Peer Review

The Tutorial

This is my Research Task submission for BENV2423. In this tutorial you will learn how to create a custom sky box, and in this example I am making an entirely white environment. In this tutorial I also explore some of the Time of Day settings which affects the skybox and may give you the results you want for your environment.

PLEASE VIEW IN HD!


TUTORIAL SUBJECT (500 Words):

With technology changing and improving every day, there are plenty of definite gaps in the so-called ‘body of knowledge’ that will no doubt be eventually filled as users become more familiar with the software available to them and begin to find limitations and possibilities that the software presents.

However, because these updates and new versions come out so regularly, there is no way even a single person could know how to use every single tool in a program; there are updated versions so regularly that by the time a person was to understand how to use every tool and know every possibility that the software offers there would already be a new version out that users would have questions about how to use.

This is why there is a great need for users themselves to create tutorials (which had indeed been recognised on sites such as youtube) for things they have figured out about the software. It is much more helpful when users create tutorials because they know more than anyone what other users will be wanting to do with the software, much more than buying a book about the program or typing a question into the ‘help’ menu. This is particularly true with software like the Crysis Wars Sandbox 2 Editor that we have been working with this year.

When working with Sandbox this semester I found a few gaps but the thing I found most difficult and most interesting was how to make a custom skybox and a completely white environment; mostly because I had to deal with several different aspects of the editor to achieve this goal and the end result was very rewarding and interesting to walk around in.

I only found one tutorial on how to make a custom skybox on the internet at this website: http://www.incrysis.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=25675, but it was not all that helpful as it also included downloading 2 or 3 extra programs or plugins to get the right file type, etc. But I figured out that because it is possible to export objects from Sketchup with its textures, that plugin must create the .dds file that Sandbox needs to recognise it as a texture. Then I managed to figure out my own simpler process for creating this file. Then because this was not supposed to be a normal-looking sky and I did not want a horizon line I had to figure out how to get rid of it using the Time of Day settings menu, and I still don’t know how to stop it from going to the default setting each time I open up the environment.

The tutorial I created is easy to understand, though made for intermediate to advanced users because of the work in the file path of the Cysis Wars folder, but because I explained things clearly and relatively slowly I think any type of user would have no trouble with it.

Porosity Video

This is my video for BENV2423 Experiment 2 submission. The video depicts my porosity lens for this project, explored through the use of a completely white environment, like a blank canvas, and also through an installation.

PLEASE VIEW IN HD!

Please view earlier post for Porosity Concept!

Filefront and Google Warehouse Uploads

http://www.filefront.com/17478238/z3333620_Exp2_Levels.zip

http://www.filefront.com/17478243/z3333620_ObjectsExp2.zip

http://www.filefront.com/17478380/z3333620_SketchupModels.zip

Controls:
turn on spawn- k
turn off spawn- l

INSTALLATION MODEL: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=3bd8cee840d2658b55e2bc328da57bb3&result=4

SPAWN BOX MODEL: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=171fb7f7ce096de655e2bc328da57bb3&result=4

Video Tutorial Ideas and Research

For my video tutorial I will be showing how to make an environment white like I have for my assignment submission.
I had a lot of trouble understanding why simply changing the colour of the sky in the Time of Day option in the editor did not work, and later found that to change the colour of the sky you have to use images of particular size and names. The best site I found about this was http://www.incrysis.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=25675.
However, it talks about downloading a plugin for Photoshop to make the .dds format that is required by Sandbox to use the texture. I had to find a way to save an image from Photoshop as .dds, and I downloaded a plugin for Photoshop to do this and that did not work, after a while Andrew and I discovered that if you simply save it as a .tiff in Photoshop and then the Crysis folder automatically creates the .dds image when you paste this .tiff image in there.
So I had to edit this person's written tutorial to suit my needs and also had to play around with settings in the Time of Day option such as 'Volumetric Fog'.

