Jump to content
The Dark Mod Forums

Newbie DarkRadiant Questions


demagogue

Recommended Posts

Melan. Look in the Dark Mod Console where it says 'leaked' and a line or three above it will name the entity. Then you can find that entity by using Dark Radiant's Entity List. It is possible that the entity was deleted 'in an odd way' so you can't see anything but it's still in the map.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Figured it out at last -- some func_static got lost in space, beyond the limits of the grid. I don't understand how it got there, but the problem is fixed.

 

On a positive note, it is pretty nice how far I got in one day while still learning. I wouldn't say my building speed is faster than Dromed because of the need for more detail, but the end results look good.

 

[edit]This, however, does not look good:

 

uglylight.jpg

 

I put the light entity in the interior of the lamp, but apparently, it is not the proper way to do it. I remember that in the training mission, even shadowcasting lights "bled through" the material of the lamp. How is that done? (I also recall a yellowish haze around them - particles?)

Edited by Melan

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Figured it out at last -- some func_static got lost in space, beyond the limits of the grid. I don't understand how it got there, but the problem is fixed.

 

On a positive note, it is pretty nice how far I got in one day while still learning. I wouldn't say my building speed is faster than Dromed because of the need for more detail, but the end results look good.

 

[edit]This, however, does not look good:

 

 

 

I put the light entity in the interior of the lamp, but apparently, it is not the proper way to do it. I remember that in the training mission, even shadowcasting lights "bled through" the material of the lamp. How is that done? (I also recall a yellowish haze around them - particles?)

 

The lamp model is casting a shadow, disable shadows on it with "noshadows" in the entity inspector (I think "n" is the default shortcut).

 

There is a bit of a problem when you disable the shadow, as now the lamp will never cast any shadow at all. (one day I was going to work around that with turning the shadow on/off or using a shadow-casting light but never found time).

 

OTOH, the shadow you see is "semi-realistic" for the lamp, the light inside is blocked at top/bottom. Unfortunately, D3 has no soft-shadows so it looks wrong.

 

As for the haze, yes, thats a particle.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The streetlight model needs to have the spawnarg "noshadows" "1".

 

So you can put it on both lights and models (and presumably entities)? Interesting.

 

OTOH, the shadow you see is "semi-realistic" for the lamp, the light inside is blocked at top/bottom. Unfortunately, D3 has no soft-shadows so it looks wrong.

Yeah, it would be all right if it wasn't a B/W stencil line, but until someone gets to work on the Doom3 source code and hacks in soft shadows, that's not an option.I will have to experiment a bit tomorrow to see where it would look best. Light placement is a bit trickier than in Dromed.

Edited by Melan

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

Link to comment
Share on other sites

How do you get AI to walk on complex terrain patches?

 

AI cannot pathfind on patches, only brushes, I know it sucks. But they can be "tricked" onto walking on patches. like if you put a monster clip brush below your patch, the AI will walk on the patch.

 

If you want to see what the AI see when in game, go into the editor and hide all patches.

I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Cool screen Melan, looks like are are doing fine :)

It's actually one of the less cool ones; you can do some quite nice work with patches. ^_^ I've got a long way to go, though - among other things, I'll have to bring a few more trims into the game, and that requires a bit more work than just running them through Bright.

Edited by Melan

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A minor question on visportaling: do visportals meeting other visportals partition space? Or do I have to put in a worldspawn protrusion to create "windows" through which they propagate? In the image below, I made them meet over a roof at 90°; to the north, I also have two visportals (a rectangle and a triangle to cover roof) sealing one opening. Will these portals work correctly?

 

Architectural5.jpg

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's OK to butt visportals against each other. Whether an indivual one will work depends on the situation. I've done many that are aligned in the same plane (effectively to get an irregular shape made of several visportals.) To align them at an angle should work. Of course, that doesn't mean it will be effective depending on the views. ;) If that one doesn't work you could add a chimney at that point I guess. Remember, visportals must 'seal' off each section. If there is another opening that leads back to the player then it may remain open depending on the situation. I might have to do a diagram to explain that. ;)

 

[EDIT] You could also try a narrow vertical spike brush of sky texture instead of a chimney.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

AI cannot pathfind on patches, only brushes, I know it sucks. But they can be "tricked" onto walking on patches. like if you put a monster clip brush below your patch, the AI will walk on the patch.

It's not so bad, it turns out you don't even need to follow the shape of the terrain.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's not so bad, it turns out you don't even need to follow the shape of the terrain.

 

Nope AFAIK as long as the distance between the patch and the clip brush is less than the fall for taking damage, the AI will climb it. The last time I tested this, albeit over a year ago, I had a pyramid and the AI would only go so high and then would go around the pyramids sides.

I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

More questions:

1) Door handles: they are supposed to be fixed to a door with the "bind" argument. But how to create the link between door and handle? I tried to affix a dual handle entity to a door, and originally thought from the Door tutorial I would only have to make the object touch the door... Or do I have to enter the door's ID into the bind parameter? If this is the case, how can I find this ID? I am not seeing numbers like in Dromed.

