Sotha

Yeah, captain Knightons manor aka Porter 1. I've made great progress this weekend and I'm rather confident I get it released shortly after the new TDM version rolls out. Whenever that occurs, I dunno. After this mission I'm gonna take a long break from mapping. Three map contributions per year is definately enough for me.

One mansion heist coming from here as well. Looks like nice times are upon mansion-lovers..

My map now has 2 skyboxes and I can switch between them. The first skybox is the old 3d skybox. Meaning that the buildings are models. The second skybox is 2d, meaning that everything therein is 2d patches. 3d skybox: Worst possible fps: 45. (observed at certain map bottleneck area, not in the area seen in the screenie) Showprimitives: views 5, draws 870, tris 39000, shdw 2280, image 60mb. (showprimitives is for the area seen in the screenie) Screenie: 2d skybox: Worst possible fps: 55. (same area as above) Showprimitives: views 5, draws 150, tris 20000, shdw 2900, image 46mb. (showprimitives is for the area seen in the screenie) Screenie: 2d skybox does not look as good as 3d, but the performance improvement is quite tangible. Maybe I'll stick with the 2d and improve it by better patch placement. I don't think it is difficult to reach similar visual quality as in the 3d skybox. And low-enders will love me for additional fps. I probably have no longer the SVN access, I'm afraid. Of course, I could stick the stuff I have in a .zip file at mediafire or something. The nomenclature would probably have to be changed to fit the official TDM stuff. I can contribute the tree and building textures right away. For more more complex assets (models, skyboxes) my modus operandi is as follows: I want them to be unique for the mission I've created them for. So they appear for the first time in my mission.After the mission is published models, skyboxes, everything is free to be added to TDM assets. Oh, and I'm eagerly waiting for the female characters. I'd love to have them for my map. But once v1.03 comes out, I only swap placeholder AI's into females and press the big button labeled 'publish.'

The texture is basically a collection of 5 trees. Aligning the texture on a decal patch you can get 5 different trees from one texture. Then you can clone the patches to get individual trees here and there. Like here: Or you can create a forest simply by multiplying the patches: The benefit of individual patch=one tree is that you get the perspective effect, when the more distant trees are smaller. I don't think there is a huge performance impact, since one tree is 2 polies (right?). A forest of 100 trees costs 200 polies, which is less than one typical model. All the buildings in the scene are real models. I had the idea of creating textures with images of the buildings from different angles and then substitute the model buildings with patches. The performance improvement would be quite nice. But yeah, my map is mostly finished and I'm waiting for 1.03 assets. In the meantime I could easily look to create textures for the building patches. I think many things can be accomplished already with this simple texture of 5 trees so I'm focusing on the buildings rather than on the trees. As always, I'm really pleased if someone else can benefit from my hard work as well. Naturally, all textures, models etc I create are free for TDM to use.

I was just about to lose hope and quit trying, but these last suggestions helped. Got it finally to work. For those who are also wondering how to make it: The material file is like this: textures/knightons_manor/forest_light_d. tga is the normal diffusemap texturetextures/knightons_manor/forest_light_alfa. tga is the alphamask-thingy. Basically it is a black&white image with black background and white silhouette of the trees I want to be visible. Black is transparent. White is opaque. Thanks for help!

Nope. I'm working with .tga files. And they should have this transparent areas, as seen in the image above. I did not understand this part.

I've tried to replace the poly-forest with a decal forest. I'm running into trouble again. I've created a texture like this using a screenshot of the TDM trees: And now I'm trying to get it ingame. The transparency does not work. The material definitions I've tried so far are: The second one I took from the tdm_decals_vegetation.mtr. It is from textures/darkmod/decals/vegetation/hanging_horizontal_leaves. I basically don't know what it is doing, but it's used for decal vegetation so I thought it might just work. I cannot get this to work. The area which should be transparent looks always black. Probably is due to some magic material definition, which I am not aware of. So.. what is it?

Darn. Couldn't get that skybox correctly. It is impossible to do by hand. Even if the cubemap matches with all it's neighbours, it still looks horrible. Choosing a different approach, I checked the cityscape with r_showtris 4. It looked like a white mass in a cityscape shape. When I created the thing I had simply done a few toy buildings which I rotated and placed them in the skybox. And multiplied them to make it look like a city. Bad move. What was I thinking! There were zillions of polies, which the player would never see, windows on the blind side of the buildings etc. Removed those, removed buildings not visible to the skycamera. I also removed a forest made out of shrunk tree models (170 polies each.) Need to do a decal version of that forest. Removed my moonlight-light which made no visual impact because of the ambient_world does it's job. In the end I got improvement from 35fps to 50fps. And this is measured in the lowest possible performance area, otherwise it runs stable 60fps on my computer. And this is with 80% of the planned amount of AI's wandering around the map. Success! Moral of the story: do not put in visuals the player will never see. If you look carefully, you'll discover many things optimize gaining performance without degrading visuals.

Holy crêpes! I disabled the poly skybox and the change was 35fps -> stable 60 fps. Assistant! Bring forth the clone brush!

Ah, that explains it. Thanks a lot! It's impossible to take precise screenies and get them to align, but what I *can* try is the take as good screenies as possible and clone brush the buildings to the original well tiling cubemap. But before taking that action I must see the performace gain: is it really worth it. Okay, thanks. Gotta learn finally the .def files, I suppose.

In addition to the previous problem, I'd also like to know can I change AI carried items properties. I have a guard carrying a lantern, but the shadow cast by the guard didn't look realistic, so I put the guard to noshadows 1. The guard looks now fine, but the guard's SWORD is still casting shadows. Can I somehow set that to no shadows as well?