Appropriate Song Selection for Documentary

These are the songs I narrowed it down to for my documentary:
- Never Know (Jack Johnson)
- The Scientist (Coldplay)
- Clocks (Coldplay)
- Upside Down (Jack Johnson)
- Let Me Take You There (Plain White T's)

And I listened to these with my Porosity Lens in mind and the one that spoke to me most in relation to my concept was Upside Down.

Here are the lyrics for Upside Down by Jack Johnson:

Who's to say
What's impossible
Well they forgot
This world keeps spinning
And with each new day
I can feel a change in everything
And as the surface breaks reflections fade
But in some ways they remain the same
And as my mind begins to spread its wings
There's no stopping curiosity

I want to turn the whole thing upside down
I'll find the things they say just can't be found
I'll share this love I find with everyone
We'll sing and dance to Mother Nature's songs
I don't want this feeling to go away

Who's to say
I can't do everything
Well I can try
And as I roll along I begin to find
Things aren't always just what they seem

I want to turn the whole thing upside down
I'll find the things they say just can't be found
I'll share this love I find with everyone
We'll sing and dance to Mother Nature's songs
This world keeps spinning and there's no time to waste
Well it all keeps spinning spinning round and round and

Upside down
Who's to say what's impossible and can't be found
I don't want this feeling to go away

Please don't go away
Please don't go away
Please don't go away
Is this how it's supposed to be
Is this how it's supposed to be

"Who's to say, what's impossible"
Questions the way we view spaces in society, and refers to Porosity Lens being plausible way to view it
"I can feel a change in everything"
This Porosity Lens may just change the way movement in space is investigated and portrayed
"But in some ways they remain the same"
But in some ways this way of viewing movement is not revolutionary, we are just able to use new technology
"And as my mind begins to spread its wings, There's no stopping curiosity"
Because of technology we must open our minds to new possibilities and new ways of thinking about space and my Porosity Lens
"I want to turn the whole thing upside down"
I am going to turn the way people think about this topic 'upside down'
"I'll find the things they say just can't be found"
My Porosity Lens finds ways to observe and portray movement in space in ways that may seem inappropriate, but I will make it appropriate
"Things aren't always just all they seem"
There is always a new way to look at things, not just the conventional way, and showing the memory of movement as spawned objects looks like it's just objects but it is really movement. It is not what it seems!


Here is a video testing this song with my environment:

Custom Installation

I have now replaced the metal fences from the Sandbox Databases I was using as ramps with my own custom made models from Sketchup, and did the same with the platforms that make the levels in the installation.
This time though I decided that it would be better to be able to see the platforms rather than have to guess where you can and cannot walk, so I made the platforms white with the opacity at 50% so that they are see through and when the result of the Porosity Lens (the spawning) is viewed from above for example, none of the entities are hidden by the installation.
When developing this custom installation and modifying it from the original installation I decided to make it on a much larger scale to allow for more varied experimentation with my Porosity Lens. Here I simply duplicated the small custom installation and made it several (96) times the size as it was originally as this model was quite limiting to the player's movement.





The image above shows the result of the spawning of entities as the properties were set before: colour as black and opacity at 20%. But viewing this in the new scene and with the Custom Installation I decided that it does not have as large an impact as it needs to have, and it could be better if the opacity was not so low.
So, I changed the opacity to 100% and tested this out, and decided that I do not need opacity to show the density of the entities that are being spawned because they are at a random rotation and size, so it shows the density by itself.
This is an image of the result of these changes:



I think these changes I made to the entities being spawned make the contrast much larger between the environment/installation and the Porosity Lens.

ReDesigned Environment

Since the grass distracted from the spawning objects, and the environment does not play an important part in my Porosity Lens concept, I decided to change the texture to 'snow' and make the sky white. Changing the colour of the sky proved to be more difficult than expected as there is not a lot of information about it out there, so I am considering using this for my Research Assignment.
I have also realised that it is hard to understand how the installation works when I have made the platforms in it see through using the "cloak" function on them. So I have decided to change this for the custom installation so that people other than me who want to test out the Porosity Lens in my environment can understand where they can and cannot walk on each platform in my installation, but still not distract from what is being spawned and the actual essence of the Porosity Lens.

