Lux

Hahah, yeah it is masochistic to some extent. Most I've ridden is around 45 mi. and it does take it out of you. A nice 20-30mi ride a few times a week is enough that you can eat and drink anything you want so that's the main reason I do it besides enjoying the ride.

Haha! That was more a jab than anything else, just messing with you, dude. I dig motorcycles. I only have a dirt bike right now cause I'm gettin old to the point where stuff has stopped healing the way it used to but I do cycle and enjoy that a lot and also hate other cyclists that don't obey the rules all should follow on the roads. I also don't live in a large metro area so not a lot of traffic to deal with out here. My normal route goes out through the country which is much nicer than intensely breathing exhaust for a couple hours. I've never done a century ride but I think it would be fun at some point.

So you ride the Isle of Man on a moto or do you pedal like a real man?

I just figured out the skybox is shining down inside my bevel corner so I had to cap that off, and you want screen shots? Har! Not even through the tutorial and you want screenshots?!#^@& You are very very funny!

...where you get this guy??

Thank you for the link and the tips!

Ah, I see... yes I'd read a number of other posts in threads talking about converting things to func_static for that reason, just want to make sure I'm not making an optimization mistake that I should heed. I'm an efficiency freak so doing things efficiently, cleanly, and in the easiest manner possible (given design constraints) are things I try to optimize in my design style. Not just for my sake, but what's best for the user, the engine, map fluidity, construction, etc.

So I at least figured out something with the rain/rainsplash patches and visportals. I was trying to recreate the patches by first removing the offending ones and then cloning the North yard patches and pulling them down in top view to resize but apparently resizing does not work with patches?? Is this accurate? I tried with QE button pressed, Alt, Ctrl, Shift, combos of ... nothing would resize the patches. Then I figured out it was because the tutorial tells you to "Convert them to fun_static". I reverted the Originals and then I could resize them. Then I figured, lets see how the visportal treats them if they're all worldspawn class and not func_static. What I found out and I'm sure you're all aware of is that if they're worldspawn, they come in to view just like all the other geometry. If you overlap the corners of two portals so you can see through both, its only showing rain in that tiny little corner, nothing else is rendered. So... what I'm wondering is why should they be (if at all) converted to "func_static" when it appears much less is always rendered using entity class: worldspawn like all other brushes and it appears all visportal rules now apply to them so only what can be seen is rendered.

Ok, thanks very much, nbohr1more. The Transaction, fun mission, gg Sotha! Yeah I just finished The Phrase Book last night and started on Fidcal's series, just started The Heart of Lone Salvation. What sucks is I'm getting these story ideas and then I'll come across a mission that has done a variation on it. Hah... don't want to do what's already been done before story wise so the research continues.

Do weather effects, "rain" in this case (from the tutorial) always render even when they're on the other side of a closed (red) visportal? That is the case on my test map. Can't get the rain not to render though when you are hide_distance 640 away it does stop rendering though that is a function of the rain and not the visportal cutting off its render. I'm only using 1 patch for rain however if I had 2-3 stacked for downpour one would think that with a red visportal, this would not consume compute cycles. I do understand that if its raining you'd "hear" the rain outside but sound travels through them regardless of closed or open, correct? The reason I ask is because the tutorial specifically states: " Portalizing: Visportals Portalizing defines which areas of a mission are to be rendered at any time so as to avoid unnecessary rendering. Without it a big mission would grind to a halt. Our little mission could manage but even here, if you put in torrential rain you will find it slowing down on many PCs. Portalizing won't help out with the rain but it will improve performance indoors; why waste processing time on the rain when you can't see it? " And yet, after explaining where the visportals are to be created, goes on to say: "Save, dmap, map and try it out. If you have torrential rain then you should notice a big difference when you go inside and close the yard door." When the "closed" door and subsequent red "closed" visportal have rain rendering on the opposite side, this is kind of confusing. So I don't know if this is expected behavior or I made some mistake, but it seems like something is wrong. Some clarification is welcome. Yes, I have r_showportals 1 and r_showtris 2 enabled and the rain is clearly rendering while inside the house on the opposite side of a red portal. EDIT: Also, when I'm in the 2nd inner room with the door shut, the South half of the rain in the outer yard still renders; the half closest to me. The far North side does not render, however I'm still within the hide_distance parm of 640. I've also removed the parm from both of the rain patches with no effect. When the inner door is opened, the rain is rendered on both the North and South of the yard even though another red visportal lies between us. So through 2 red (closed) visportals the rain only renders on the South side (can't be seen through two brushes with no leaks) and through 1 red visportal the rain is rendered on both North and South of the yard. Puzzling.

Got it! Thank you.

Thanks for this! I'm going to use it when I get to that point.