 

2) Prefab chests: these seem very finicky; whenever I rotate them, it seems something gets left behind in space - especially the latch on the lock. Is there an easier, less painful way of precise positioning? (Also, the old wooden chest often seems to produce some kind of graphical glitch - colours get screwed up and I have had two crashes while manipulating it. This doesn't seem universal, but it has happened more often than I thought it would.)

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1. Make the handle a mover door handle entity and give it the property bind <doorname>. The doorname being the name of the mover door entity. Each entity has a unique id - the line below the classname in entity inspector. See also the Doors article on the wiki. * Position the handle(s) manually where they should go on the door.

 

[edit] * I see you've already been to that article. I see the bind did not state doorname so I've added that now.

 

2. There is a glitch in Dark Radiant when rotating multiple selections. In the case of the chests I think it is just the handle. No fix at the moment but to move the handle manually. When first inserted look carefully where it should be positioned before rotating the whole chest then rotate. I usually select the rotation property of the lock pin and delete it and start again. I prefer using the arbitary transformation dialog to precisely rotate things; others use the rotate tool. Key in the chest - delete if not wanted. Set the lockpick values only on the chest body (the froblock entity.) Note there is a clip texture brush inside to control frob. Needs practice to get familiar with some of this stuff.

 

[EDIT] not seen any crash associated with chests so can't help there I'm afraid.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Greebo: 1.0.2, I think - I uninstalled/reinstalled it twice since 1.0.0. Does it have a specific significance (aside from being able to clone patches)?

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah - I loaded the prefab into the editor, positioned it, then rotated it with the rotation tool at about 190°, and finally did a deselect via the Esc key. IIRC the latch did rotate, but it rotated incorrectly to a wrong position - perhaps similar to multibrushes in Dromed, where the last piece selected determined the rotation axis? A similar thing happened to the cloth bit in the chest once. I will have to experiment more in the evening; I did not do a systematic study of the errant behaviour. It may be my fault, although I think I did everything correctly. Even so, it is a bit problematic to manipulate something made up of so many independent bits: ideally, I should be able to check and readjust position and rotation without reselecting everything beforehand. I don't know if this is possible with the engine's limitations, though.

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'll check what behaviour I get on my end - I get the feeling this is the old "grouping" issue, where some parts like lights are not rotated correctly when using the manipulators, depending on the object type.

 

On a general note: it might not be obvious for mappers, but DarkRadiant is a completely stand-alone application which has technically nothing to do with the game engine (D3). DarkRadiant is just using the game assets, but has its own codebase. So if you're encountering a problem in DarkRadiant, this is most probably something you won't see in the actual game. Furthermore, DarkRadiant is fully open-sourced already (D3 is not yet), so in theory there is no limitation of what it can do, except for the one imposed by my spare time. ;)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I believe that beyond bugfixes, you should pressure a programmer into developing a WYSIWYG readable editor module that could generate precise XF content - it would not be a hard task, and it would make the editing process quite efficient. Is there a feature request thread here? I could not find one.

 

(BTW, I did recognise DarkRadiant was not a native Doom editor. I actually do read wikis and documentation, even if it may not be evident from my questions - I am still struggling with a bit of information overload! :) )

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Haha! You provide the programmer and we'll apply the pressure! :laugh:

 

Picking up on something you said earlier, it is possible to reselect the entire chest (all components) later without having to reselect the parts one by one. Two or more ways. One is to zoom right in then in Top View, Shift drag the mouse over the chest and it selects everything (remember to have all filters off eg, to include the clip brush.) This operation selects everything in the plan view so it will likely select the floor and ceiling too plus other stuff so is not ideal here.

 

Another way is to use layers as groups. (I only ever use them as groups but that's another story.) When you first insert a prefab and it is still selected, add it to a layer so you can reselect the whole thing later by clicking the layer. You can create a new layer even while the prefab is still selected so no worries about forgetting till the last minute. Name the layer say, Jake'sChest etc. Anytime you want to move, rotate, delete, copy, whatever, you can just select the layer.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.


  • Recent Status Updates

    • Petike the Taffer

      I've finally managed to log in to The Dark Mod Wiki. I'm back in the saddle and before the holidays start in full, I'll be adding a few new FM articles and doing other updates. Written in Stone is already done.
      · 0 replies
    • nbohr1more

      TDM 15th Anniversary Contest is now active! Please declare your participation: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22413-the-dark-mod-15th-anniversary-contest-entry-thread/
       
      · 0 replies
    • JackFarmer

      @TheUnbeholden
      You cannot receive PMs. Could you please be so kind and check your mailbox if it is full (or maybe you switched off the function)?
      · 1 reply
    • OrbWeaver

      I like the new frob highlight but it would nice if it was less "flickery" while moving over objects (especially barred metal doors).
      · 4 replies
    • nbohr1more

      Please vote in the 15th Anniversary Contest Theme Poll
       
      · 0 replies
×
×
  • Create New...