Here are some images of what my environment looks like when the objects are spawned after I changed the textures:


I think that this white 'canvas' helps to emphasize my Porosity Lens and the result of it.



This is a video depicting the result of my experimentation with a completely white environment (including the sky) in order to portray my Porosity Lens more clearly.

Developing Porosity Lens and Sketch Installation

Here I have changed the colour of the archetype object I am spawning so that it is not the same as the sketch installation. This will make it stand out better from the structure, and I have also set the opacity of the archetype to 20% so that it is more obvious when the player has stayed in one place for a long time as the density of the objects will be greater.
However I have noticed that it is quite difficult to see the spawned archetype because the grass distracts your eye.

Sketch Installation

Ideas on Sketch Installation:
- it could be like a platform for the local player to run around on and just be simply 'used' to demonstrate my porosity lens
- it could be an obstacle course with different pathways that could be taken so that perhaps there are choices that can be made by the local player and the spawning will never be the same twice
- it could be the obstacles
- it could be both just a platform for demonstrating the porosity lens and also partly obstacle and visually pleasing (or perhaps purposely visually not-pleasing)
- could create an enclosed environment, therefore limiting the local player's movement, but also allowing the porosity lens to be examined in another way

The sketch installation is made completely from a slightly modified version of this part of the required Town Hall model and is repeated to create the installation.

This is the original version of the part of the Town Hall model.


This is the slightly modified version. I took off the part sticking out from the left side and I copied the top bar to the bottom to make more of a box shape. This is the beginning of my installation.





I have now added ramps using elements I found in the Props folder of the Sandbox2 databases, and also added platforms to make levels in my installation, but so that it does not distract from the objects being spawned and my Porosity Lens itself, I have activated the "cloak" function so that they are invisible. I have left the ramps visible however as I think it is important to be able to see the elements that cause certain patterns in the spawning of objects in my environment.







This video depicts my sketch installation to show what it looks like when the local player moves around inside it and uses it as a platform for spawning objects but also limits the player's movement significantly.



This video shows the local player walking around the environment again but this time you can see the player as he moves which helps the viewer to understand the way the spawning is working in the environment and view what is happening from more of a third person view rather than being the player and seeing it first hand as the player.

Mastered Flowgraph Node

The node that I have been working with most this semester is the Entity: SpawnArchetype (among others that are needed to work certain functions of this node. I have added my custom model as the archetype and modified the flowgraph to make a key trigger whether the archetype is spawning or not (by spawning them somewhere that cannot be seen). This video shows mastery of the spawn node because it shows that I understand how the node works as I have set properties like scale and rotation to my specifications, and added a way of turning the spawning on and off.

Progress with Spawn Archetype Node

Here I have added my custom made object as the archetype and tested out how the flowgraph is working with this new addition:

Porosity Lens

I found reviewing Antony Gormley's works and his concepts increasingly intriguing (and relevant to my investigation into Porosity) as I dove further into it, as he has spent the last 25 years investigating "the body as a place of memory and transformation". This got me thinking that if the body stores memory, then surely the best way to investigate the interaction between body and place is to somehow 'store' this information by leaving behind a trace of the movement of the body, and therefore transforming the 'place'.

"Spawn" supposedly means "an operating function that executes a child process", and when looking up the term "Lens" I found a meaning that, like in the case of 'spawn', has a significant (yet entirely metaphorical) connection with this experiment; this being the use of the "Corrective Lens" which is for "the correction of human vision". I see a strong link here to my Porosity Lens, in that when the local player moves around the environment and these "children" are spawned it creates a new way of understanding how a person moves through an environment; not just by seeing them move through it and watching them slow at certain junctions, but viewing the 'results' of this as an object itself with a property such as density showing the types of movement that occurred. Viewing this movement as an object also relates back to Gormley's work in an interesting way as he explores the body as a place rather than an object and I plan to explore how the body moves around a place and use objects to portray this movement.


References:
http://www.russelllowe.com/benv2423_2010/experiment2/brief/brief_exp2.htm
http://www.whitecube.com/artists/gormley/(quote above about Antony Gormley's work from this site)
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/spawn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens

Porosity (Lecture Stuff)

Can Porosity be represented in real time? What should a representation look like?