I'll take this as a "non adjustable"?

You know, I know there were many things done wrong in TDS, but there were many many things done right too. I really enjoyed it. Note to self: DO NOT SNAP SKYBOX.PFB TO GRID ... lol screws up all the positioning within it and you get multiple pieces of moon

That produces a more desirable emmersive result.

I may look in to that a bit later but sounds feasible. Thanks for the mention, nbohr1more. Is there any way to change the scroll wheel ortho view zoom so that you can point at anything anywhere in the view and when you zoom IN whatever the cursor is over zooms in to the center of the view and when you zoom OUT the view zooms out towards where ever you have the cursor pointer? That is how mastercam works and wow does it aid navigating around. Is this adjustable?

Thanks guys, yeah... fog for later Yeah I'm just curious about these things as I go through the tutorial and I sincerely appreciate the feedback. Its nice to know some of the pitfalls ahead of time. It will help me make decisions when I get to that point and save me time and double work as I look ahead.

Ok, so I expanded the fog just past the boundry walls and this ended the z issues and it renders properly. As the example in the tutorial illustrates, the courtyard that we were adding fog to is shaped like an L so there are 2 fog lights needed to cover the entire courtyard. The boundry between them I tried a few different things. 1) using exact same boundry line 2) allowing slight space between them 3) overlapping them All produced different rendered results but the same general "awful" effect, either a definite boundry or a "gap" with no fog when the player crosses the divide. Is there a solution for this or is the best measure generally just to avoid using multiple fog lights in a single area thereby constraining the area to that which best suits the rectangular fog boundry area? Also, in doing this I noticed when the boxes overlapped it created the effect that the fog as it extended up in to the skybox made the skybox look appropriately foggy where as with no overlap the fog ends bascially where the wall does and does not extend up in to the "air" giving the player a sense of atmosphere. I tried to use this "overlapping" of fog boxes which generated the fog plane by creating multiple other fog lights surround the initial 2 so there would be fog light boundries overlapping up in the night sky. I don't know if I'm explaining that clearly or not. In any case, it had no effect. The boundries were not observable against the skybox no matter what, so the sky still looked devoid of fog. Is there a work around for this or is it generally good practice to also avoid?

I think I watched 2 of Komag's however on his channel the majority of them have been pulled or the host links are broken.

Cool, thanks, Obsttorte!

