Lightcraft, this looks really good, we do a lot of this work and are looking to move to a better package, let me know if you looking for a beta tester
Lightcraft- where in the world are you based?
Hey jack
im 15 mins from you in Sydney lol
say hi to sunny for me. years ago when Halcyon was still very young
he came over to perth to check it out. it was early days back then for the engine, and i think you guys went down the quest road? if i am not mistaken.
You guys are also playing with some scripts i wrote, Geo paint.
oh by the way i worked with fern for a while after he left ivolve.
hes into making games last time i caught up with him.
small world huh?
very small world, sunny had guessed it was you.
We are in the process of looking for a way to visualize our models in realtime. I have familiarized myself with most of the options available, but like you say, it is a hassle to learn another program and have to switch back and forth. I am interested to see what IMAGTP is going to do with CryEngine2, but I feel that may be out of our league. If this is as easy as it seems to be, and if we can get that kind of quality, this would be a no-brainer for us as it would almost work right into our workflow.
Awesome product, keep us updated!
thanks for your interest beestee
ease of use was my main aim with Halcyon, as there seems to be alot of mucking around with the other RT solutions.
keep in mind that cry engine doesnt do GI.
Im working on a few demos right now, that are going to show the engine off as best as possible. most of the work i have done with it have nda attached to them or use textures that come from my texture library i have, and i really dont have a clue as to which textures i can freely give away or ones i have grabbed from various websites. So i am starting from scratch to be safe. this way i wont get into any hassles because i used a texture from something copyrighted.
so stay tuned some nice demos coming very soon.
is there going to be any support for collision detection?
It originally had Collission detection, but it was pretty unstable as you needed to have geometry that was watertight, or you would get stuck or fall through in places, i had issues with differences in detection between nvidia and ati cards, so i have put it on hold until i figure out a workaround.
I have to admit, collission detection didnt really help with navigating the scene, as you would always be getting stuck in stairwells and tight rooms especially when clients took control.
i figured that as a tool to view a space from an architectural tool, it really hindered it as most clients want the freedom to go where they wanted.
i will be looking into it regardless though. so im putting it on the wishlist.
cheers
An interesting thing you can do in Halcyon is make a sphere, add a panorama you have rendered on to it, and it lets you view a super smooth panorama.
Anyone experienced with quicktime knows how jerky and aliased a pano can look.
These panos run fullscreen at 75 fps !
Is it comparable to the smoothness of devalVR?
wow that devalVR is pretty darn smooth!
Jep, devalVR is the best one I know. That’s why I asked 
This DevalVR is a nice web integrated panorama, pretty good if you want a web delivery, no doubt about it. Halcyon is standalone fullscreen, have you tried the pano scenes? it runs at your highest monitor settings, with an 8k map. http://www.lightcraftresearch.com/Panoramas.zip
I have been playing with creating a bunch of spheres that you can travel between, its kind of neat as there are all these bubbles of images you can move between.
just on another note… i have created a nice demo of the solar system with nasa’s high res maps.
what are the copyright limitation with these maps?
can i put out a demo with them? is credit to nasa all thats needed? or do i need special permission? im not sure if the planet maps are public domain.
I tried Halycon. But I got a very low fps viewing the 3D scenes. I still have a 9800GT. So that may be the reason.
The panoramas you provided worked perfectly smooth.
To really put this to test I made a 10000x5000 panorama (50Mp - 45mb jpeg file)
DevalVR has a standalone player of only 1.5mb - no install - freeware
It runs full screen (just like the webversion btw)
DevalVR could handle this perfectly smooth on fullscreen 1280x1024 - 9800GT - Core2Duo 6600
When I feed this panorama to halcyon. I could handle this perfectly smooth too. However there were some issues in the sky. see pic. Don’t know what this could be? I tried to reload the scene, but it didn’ go away. You can have the panorama if you want to make tests on it.
So IMHO there is no difference in smoothness. But there is in usability. When you try to zoom in halcyon the image gets completely warped. This doesn’t happen in DevalVR + the image is a bit more sharper.
Another thing I noticed is that halcyon displays the panoramas wrong. It’s flipped horizontally. So e.g. in panorama2 when you look at the stairs, the kitchen should be to the left. As it is in the picture. But when I look at it with halcyon the kitchen it to the right. So you should really fix this.
those vertical lines are from your image size, resize the image to a bit depth number and all should be good.
for instance 8192 x 4096
as for the flipping, i made a sphere, put a normal modifier on it, placed a camera inside applied the pano texture, and exported it.
I noticed the mirrored panos later, and did a photoshop flip. but to fix this all i need is a spherical uvw modifer in the stack with -1 in x tiling.
When i have a spare minute ill make a new pano file.
Warning!..if you dont like code stop reading here.
you can even fix this yourself, by opening the .mob file in notepad and changing these 2 lines…
SetScale 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 to this SetScale -1.000000 1.000000 1.000000
and also
SetCullBackface to SetNoCull
what this does is flip the mesh in x, this makes the normals flipped back outwards, so we change it to 2 sided by the command SetNoCull
if you really want to get your hands dirty with the code…
try this.
copy paste the geo node paragraph, change its position, change the image, alter the cameras digits to lengthen its clipping. and you have a whole lot of panorama planets. providing your card has enough memory to hold them all.
which you could easily overcome come with LOD…but i better stop before people fall asleep 
cheers
I believe that’s fixed then. Didn’t realize it was that easy.
I think you have great potential in the engine. But I personally wouldn’t use it for panoramas.
I can’t really follow you with the panorama planet thing :?
But it seems you have some nice tricks up your sleeves. So keep us posted!
I wasnt banking on a killer pano app, it was just one of those neat ideas you have at 2 in the morning lol
try this mob file.
http://www.lightcraftresearch.com/PanoSpheres.ASE.MOB
a whole lot of these would look cool if they cover a large resort.
Jep those ideas of 2 in the morning… 
Just tried the mob file and it’s really fun. It could be used for creative purposes I think.
At the moment I’m working on a schoolproject (yes I’m still a student) in which I’m using panoramas as the medium, trying to rethink the possibities of panoramas. This could be one of them 
if your trying this demo in xp64 extract to a folder and run the program exe from within the zip file this worked for me…