"the public space of the city doesn't end at the building envelope; any mixed building requires access by the public and is necessarily prous."

The porousness of a building relates to the ease by which a building might be accessed and evacuated; the irony here is that high levels of porousness would seem to facilitate both.

In video games we are not restricted by materiality, translucent, overlaying is more opaque, a hybrid of the additive and subtractive methods: what it should look like.

Research for Research Assignment

3D Ripper DX:

I would like to use this plugin for the research assignment to try and somehow 'save' the objects/scenes I create while in the game in Crysis, as when you press esc it is all gone. This plugin is compatible with 3DS Max 2009 and 3DS Max [Design] 2010, 2011. For this I will need to use 3DS Max Design of some kind as it seems that I cannot get the file for 3DS Max 2009 anymore.

Supposedly 3D Ripper DX will allow me to:

- capture all geometry, textures and shaders, rendered during single frame

- import captured geometry into 3D Studio Max

- see what exactly has been drawn by each individual draw call

- see renderstate, textures, vertex streams, index stream, vertex declaration, vertex and pixel shaders (including HLSL source code if available) of each individual draw call

I will be keeping an eye on the forum for this program also, hopefully there will be someone trying to use this program with Crysis or something similar, as I am not sure that it will even work with this program!

http://www.deep-shadows.com/hax/3DRipperDX.htm

Ideas for Experiment 2 and Porosity

Originally, my idea was going to be about creating an environment according to how the local player acts and moves around. My idea was that I would make a grid or flat boxes and I would walk around on them in the game, and the longer I stood on them, the less they would scale. So, if I was to run around fast across the boxes they would grow really tall because I hardly spent any time standing on them. This would investigate Porosity according to public and private space. The areas a run over fast and do not linger become/are shown as private space, non-accessible, unwelcoming. The areas I spent a long time in (the accessible areas) would then form a pathway through the 'city' and would perhaps be defined as pubic and 1-hour spaces, like Richard Goodwin is exploring.


After running this idea past tutor Andrew Wallace, however, we decided that it was not a good idea to have an environment that changes in the game, as if I ran through this and boxes shot up on the y-axis because I did not stand on them, then no other player/AI would be able to contribute to the shaping of the environment, so this idea was really very limiting.

I am now experimenting with Spawning objects that I custom make in Sketchup (that are similar to shapes that Antony Gormley uses in the works in the post below), that will hopefully each have a random rotation and random scaling on each axis. When I am in a place for a long time, more will spawn so the density will increase, and this will be shown easily as the objects will have a certain transparency to them. I am also planning on investigating the program 3D Ripper DX, which should allow me to save/capture the shape made by the local player as I move around the environment. This video shows the beginnings of this but using a clock (from Archetype Entities, Props in the editor):



These are the models I have been working on that were inspired by Antony Gormleys sculpture series' Framer and Aperture:

Antony Gormley Research

I would like to spawn objects as part of my assignment, and after looking at some of Antony Gormley's work I have decided that I would like to incorporate some of his concepts and the shapes he uses into the objects I will be spawning. I was particularly interested in the APERTURE and FRAMER sculpture series', and his exploration of the body through new kinds of structural complexity.

The FRAMER works refer to the "masses discovered within the total body volume", and use architectural volumes to describe and extend the body.



The aim of the APERTURE works is to "turn the body into an open framework of tetrahedral, cubic, dodecahedral and more complex polygons", and the outer edges of the works seemingly "grasp the air and indicate, in the metaphorical sense, the moment in which a body opens itself to the space around it".



Gormley states: "My work has always explored the body as a place rather than an object", and this is interesting for our experiment brief because I would like to explore how the body moves around a place and explore the ways in which I can use architectural volumes and masses to portray this movement.
I plan to use the types of volumes that Gormley uses in his FRAMER works in particular as the objects that are to be spawned as I (local player) move around the environment. This will be the beginnings of my Porosity Lens.

