.

The material river_water does not seem to be transparent when applied to an object.

A typical "man-sized" collision capsule laid lengthwise can be "climbed over" : basically, it looks like the character is walking through it very slowly. Try it with a chair laid lengthwise with its back on the floor.

1 unit in M&B is approximately 1 metre in player-scale.

Characters can auto-step perpendicular surfaces up to 0.3 units in height (e.g. like going up a stairstep). 0.4 units is unsteppable, but jumpable.

If a surface is too narrow (less than 0.2 units wide?) it will be un-auto-steppable regardless of its height. For such surfaces, use a ramp as a collision definition.

If two objects have their faces too closely flush with each other (e.g. if you model a book on a table and a face of the book is *exactly* on the face of the table), and you define a collision manifold based on this, the game will assert an error (something like number of faces adjacent to an edge > 2). To prevent this, always leave a gap between faces if you're going to export them as a collision object. So either the book should hover slightly above the table or its bottom face should clip through the face of the table.

In an empty scene (e.g. if the .sco file is missing), the player always spawns at (0,0,0).

If there is a floor below the player's spawn location, the player spawns at floor level.

If there is no collision definition under the player's entry position, the game crashes with a "ground_quad" error.

For best shading effectiveness in indoor scenes, large faces close to a light source should be broken up in a radial pattern with the light source at the center.

Shadows are cast on collision manifolds, not view-meshes. For best shadowing, large faces on collision manifolds should also be broken up into subfaces radiating from light sources.
 
All stuff that's very useful to know. I don't have anything to add at the moment. Thorgrim, could you link to this in your sticky?
 
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