My current set of problems arise from the envshot command. Background: I first made a nice landscape I've been using as a starting point for skybox creation. I've added small building models to my skybox room to fill the landscape with buildings. Now I want to smoothen performance by capturing an envshot of my environment with all the buildings. This way the new skybox would provide better performance since the buildings are in the *image* not polygons. I have a skybox room with the plain terrain cubemap and the building models. The room contains the skybox camera. I made an empty room with skyportal textures, flew there in 640x480 resolution and typed "envshot knighton 512" I get a bunch of images in the env/ folder. The problem is that all the images are identical, like the direction I was watching when I typed the envshot command? I've read this http://modetwo.net/d...title=Cube_maps and followed the instructions, but I've no idea what I'm doing wrong. I've tried 640x480 and 800x600 resolutions, 512 and 1024 envshot parameters, but no help. I've tested with noclip and without it. Any clues?

Boohoo! How utterly demoralizing to see such a magnificent attention to detail on such an old engine. I'm currently struggling with my mansion exterior. It either looks like doom 1 without much detail, or then it is one way trip to choppyland. Too much ground to cover, too difficult portalizing.. I'll hope the gameplay makes up the lack of details..

Heh. I doubt it. Clearly he enjoys posting in the style he does and I suspect some petty forum arguments would not change that. Nope. He'll be back.

Hey, nice you noticed that one! When I browsed the sounds and spotted that I just *had* to use it in the broken portcullis lever. Little bit of detail...

So basically you want an unopenable glass window, which dampens sound, but less than a brick wall? Make hole in the wallMake a window: a glass brush and place it in the hole.Make the glass window brush into a door. Either rotating or sliding, doesen't matter.Put a visportal inside the window brush.Set the window-door entity properties as you want (set the wanted sound dampening, namely the spawnargs which control the how the sound is dampened when the door-window is closed.)Then in the end just make the window-door unfrobable.Play it safe by making the window-door locked or set "ai_should_not_handle 1." That way the AI won't open the glass if searching for the player. That's it. EDIT: just gave this another thought and I think this results in a situation where the window looks black since the visportal is closed. Is there a spawnarg for a door to keep visportal open at all times? If there is, the problem should be solved. EDIT: Thought about it some more, and yeah. It should work. All you need to do is to put the visportal in the window hole, but not in contact with the window-door. I hope you get it to work.

[..] Deleted my posting. Not gonna derail another thread.

Operating System Windows XP CPU Intel® Core™2 Quad Q9500 2.83Ghz System RAM 4GB Video Card ATI Radeon HD 4890 Video Drivers Catalyst™ Version 10.8 Experienced Performance Had to disable Catalyst AI to make skies correct. Running in native resolution of 1680x1050. No AA, No AF. Looks pretty, runs smooth as silk. Except in the *old* version of return to the city, that is the only map where I've had performance issues.

It's impractical to make separate versions of a map. I'm certain I personally would never do it. There is no confusion, since there is only one true version of the given map. Remember, instead of asking the mapper to see extra trouble for them, the low-enders could easily go to the local computer store and exchange hard currency to get new toys. This move would confer boost for ALL the games they have, plus they have the possiblity of playing newer games. Plus irritation of slowness is gone. It's many pros for the con of money loss. Hardware is really cheap nowadays, even students can afford decent gaming rigs. But this all said, mappers still should do their best to optimize their maps for smooth performance.

Most excellent shots! I'm a bit worried on performance, though. But if you can do magic on Return to the City, I'm sure you can manage it. The shots reminds me of a cathedral I visited in Norway, namely the Nidaros Cathedral. I found a few shots from the net to aid with creativity: Exterior: http://upload.wikime...-west-front.jpg Interior: The famous glass window from the inside. It's also visible in the exterior shot. Maybe these spark the texture-wizards we have here. http://upload.wikime..._2005-08-22.jpg The exterior was cluttered with all kinds of details: http://nord.blogit.f...al-gargoyle.jpg http://nord.blogit.f...al-gargoyle.jpg Great place. Visit it if you go to Trondheim.

The best way to avoid assholezation is to try to avoid such harsh tone. Otherwise one asshole can induce other -entirely sensible people- to become assholes as well. Net effect is disastrous for everyone. Let's keep our own standards high and let's not be unnecessarily rude: if someone is an asshole, that is no excuse for someone else to turn into one as well.

Yeah. For immersion *seeing* the door open is more important than *hearing* the door open. We are probably assuming the thief opens all doors with stealth and carefulness. I hope someone figures this out.

Hey, does anyone else here have choppy flash performance? All flash-related run a few seconds, then pauses, then continues. In other words flash does not run smoothly, but it is really choppy. Like slideshow choppy. This is *not* related to bandwith, it is just playback of a flash video which has already been buffered. On the same computer, linux side, everything runs perfectly (as always). I've tried uninstalling and installing flash several times, but no dice. Perplexing. Tried googling, no solutions. Does anyone here have this problem?

Yeah, I agree with this. I tried once to brainstorm how it would be possible -from mapper point of view- to get an AI to deviate from normal path to check a room if he sees a door mysteriously open. I thought that if we had some kind of general purpose suspicion marker, similar to absence markers, except it would not provoke 'something is missing' -barks. When the door is opened it would trigger a set of triggers, which place this suspicion marker in the doorway and then remove it. If the AI saw the marker, he would go to high enough alert level to make the AI to walk to the marker and look around a bit, like checking the room. But yeah. There is no such marker, and I'm not sure how to prevent AI from agitating themselves with it. The door should somehow detect that it is the *player* opening it before triggering the marker on-marker off show. Difficult stuff.

Correct. That's what I did. I'm holding the object there.