I have visited many of Antony Gormley's Exhibitions in the UK, including 'Event Horizon', and more recently 'Another Place' which I visited in June this year with my family.


(it was a pretty horrible English day!)

S.W.A.T Analysis

entity:ProximityTrigger (from Turn Light On When Player Gets Close Flowgraph)

Strengths: has lots of inputs and outputs, so can be enabled and disabled and can also enable and disable other parts of the flowgraph and nodes.

Weaknesses: limited in terms of using it to trigger things from far away as it will only work when player is on top of it in the game.

Opportunities: easy to use for things like lights that turn on when you get close to them, or move an entity when you get close to it (really anything to do with being within a certain range of the entity in question).

Threats: good to trigger things with, but if too many are used they might overlap and then the movements might not work as intended originally.

Entity:SpawnArchetype (from Spawn Entity as Local Player Moves Around)

Strengths: can spawn any archetype (and make custom models archetypes to use), has many inputs that relate to properties of the archetype (pos, scale and rot) and has outputs that can be used for when the task of spawning is completed or when it has failed.

Weaknesses: had to download plugin system which meant I had to make a mod and a new level too, have to link quite a few more nodes to specify settings for properties and things like time between each spawning, requires moderate knowledge about flowgraphs and how nodes work together.

Opportunities: this will be a useful node to use for showing where a player has moved by spawning objects according to the player's position, leaving behind a pathway of objects like footprints.

Threats: could potentially go wrong if did not know how to make mod version and levels, a bit complicated to install, a bit complicated to turn custom model into an archetype to get the name to type next to 'archetype' in the node settings.

Entity:EntityPos (from Scale Entity as AI Moves Around It)

Strengths: can easily assign entity by right-clicking for selected entity, many outputs with lots of properties that can be set using other nodes, input 'get' which finds assigned entity's position, good for moving objects/players/AIs.

Weaknesses: needs a lot of extra nodes to link to in order to actually set or use any properties of the entity in some way.

Opportunities: can use this to find player's position in the game and when the flowgraph 'gets' the players position I can use this to assign the spawned object/archetype its position.

Threats: if don't understand the communication enough between nodes this node will be useless because it requires some other nodes in order for the position of the input entity to mean anything in the game.

Three FlowGraph Nodes

Make AI Walk Towards Tag Point and Do Action:
This tutorial is from http://www.veoh.com/search/videos/q/sandbox/offset/40/searchId/9e96e75bb22461d76d60e24aa9dd1b70#watch%3Dv17308205SRsWdN2E (accessed 22/9/10)
Here are some screenshots of the flowgraphs I created. (THIS NODE IS NOT ONE I AM CONSIDERING, IT WAS JUST TO START OFF WITH FLOWGRAPHS SO IS NOT INCLUDED IN MY 3 CHOSEN ONES!, AND WILL NOT BE ANALYSED BY S.W.A.T)
For my action I made the AI walk to the tag point and Salute.
This one was the new AI action flowgraph:

This one was the one that is connected to the AI itself:


This is a screenshot of what the set-up looks like in the editor:


This video shows the result of the flowgraphs together:





Light Turn On When Player Gets Close, and Then Turn Off:
Here is a screenshot of the flowgraph I used for this:
I used the Proximity Trigger so that when the player is close to the light, the light will turn on, and when the player is not close anymore, the light will turn off again after 1 second.



Here is a screenshot of what this set-up looks like in the editor:
I used a custom model for this example as when I was first testing out if the flowgraph was working it was hard to see if the light was turning on because you could only see a small change on the terrain floor.





Spawn Entity as Player Moves Around:

I had to download the plugin system for Crysis to get this node (Entity: SpawnArchetype). The flowgraph shown below depicts the node working so that when the game starts, every 0.05 seconds the position of the local player is checked and a chosen archetype is spawned in the position of the player (in this case I chose bananas).

Here is a video of the results of this flowgraph. I plan on investigating the possibilities of this flowgraph in more detail for the assignment.



