Serpentine
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Posts posted by Serpentine
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A tip to spot leaks like that is:
1. Make sure all transparent surfaces like windows etc are opaque for the duration of this.
2. Make sure your ambient light is inside the building or whatever, in this case it doesnt need any moving.
3. Open a section of the skybox to create a leak.
4. Change the texture of the front door, or whatever visportal you want to test to something like stone.
5. Dmap and trace where the leak is, make the chane then repeat until it starts moaning that entities are leaking (i.e an entity/patch is exposed to the void)
6. Once all the fixes are made, select the 'visportal' and 'make visportal' it again.
7. Make sure if you changed any doors or other visportals that they are back to how they should be.
Also note, I didnt look for the leak in the study, its portal is always open, you can most likely find that by inducing a leak to the void from one of its walls. But its most likely related to the model you are using for a doorframe not blocking correctly.
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Gave it a go, took around 30 minutes - pretty in depth look at things.
Notes :
- The doorknob on the first door ahead of you once you have entered the building's handles arnt centered.
- Panels on the floor around the enterence and first level look quite out of place, a bit bright
- Windows to the front area are transparent, but they dont reaaaaally need to be - changing them to something opaque would most likely boost performance quite dramatically and stop the 'whole house' from hearing you outside.
- There are a few other areas where you seem to be able to get heard everywhere, I suspect they also need portalling looked at, cant think of them off hand tho!
- The runner guy, I thought he was meant to be knocked out or something - the note sort of implied it, but he's quite dead
- A few other windows seemed to be transparent when it wasnt required - but I could be seeing things - just make sure it doesnt leak performance
- In the kitchen the AI patrol node that seems to be in some monster clip - the one nearest the chest, looks a bit funny when he walks there (like he bumps into the box a few times then it seems to arrive)
- Some notes are collectable, some just readable - I only played medium, but dont remember them being needed... just seemed a bit odd
- Your front door and study area visportals are not working - check with r_showportals 1
- There is a wall section that is too short and leaking behind the front door on the right of the front door, on the most easily visable from the outside
- There is another leak on the 2nd floor, on the left indent, one of the closed windows has a gap between it and the wall, leaking to outside and making the bedroom always render.
Fixing up those leaks and making sure your portals work after that should dramatically increase your performance!
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Whoa there, I did not expect that!, looking awesome man
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wow, looks awesome :3 specially the brickwork
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Visportals have to remain simple for the most part. I have noticed sometimes if the visportal goes into a doorframe and doesnt just cover the door it will not portal correctly, other issues are if two portals touch and with portals leaking. I'm not sure if there is an easy way, but to find leaks around my visportals I usually give the ones I am testing a solid texture and then open a section behind them to the void, this way if there is a leak you get a nice point file and can adjust the 'portal' brush to cover it. This isnt always possible tho, with AI and lighting added elsewhere you would run into issues. I also tend to use the 'make visportal' option in the toobar.
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Its just the patch issue, it does this if theres a missmatch
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Sure, PM me a link and Im happy to provide feedback etc
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And the even better part is, that the MSDNAA and uni versions can also be used by another person, like, say, a brother who happens to have a sister whose uni is participating in the program. 35 € for a complete version of Win 7 64 can hardly be beaten.
They've removed it from the MSDNAA over here, at least for the ACM one
That said, they still have Server 08 R2, kinda odd
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Just remember that you can switch grid sizes with the number keys, makes life a load easier
And if you ever work in 0.125 or such by mistake and you're a little bit brave, you can just select everything including vertexes/points, change grid size to whatever you want and hit "snap to grid", works surprisingly well when it isnt deleting stuff for whatever reason it does, just need to watch out for decals.
Looking good tho, once you get this stuff down, you start getting quite quick with DR.
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The linux version of the editor is working, it is just not avaliable in packages, however if you wish to download the source and compile it yourself, you shouldnt have an issue. DarkRadiant is licensed under the GPL. Wiki on compiling DR under various flavours of linux
TDM itself has the following:
- All non-software assets (models, textures, supplied maps etc) are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
- Assets related to doom, used in missions etc are licensed under the DOOM 3 Software Development Kit Limited Use License Agreement.
- The non-id(doom3 sdk) source for TDM itself is licensed under the ever awesome 3-clause BSD license.
FM's would be licensed according to the author (as map files themselves only contain references), but I'm sure if you wanted to copy some content from one to something you are working on, permission would be a very good idea - common decency.
And if in doubt, check the LICENSE file contained in the TDM source package.
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1
- All non-software assets (models, textures, supplied maps etc) are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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I've been playing around with Filter Forge for a while now, using it as a stand alone app and playing around with some filters, once you get the hang of it you can make some pretty nice stuff, tho I generally use the textures only as a base to manually edit them. Also has a really large collection of good user made filters that you can go download, most of them are quite configurable with sliders etc similar to Wood Workshop it seems.
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Hey there,
Please make sure you're using the latest gfx drivers and then change the Catalyst AI setting to 'off'
Theres a good chance thats causing it - so lets try that first!
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Assuming you have used one of the 'Create Model' curtains:
- Go to the entity tab, tick 'show interited values properties'
- There should be a 'solid' listed, click it and set its value to 0, it will make a new black entry to tell you that the inherited value has been overridden
(you could always skip viewing inherited and just make a new one, but I think its important take note of inherited for some stuff, makes you aware of certain things)
As for the footlocker, it depends how its constructed, is it the prefab or made from brushes? If its brushes, you use the same method as making a simple door.
