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If you create a sufficiently small cylinder in DR it will have a rectangular profile, too. Besides that you can alter the subdivision in DR, so you can increase/reduce the tris count if desired. You obviously don't have the amount of control over the triangulation like in a modeling program, but it is sufficient most of the time imho.

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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The problem with trying to make DR do everything is that it wouldn't do anything particularly well. Trying to replicate all of the core modelling features of a tool like Blender would take years of work, require massive changes to the application structure, and would still never be as powerful or usable as Blender itself. And then someone would want to be able to do texture painting in DR too, and it would then have to include all of the features of GIMP as well.

 

The other problem is that the MAP file doesn't have enough flexibility to support full vertex modelling like a ASE or LWO file can. You have clumsy, unsmoothed brushes, and very limited Bezier patches to play with, and that's it. To include full modelling functionality you would need to do something like export the model to an autogenerated ASE file and then load it back in via a func_static. It would be a horrible hack.

 

No one is saying to transform DR into a full fledged modeling suit. Can you explain why the map file would need to be changed? Afaik the map file only takes the necessary info from DR that idTech 4 expects, so if you give it the necessary info, nothing needs to be changed, Imo the only thing that would need to be changed is DR code it self but i'm not sure. I know Hammer is a tool made by a AAA developer, but just for argument sake, indulge me, i'm sure no one here consider it to be a full modeling tool, even tho it has a rope/cable system, not dissimilar from the func_beam entity of DR, whose functionality can be easily done another way, is all a matter of "improving quality of life" to level designers and the less third party tools they need to change into the less error prone and faster the work is done, profit.

 

I'm sure greebo has his hands full and this functionality is indeed not a requirement so all this talk is pure dream talking from my part.

 

Not to mention the fact that each feature added to DR increases its complexity, and therefore the learning curve for each DR newcomer.

 

The complexity of a tool depends on the user interface and the documentation available, if the interface is intuitive and the documentation is well done, any tool is able to be used by anyone. Have you seen the interface of Unreal Editor 4 and Cryengine 5 ? They are a million times more complex then DR will ever be but that didn't prevented every kid on the block to flock to them. What i asked is certainly not rocket science, anyone that knew how to put a entity into a level would know how to use the rope entity but like i said, dream talking.

 

 

For distant art, sure. But for something placed nearby the player you'd be better off with 3d cables. But instead of cylinder, you can use 4 sides (square/rectangle profile), just give them one smoothing group. You'll save a ton of polygons, and nobody will see the difference. Old modeling trick.

 

You are right but funny enough you can create square "cylinders" in DR coupled with the material smoothing, is very easy to make nice looking and performant ropes and cables. Btw from my experience modern GPU's like more real geometry then a flat plane with a alpha texture, all those invisible pixels are still rendered and then discarded and that takes performance out, that is why many grass or particle systems try to diminish the amount of invisible pixels:

 

 

 

  • Reduce dead space around cutout-alpha particles. Use texkill to not process the transparent regions of the sprite. Alternatively, trim away the transparent areas around the particle, using an n-gon fan instead of just a quad sprite. (but beware lowered quad (2×2 pixel block) utilization when increasing the triangle count, or becoming vertex bound in the distance, so LOD from fan to a quad sprite in the distance).

 

http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=91

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You are right but funny enough you can create square "cylinders" in DR coupled with the material smoothing, is very easy to make nice looking and performant ropes and cables. Btw from my experience modern GPU's like more real geometry then a flat plane with a alpha texture.

 

That's true, you can get away with more triangles than with transparency, even TDM engine allow for several milions of polygons per scene, as long as other things are relatively low.

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The complexity of a tool depends on the user interface and the documentation available, if the interface is intuitive and the documentation is well done, any tool is able to be used by anyone

I can't deny that. But both requires quiet some work, and currently we only have one person who is really working on DR. And what is intuitive and what not is quiet a subjective matter, imho.

 

But to be honest: Once can of course expect DR to become the ultimative ubertool with which you can do anything with, but if a mapper really wants to lay focus on specific aspects of map-making, he or she will most probably not be able to get around digging deeper into the matter and additional tools, independent from how advanced DR really is. And personally I don't see any problem here. There are lots of tools (many of them well documented) available that can be used by anyone, so why bother implementing all that stuff into DR.

 

I think, especially with the low manpower we have here in mind, that focusing on additions that easens or speed up the work aspects that DR is designed for is much more beneficial then keep adding more and more features. If anyone disagrees - DR is open source ;)

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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  • 1 month later...

Greebo the engine itself renders models that have the material names well written (so it can see the diffuse texture) but no .mtr defined has full bright and translucent, DR on the other end renders them exactly like any other model just without any normal map, but that goes easily unnoticed among many models, is there a way to make DR behave like the engine or even assign a special texture to models with no mtr define so we can see them directly on DR without the need to see ingame?

 

You could also add a option to select a model, right click in the 2D window and chose "open/see material definition", similar to what we have on the media tab.

Edited by HMart
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  • 5 months later...

Is there a "Collapse All" contextual menu option for the Media Pane folder tree? It's always tiresome to just hold left cursor key until all the folders inadvertently opened by the search function get collapsed, just to be able to manually search when the search bar has failed you.

 

I'd say it'd be a very low effort, good quality of life improvement. "Expand all" could also be added, though I don't see why anyone would want to click that. :laugh:

My FMs: The King of Diamonds (2016) | Visit my Mapbook thread sometimes! | Read my tutorial on Image-Based Lighting Workflows for TDM!

 

 

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I've been thinking about an option for the wireframe view of the camera mode that grants extra occlusion. Right now, a brush can't occlude another brush/model behind it, but it occludes its own, backward facing edges. In a large map the wireframe mode is more or less useless because it's just a mess of white lines. If it were more akin to how r_showtris 1 looks in-game (versus how it is now, which would be r_showtris 3 in this analogy), I think that would be far more useful.