Scale Entity as AI Moves Around It:
For this flowgraph I used the Entity:EntityPos node for my flowgraph in particular as this allowed me to use the scale input for scaling the basic entity as the AI moves around. This video shows my progress on testing scaling when working with AIs and entities. I had planned to expand on this and use this particular node in my final assignment. However, I am now planning on spawning objects instead.
I got the flowgraph from this blog in my tutorial group: http://terrencewong2423.blogspot.com/ (thank you!). I am interested in finding out more about this node and how I can use scaling in my assignment.
Here is my flowgraph for this node:

Re-arranging and Investigating Town Hall Model

This is the Town Hall model without the long flat components (I am assuming these are the tracks?) and I like the model this way as it is repetitive and plain, so then I will be able to add my own models to it easily and they will stand out more. I would like to use this model as a sort of 'grid' for how the city I build might be arranged.


This is the Town Hall model untouched, in its original form.

Here I lifted the layers from inside the model and put them above the main frame, and then angled the longest components at 30 degrees to make a strange shape. With the angles I am thinking about testing out making a more Tipi-looking building perhaps, but maybe that would only be created when the player moves towards the components. This might be an interesting thing to continue investigating.
This is what the Town Hall model looks like with all those horizontal components having been moved to above the main frame.
This is just one of the components of the main frame.

This is a shot looking through the main frame, which I found interesting as it shows the shape of the structure to be very repetitive and square, when really we can see from the single component of this main frame above that it is not all that repetitive and contains many different sized rectangles. It is however, a very strong shape.

Investigating AI

After watching a few tutorials on youtube, I can see that it is quite hard to distinguish videos that just make the AI do something using AI points and navigation, and ones that use flow graphs.

Making Terrain

Terrain Ideas

http://image10.webshots.com/11/4/87/60/130448760AoOoHU_ph.jpg
This image I found is interesting as it shows a kind of mountainous range, but it is really made up of a series of valleys, as the mountains are flat on the top. There are also some interesting textures.




http://www.beachwallpapers.in/wallpaper/Sandy-Cay-Caribbean-beach/
I like this landscape as it is quite simple and wont distract from what is the real issue in the video I will make for this assignment. It is also quite limiting though, as it would be quite hard to use the landscape in any way in my research as it would really only be flat land with some texture on it. It is very attractive and simple though.



http://www.wizardnet.com/musgrave/cool2.jpg
This is my favourite of the three landscapes as it combines water and mountains, without using the beach concept. I like how these mountains seem to just appear out of the water and the landscape is very harsh and dynamic.

Research

Information about categories of nodes, and general information about what flow graphs can be used for found here:

http://doc.crymod.com/SandboxManual/frames.html?frmname=topic&frmfile=contents.htmlThis is from the EXP2 brief:

Note: In simple terms a Porosity Lens is a way to understand peoples navigation through an environment. A key aspect is that it takes into account how long people spend at certain places. This reflects on the public/private nature of those places. The use of the term 'lens' in Porosity Lens is metaphorical; in other words instead of using a glass lens to focus rays of light into an image (as is the case in a literal lens) students in BENV2423 are using flowgraph nodes to focus information to create a real-time interactive environment.

Flowgraphs don't exist in a vacuum; depending on the students concept they will need to link/embed flowgraphs in objects, spaces, vehicles, characters that in some cases will need to be custom designed and built in SketchUp.

Porosity According to Richard Goodwin:

Porosity: the revision of public space in the city using public art to test the functional boundaries of built form. - Richard Goodwin."The marginality of public art makes it ideally suited to the task of commenting on or contradicting the main body of the text of public space in the city. This contradiction is central to the work of this thesis.""It can be argued that the social construction of a city is as important as its physical manifestation as buildings."

