Guild of Writers

Revision as of 22:51, 31 July 2020

Korman
Category	Age Creation
Licence	GPLv3
Contents 1 Korman 2 Features 3 Why Use Korman? 4 Using Korman 5 Development

Korman is an age creation plugin for the open source 3D modelling program Blender and the successor to PyPRP. It is capable of targeting several versions of the Plasma engine, including those used in Uru Ages Beyond Myst, Uru Path of the Shell, and Myst Online: Uru Live.

Features

• Works on Blender 2.79.
• Exports ages for all versions of URU.
• Bakes static lighting for you!
• Exposes game logic in a visual and accessible node system.

Why Use Korman?

Korman is the best choice for the creation of new ages when compared to PyPRP or PlasmaMAX. The most immediate benefit to using Korman is its active development. Neither of the alternatives have received bug fixes or new features in years.

Korman is a superior choice to PyPRP because Korman works on recent versions of Blender 2.7 while PyPRP requires Blender 2.49. Blender 2.49 is much less user-friendly than more recent versions. Furthermore, PyPRP is limited to exporting ages for Path of the Shell while Korman can also export ages for Myst Online: URU Live. Ages created with PyPRP can be difficult to convert to the Myst Online: URU Live format. Finally, Korman is faster than PyPRP. Ages that take 15 minutes to export in PyPRP export in under 1 minute in Korman. Furthermore, Korman makes age development faster by automatically baking lightmaps and generating vertex color lights for you, much like does PlasmaMAX.

Korman is preferable to PlasmaMAX because the 3ds max plugin only works reliably on 3ds Max versions 7 and 8, which are very difficult to obtain legally. Furthermore, the last version of 3ds Max that the plugin source code supports is 2012. This means that the plugin can't work on new versions of 3ds max without significant work. Finally, PlasmaMAX is limited in that it will only export for Myst Online: Uru Live. This is problematic because most age creators play and test their ages on Path of the Shell, requiring an additional step to convert the age to the older game, a process that can introduce issues into the age.

Using Korman

Korman runs inside of the Blender modelling program, so it is assumed that you are already familiar with how to use Blender. If you are new to Blender or 3D art in general, check out the excellent Blender: Noob to Pro Book available for free online. Also, there are many video tutorials available on YouTube.

Once you are ready to dive into Korman, you will need to install the plugin. Once installed, check out the getting started tutorial to create a simple age with Korman. If you already have an age created in PyPRP, there is an article available to help you convert to Korman.

For a full list of Korman tutorials, visit the Korman Tutorials Category.

Development

Korman development is guided by The Zen of Korman:

   Korman should be intuitive and discoverable.
   Mapping Korman features to Plasma features 1:1 is not desirable.
   Hide annoying details and make age building fun!
   Any Python traceback seen by the user is a bug.
   Korman is written in Python, not C. The code should reflect that fact.
   Avoid "it's better to ask for forgiveness" try... except blocks.
   Spaces over tabs.
   Break lines around 100 columns (it's OK if your log message exceeds that however).

Korman development activity occurs on GitHub and on the Guild of Writers IRC network (irc.guildofwriters.org #writers). Korman is primarily written in Python and utilizes the C++ library libHSPlasma for Plasma file IO. We welcome all feedback and contributions!