My FMs: The King of Diamonds (2016) | Visit my Mapbook thread sometimes! | Read my tutorial on Image-Based Lighting Workflows for TDM!

 

 

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I think the main purpose of r_showtris is to get an impression of how many tris you have on surfaces that are created via Brushes or Patches, as they will split up each other. It is hard to judge on that especially if there are many of them touching each other. And although it shows you the tris on models either, that is pretty much pointless as the amount of tris on them is fixed and known from the beginning.

 

Setting r_showtris to 3 shouldn't show you all tris in the map, though. So if you are really seeing a mess of white lines as you describe it, you either have way to high poly counts on your models/world geometry or you haven't properly visportalized your mission (the highest setting also shows you the frontend/depth buffer overdraw).

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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Don't misunderstand, I refer to the wireframe mode in DarkRadiant as being unusable, rather than r_showtris 3 in-game, I am aware that the tri visualisation gets culled by the visportals. I also aim to draw a purely visual analogue between the two wireframe modes. While, yes, the purpose of the wireframe mode in-game is to visually represent polygonal density, I believe the aim of the wireframe mode in DR is to provide a cleaner, less cluttered visualization of one's map, which I believe is quite impossible without the type of object (eg. brush, model, etc) occlusion I was talking about in my previous post.

Edited by Spooks

My FMs: The King of Diamonds (2016) | Visit my Mapbook thread sometimes! | Read my tutorial on Image-Based Lighting Workflows for TDM!

 

 

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Ah, ok. It seems I really misunderstood you. Sorry :)

 

I haven't been using the wireframe mode in DR all too often. Having some sort of occlusion might indeed be of help to provide a clearer view.

 

Another possibility would to draw the lines differently depending on their distance to the viewer. Closer ones could be drawn brighter for example. This would in addition still provide some feeling of depth when using the wireframe mode. This might also be easier to implement.

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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In regards to this discussion: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/19662-nominate-poor-models/

 

It would be nice if the team would have the possibility to mark materials, models etc. as deprecated if they think they should not be used anymore due to them not fitting our quality standards anymore. They can neither be replaced, removed or renamed due to the possible compability inflictions with older fms, so probably an external file read by DR which contains a list of deprecated assets as proposed by R Soul in the above linked discussion would be reasonable. Or maybe a different approach.

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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The thing about wireframe is that it is often used to allow you to select shapes "through" other shapes. Imagine you are looking at your building from top down and you want to select a rat that is in the basement. Considering you know more or less where it is located, its like an xray vision that allows you to see through every solid object on top of it and still find and select what you are looking for. Though I like the idea of fading lines as they get farther, that might hinder this particular need somewhat. It always becomes a complete mess, thats for sure.

 

As for how to pass information to users when selecting models in DR... It would be great if static models could have some sort of def file read by DR, but alas they dont, as far as I know, only animated models and stuff like entities do...

Edited by RPGista
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Re Wireframe: That is something I haven't considered, but I guess it could just be made toggleable. The question would be whether it is worthwhile to implement it, which depends both on the amount of work needed as well as how much of a need for this exists. Personally I don't use wireframe mode often, but others may.

 

Re model defs: This is a though one as it would either need such a file to be created for all models already in the mod or to allow them to be left as they are, which would be a bit inconsistent. It heavely depends on what you need those files for. If you are aiming for models created by your won, you can always create custom defs for them and let them inherit from func_static. This would allow you to play with spawnarg values directly in the def or to provide information displayed in the create entity window or whatever else you desire.

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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  • 5 weeks later...

Has anyone ever thought of making a database of the models, entity's in darkradiant so it is possible to search for them?

Petike has been doing that on the wiki recently. The model database page is largely unpopulated so far, but the entity database page is quite extensive.

 

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Model_Database

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Entity_Database

Some things I'm repeatedly thinking about...

 

- louder scream when you're dying

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Petike has been doing that on the wiki recently. The model database page is largely unpopulated so far, but the entity database page is quite extensive.

 

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Model_Database

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Entity_Database

 

Awesome, thanks. This is really helpful! :D

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Wish: Official support for transparent editor images.

Filters are good, but the option to see the scene with transparent monster clip (and other game-changing, non-rendering materials) would be nice.

Maybe, supporting PNGs with alpha-channel for the editor image would do it. Mappers then could use their own materials referencing transparent editor images without adding additional geometry to the map or having to switch materials back to vanilla before dmap.

The more comfortable option would be to make the filter feature non-binary.

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For what purpose?

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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For the purpose of what the post right above his is asking for, to switch between what material is used for the editor vs. in-game.

 

I think if you're going to mess with that at all, you may as well just put in a category for in-editor material that's only for the editor (in the absence of which it just uses the normal material in-editor, which would be the normal case). Why substitute when you can just have a priority rule for the editor?

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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  • 1 month later...

How about a filtered search option? Instead of searching and scrolling through the search matches inside the entire list of entities/textures/etc. the windows would filter the folder tree to just show the entries in the list that match your typed search.

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My FMs: The King of Diamonds (2016) | Visit my Mapbook thread sometimes! | Read my tutorial on Image-Based Lighting Workflows for TDM!

 

 

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Checking for vine_friendly surfaces is easy when working with brushes and patches, but laborious with models: I end up memorising materials used by the model/skin in the model viewer, then checking them in the media viewer. Overlook some and you'll make areas climbable by mistake if there are vine arrows available. It would be nice if there were a way to check material definitions from the model viewer, or even a way to highlight surfaces by their physical affordances.

Some things I'm repeatedly thinking about...

 

- louder scream when you're dying

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  • 6 months later...

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