Information above is from website: http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/unsworks:1616#datastreamsView (accessed 22/9/10)"Pores are minute openings in a surface through which fluids may pass. To be porous is to be full of pores. Porosity is the state or quality of being porous.""... it has been possible to create images of 'what a building desires' to do next or how it might connect to other structures. In so doing, the designer can accelerate the flux of architecture. This flux or viral growth is or has been to date inevitable, but so slow that the public do not detect it.""The study claims parts of private space in the city as types of public space, and then sets about to catalogue, characterise and test these spaces through public art.""Central to my belief is the following measure: 'If one can visit a toilet adjoining a corridor leading from the lift lobby at level X of building Y and stay within that space comfortably for one hour then that constitutes a one hour public space'. In other words, the city is full of spaces of transition, connection and bodily comfort, which have yet to be claimed or classified as types of public space within the city. Clues lie within the networks of these spaces for what cities might become.""This three-dimensioning of public space enables the possibility of both more public space opportunities and also access to valuable facilities...""Porosity also seeks to engage in the continual flux or state of becoming which constitutes the edge condition of architecture now and architecture in the future.""The aim... is to accelerate the process of making public space by re-negotiating corridors of private space, which facilitates 'the public' on its journey from public to final private destination space."
Information above is from website: http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/vital/access/services/Download/unsworks:1616/SOURCE02?view=true (accessed 22/9/10)


THESE ARE SOME NODES I HAVE BEEN EXPLORING WHILE MAKING MY FIRST FLOWGRAPHS:Game:LocalPlayer
This node outputs the local players entity id, and there are no inputs on this node.


Misc:Start
This node is called when the engine is initialized.
InGame Port: Start will Trigger in PureGameMode
InEditor Port: Start will Trigger in EditorGameMode


Movement:RotateEntity
This node rotates the selected entity at a defined speed.
entityId Port: Changes the attached entity dynamically.
Speed Port: Speed (degrees/sec)
Paused Port: Pause the motion when true.
CoordsSys Port: RotationAxis in World or Local Space.
Current Port: Current Rotation in Degrees.
CurrentRad Port: Current Rotation in Radian.


Movement:MoveEntityTo

This nodes moves the selected entity to a destination position at a defined speed.

entityId Port: Changes the attached entity dynamically.
Destination Port: Destination.
DynamicUpdate Port: Dynamic update of Destination [follow-during-movement]
Speed Port: speed (m/sec)
EaseDistance Port: distance at which the speed is changed (in metres)
Start Port: Trigger this port to start the movement.
Stop Port: Trigger this port to stop the movement.
Current Port: Current position.
Done Port: Triggered when destination is reached or movement stopped.


Time:Delay
This node will delay passing the signal from [In] or [Out] for the specified number of seconds in [Delay].

In Port: Value to be passed after [Delay] time.
Delay Port: Delay time in seconds.
out Port: Out.


AI:AIAnim
This node plays the animation, perhaps a previously made flow graph for the AI to perform.

entityId Port: Changes the attached entity dynamically.
Sync Port: for synchronization only.
cancel Port: cancels execution (or stops the action)
animstateEx_name Port: name of animation to be played.
Method Port: which method to use.
done Port: action done.
succeed Port: action done successfully
fail Port: action failed.
start Port: activated on animation start.


This information is from- http://wiki.crymod.com/index.php/Flowgraph_Nodes (accessed 23/9/10)

THE FLOWGRAPH NODES I AM USING TO SCALE MY SPAWNED OBJECTS:

Math:Random

This node selects a random number between the limits that I can choose.

generate Port: generate a random number between min and max
min Port: minimum value of the random numbermax Port: maximum value of the random number
out Port: random number between min and max
outRounded Port: [out] but rounded to next integer value


Vec3:Scale
This node will scale the number that is chosen by the Math:Random node on its x,y,z axes.

vector Port: holds x,y,z values
scale Port: connected to 'out' port of math:random to activate scaling
out Port: connected to 'scale' or 'rotation' input ports of Entity:SpawnArchetype


Entity:SpawnArchetype
This node is in the plugin system which I downloaded. I am using it to spawn objects behind me when I (local player) moves around.

Spawn Port: connected to Logic:Any node which means in my flowgraph that an object will be spawned every 0.1 seconds
Archetype Port: shows identity of object to be spawned
Pos Port: specifies position of object
Rot Port: specifies rotation of object
Scale Port: specifies scale of object
Done Port: what to do when spawning finished