- Go to the entity tab, tick 'show interited values properties'
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Thats a pretty nice idea, would be super simple to put in considering its just the reverse of the current method without the static base score, so long as it is explained I think that would be rather nifty
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Caulk is a texture which tells doom to not bother rendering it. But it still seals against the void. Its like making things invisible, but they're still there. Helps with performance, but also to help clean up the look when using shaders and not wanting unnecessary surfaces (the thin faces of a window in direct contact with the wall that you dont want to 'look' through anyway)
To change the size, angles etc of a projected light you have to go into vertex editing mode, select the light then hit 'V', drag them around as you see fit.
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pk4's are essentially just zip files, either rename it to a zip or just open it with something like winrar etc.
As for model to brush, you cant really do that. You can however make a window using the glass materials and a few brushes. (remember to caulk the sides of a window that you dont see)
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Once you have created a skybox successfully, you pretty much create walls of sky portal where its needed, it does the rest, exactly as you were thinking
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I almost never use the clipper tool for doors, I find it too much like hard work
Instead I make a copy of the wall I want to cut, then resize it to the dimentions of the door I want to put into it. Extruding it a bit on each side of the walls. Selecting the now 'cork' door going between the two rooms I hit subtract then delete the cork and look around to make sure the cuts are good. If the cuts are not neat (strange floating patches with no volume etc coming out at right angles) I generally select the well cut blocks, copy those then revert to before I had subtracted and paste them back in to place. Takes a few goes to get used to but quite quick and efficient when cutting between strangely sized/shaped things where you need a more visual guide
The most important thing is to just try cutting on simple, undecorated surfaces to minimise effort...
Also, if you look at console view after subtracting, if you get a large resultant number of new brushes etc, you know that its likely a bad cut.
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Wow, that looks great Melan :3
As for performance, make sure that your visportals are actually working using r_showTris 3, I've often made a whole load of changes only to notice that visportals(specially in 'open' city areas like streets etc) arnt working correctly. Then you can either battle merging portals or try to close in with sky portal(or whatever is applicable for your map)
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@Tels
Ah, I had a look thought that and have actually found something semi-interesting.
I had suspected the location identifiers earlier, but checking their entities I didnt see anything changing ambient... but when you brought them up again I rechecked them, showing inherited items. There is an ambient modifier included in the base class.
Then checking again and removing all of the location markers I noticed that doom/dmap/something seems to identify underground/cave like areas and automatically give them a location. Since when all the markers were removed the issue remained, but spread to some areas nearby that were cut off but did not use location seperaters at first(they were now linked). Areas like this that then lead into enclosed visportal areas keep this ambient setting too, as it seems to use them to identify these areas.
I'd be happy to send the map, I dont think it would be too easy to reproduce in a super simple map, but it might be interesting to look at. It was at least for me
But all in all, best to not call it a bug and more a 'just be careful of location's spreading via visportals!'... or similarAnd during all of this I found a different slightly strange bug which I'll add to the tracker in a few min
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I have this problem as well, however I can reproduce it quite easily.
1. Install a fan mission after a fresh install of TDM.
2. Install another fan mission or uninstall the one that was installed in step 1.
3. Black screen. Also, the load screen before the main menu is the default Doom 3 one, only without the texts (i.e. Loading game, Initialising Menu)
I have tried using the methods found in the previous posts, but none of them worked. Deleting all TDM related files in my Doom3 file and then re-downloading the whole 1.4GB TDM again solves this problem though.
So far it meant that I need to download the whole mod again for every fm i want to play, but I'll now try making a backup of the TDM files to get quick acess to them.
If you have the time/effort and a bit of know how, I would suggest perhaps using to difference the directories from when it is working to when it stops working. Most of it will be static, levels, maps, stuff like that. Logs and settings files would grow/replace, logs can be excluded and settings looked at. If you're using/know some *nix stuff this isnt much of an issue, however in windows I'm unsure of the best approach. Would be interesting to see what happened if you ran it in a Sandboxie, tho I dont know too much about how it stores local changes. Might be very straight forward to get the changed files that way tho. At the moment it seems to be trying to narrow down _if_ its a settings file or if its something like a file getting deleted/replaced etc.
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Texture Category from the Wiki\
That contains a lot of info about texturing and texture creation etc.
The best information that isnt linked there for using the texture tool is over here :
And the tool 'Surface Inspector', hotkey S
Allows much more control over things like scale, rotation etc, I find it most useful.
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@Serpentine: the visportals shouldn't make that difference to ambient light. Probably something else. What ambient light texture are you using? Some do fade.
I've been playing around some more, to test that - and sure enough it does change the ambient level... Im not 100% sure how.
The 'lighter' shot is what ambient is everywhere else, the 'darker' is in the visportal cut off area.
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/470/lighter.jpg
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/4968/darkerl.jpg
Using lights/ambientlightnfo for texture. Elevation of the point does not make a difference. Removing one of the visportals removes the behaviour...
:mystery:
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Im not 100% sure if anyone has asked this - and reading the wiki is far too academic for this question :
If I enclose an area with two visportals, think of an alley(with a dead end). I can close the horizonal and the vertical.
| | |VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV |``````````````````````````````V |``````````````````````````````V |______________________________V___
Where V is a visportal.
The area covered in `s becomes darker than the ambient area outside of the 'doubled' visportals. when you transition from one area to the other there is a smooth fade, is this intended? its quite nice for making darker areas. Does this even make sense for performance?
Also, on a topic that I actually have dug around for a while and not been able to find an answer : How do I change models/skins for a light that is both electric and has a switch?, at the moment when the lights are off I get bright glass, not ideal.
Newbie DarkRadiant Questions
in TDM Editors Guild
Posted
Thats quite a strange issue.