Can't click ethnicities

[cousteau]

There are some ethnicities which have a narrowed clickable zone, or no zone at all (or at least it's too hard for me to find it).
The Nordid one is only clickable around the neck, also the N-indid and the Aethiopid are not clickable on the upper part, and the Sudanid and Nilotid seem to be not clickable at all.
(Also, the Central Afro colored square looks a bit moved to the right)

[Manuel]

Weird...
are you using 16bit color mode?

Btw: Ethnic will use sliders in alpha5

[cousteau]

32 bits (at least that's what the Nvidia driver says). Nvidia GeForce2 MX/MX 400 (64 MB), 96.43.14 driver, using Ubuntu Jaunty 32 bits and the nightly .deb builds. Compiz is off.

Ethnicities look like in the attached image. Apparently, I can only click on the highlighted zone. I couldn't find that zone for the Nilotid and Sudanid.
It seems that the clickable zones aren't set properly.


About the new ethnicity tool, the best way to implement it would be with sliders and, if there are too many races, an "Add/Remove ethnicity" dialog so you only have the sliders for the used ones (specially if all fantasy morphs are implemented as races).
Also, for a more realistic result with less controls, I would separate the head modeling from the body modeling, so the body has few or none ethnic tools and the head has more complex tools such as ethnic brushes, expressions, hair...

In a more extreme attempt to reduce CPU usage, I would add an option to render the body model faceless, or with the face rendered as a 2D texture, and have a separate "head tool" with only the head rendered.

[cousteau]

Got the problem!

Examining the data/3dobjs/button_*.obj (africa, america, asia, europe) files, I noticed that the maps are in 3D format, that they all contain a "dummy" button the size of all the map, that each ethnicity has its own button, and that both the dummy button and the ethnicity buttons have a Z-coordinate (towards the screen) of 0.000000.
This makes the ethnicity buttons and the dummy button be in the same plane. Add some rounding errors (stuff that might depend on each one's graphics card) and you'll get a button behind the dummy button, or with part in front of it and another part behind it.
The solution: change the Z-coordinate of the dummy button to 0.010000 (or all the ethnicity buttons to -0.010000). Negative values push to front, positive ones move to bottom.

BTW, open the buttons_america.obj file, there's a funny thing with the buttons names there...

[cousteau]

...so, instead of fixing this, you have just removed the ethnicity tool. Great
now that I had found out what the problem was...
Well, I guess this means a better ethnicity tool will be developed in the near future. I vote for a simple one in the "General" tab and a more complex one (with Earth maps, brushes and the like) in the "Head" tab (there's no such tab yet, but I'd like to see it).

[mflerackers]

If you would have read the commit message in which we removed it you would have seen that we are reimplementing the ethnics since they don't work very well with the new detail morphs. Also the way to change ethnics was not user friendly. They will be back in alpha 6.

[cousteau]

Well, indeed, it wasn't user friendly. A drag-and-drop thing would be better.

It's a pity that it has been delayed for alpha-6 and not alpha-5... this ethnicity thing seems to be complicated to solve. Take your time and make a good tool, this isn't a race (no pun intended).

BTW, all other milestones for a5 are already at 100%, does this mean that alpha-5 is out?

[mflerackers]

Not out yet, but it will be very soon.