Hey guys, as suggested by Demagogue, I'm creating this thread to answer things I come across while creating my FM. I'm sure you guys/gals are familiar. So this is brought over from my other thread where it was misplaced: ______________________________________________________ Hey, I noticed in the Radiant editor when I select "P" for preferences > Camera > uncheck "Enable far-clip plane", everything in the Camera view window turns to the "Shader not found" texture. I fixed it by exiting and reloading the editor, however after changing this setting, when the DarkRadiant editor launches its asks me again to configure the Engine path. I've subsequently noticed that if I change the Camera Settings > Movement Speed (game units) slider from the default to anything, e.g. moving it 1 notch either direction, it does the same thing to the camera view. I'm assuming this is because I have Doom3 and TDM installed in the Steam directory and its looking in the default location C:/Games/Doom3 and can't find it. After editing the path back to the Steam directory and then reloading the map I was working on, now the setting is correctly enabled/disabled however the picture I hung on the wall shows the "NoDraw" texture for the picture inside the correctly textured frame. The Necklace on the table is just a green blob which I'm assuming is the "collision" texture because it has been added to my Texture Browser. And the stone and wooden floor textures have been scaled way back and are now tiny repeating textures. Pulling up the Surface Inspector and re-selecting the brushes and clicking the Modify Texture > Natural button fixes them. Default Scale is set to .3, I believe it was .5. It appears its a good idea to set the preferences prior to starting brush creation? If a preferences change is made later will this create many issues on the map? It appears I was looking for "cubic clip the camera view" and instead changed the camera option in the prefs instead. Repeating this causes again all textures in the camera viewport to render as "shader not found", checking the game engine path again in Preferences > Game > , it has been blanked. Relocating game engine path using the "..." button restores all textures except the picture in the frame (no draw texture) and the necklace on the table (collision texture). Is this a known bug? The map complies fine with no red error messages and the textures are there once the map loads. Also the necklace looks fine and is frobbable and not jittering around like its colliding with the table. ______________________________________ Not sure if that is just Nvidia's latest WHQL driver issue not updating the 3d viewport or something that pertains to a Steam installation or what. First of all, thank you Fidcal for an excellent and methodical tutorial! Also, Im guessing either I'm misreading directions or some of the info on the A-Z tutorial is outdated because of 1.08 game engine update changes? I've run in to a couple issues so far and these questions will pertain to the A-Z tutorial. 1) Fog - bottom of page 3 Created as indicated in the testMap yard. Create a light in the normal way in the centre of the yard and drag out its box to fill the yard north to south and from the east wall the wall with the door. It should have the height from floor right up to the sky. J for light properties Give it a brightness VALUE 25 On the right is the list showing fogs and lights so choose fogs and select delta1_fog. You can try others but there is not a lot of difference and some do not seem to work. J to close light properties. In Entity Inspector give it the property shaderParm3 and a value of 600. This is the distance in units beyond which the fog is completely opaque. Our yard is about 640 units long so if you look from one end then the farthest wall is whited out. Take a few steps and it starts to appear. When this renders it looks like you're walking through a solidish block of translucent white/grey z-fighting mess. Tons of flickering and no puffy areas or clearish areas, etc. Very homogeneous throughout the air. Does an alpha mask need applied to this? Have the settings for this changed or is this graphic driver related? 2) Performance: Hiding Distant Rain If you change the rain and splash patches to func_static entities you can add some properties that hide distant rain so improving performance. I used it in the extended released version of Thief's Den but it is not critical in this small yard so I will only mention it here briefly... hide_distance n = distance in n units beyond which a rain patch is 'switched off'. dist_check_period n = how often in milliseconds the distance is checked. Too-frequent testing reduces performance; too-infrequent will cause a visible delay. For rain I used 0.25. dist_check_xy n = if 1 then only horizontal distance is tested not vertical. Set to 1 for rain/snow. Hung up here on changing the Rain and Splash patches to func_static entities. I Alt-Shift select them one at a time and the Entity properties are "classname: worldspawn". If I select that I get the "Choose entity class..." at the bottom where I can select Func_Static and hit the Add button to close that dialogue. Nothing is apparently added though. The classname remains "worldspawn". Also tried altering to func_static after adding the 3 parms above however no change is apparent. I also tried typing it in directly in the lower entry boxes with no change. Also, I noticed at the bottom of the "choose entity class..." dialogue when you initially open it and "worldspawn" is selected, it reads, "Every map should have exactly 1 worldspawn". So now after I've added the three parameters, they're obviously being applied to all brushes classed as worldspawn. If I alt-shift select any brush in the world now, they all have these three parms, hide_distance, dist_check_period, dist_check_xy, so clearly I'm doing something wrong in that I can't get the Func_static class to apply to the rain and rain_splash patches. EDIT: Looking at a door that I have added the "mover" entity property to and changed the classname to "atdm:mover_door", I see "func_static7" is added to this Entity, so in the same way do I need to add the parm "name" and then assign it the "func_static" value? Does the "classname" remain "worldspawn" or does this need altered? Note: The rain and rain_splash patches are correctly rendering in-game and compiling without errors to my knowledge. Note2: When I launch TDM and pull up the console I get 147 warnings about file missing, various sounds (Thunder), materials, etc. Note3: When I dmap my test map, the only warnings I receive are are (3) Warning: Node without a volume under the "TreePortals" section of three different areas.

Thank you!

Finished this on Shadow with a stealth score of 1 which I'm quite proud of since its the lowest stealth score I've ever gotten playing TDM missions. Not that it was easy by any stretch, very emmersive, very challenging, still never got that desk unlocked in the church dudes room, but luckily found the box under the bar after retrieving the water arrows to finish off with enough loot to pass the 1200 mark. Took me about 1:16 to complete it and yes I did quick re-load quite a bit because of the obnoxious guard with the torch (Sarcasm; I love those guys that come to ruin your party!) I didn't have any of the affor mentioned issues with the combo lock mechanism and it was a pleasant puzzle I've never experienced in a TDM mission and great mechanics. Only issue I experienced was on the "mounds" or patches the grass was placed on simply because of the player character movement and the abrupt angles at which the patches rose up from the surrounding ground. A quick crouching hop alleviated the issue however at one point I nearly got stuck between the ground and the tall stone wall. Just imagine how my butthole puckered as the guard approached and I was too well lit and sticking in the V of the wall/ground... but luckily it released me and I got to the darker area fast enough I wasn't noticed. All in all, very good gameplay, interesting mechanics with the combination lever lock and keyed elevator, and very enjoyable. Many thanks!

Yeah, google translate said, "WELSH DETECTED!" lol so that's why I said that. Actually not a bad thing either cause German/Welsh/Dutch is what my mom brought to the table. As far as my actual skills go, you sir... are entirely correct! I am a skilless newb as far as DarkRadiant is concerned, wow what a huge undertaking but hey, my dad built model air planes and that's not my thing so I have to build something. I'll dig around for that thread on sound bites, thanks for the heads up.

Great idea!