Sotha

Part 10: Sounds has been uploaded. Enjoy!

Part 9: Objectives & Readables is uploaded!

Thanks, nbohr! Bugtrackerified: http://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=4487

So I will file a bug report? Can someone tell me how I can make a new material that I can ship with my mission. The shipped material would override the defunctional material and my mission would have the frob highlighting for the this texture? Thanks!

Hi! While working on my map, I made a secret compartment to wall made of textures/darkmod/plaster/framed_03 I noticed that this texture, when on a door, will not frob-highlight at all. It is probably missing the material information. There may be other materials in tdm_plaster.mtr, which are missing frob highlighting. Is it by design or accident?

I know there are many ways to remove the noise. Audacity way would need me to separate audio from the video, then do the noise reduction and then edit the videos with new audio track. Lots of work, when I just want to focus on the main-good-stuff, which is the mapping. For some drivers there is a on-the-run noise removal, but my drivers have that option grayed out. I didn't want to start messing around with sound drivers, lose time, and risk losing the basic mic functionality that is presently working. So I'm just gonna wipe the problem under the carpet and do nothing. Agreed, it is an annoyance for most people, but the videos will serve their purpose for those who want to watch and learn from them. If I decide to start making more videos for youtube in the future, I will probably buy a good mic, a faster internet connection, some background dancing girls, and do a thorough system check so that everything is in top-notch order. At present there are no such plans, so I trust the current setup will suffice, and OGDA gets their meditation session.

Thanks for your feedback, I appreciate your appreciation. I like your unusually positive outlook on things.

The next video is now processing. It should be ready in 10 minutes or so. Part 8: Monsterclip & AI Enjoy!

Just imagine the TDM Insider HEADlines... bwahaha. Cough. Sorry....

Thanks for sharing. That really was an interesting read and formalizes some of my experiences I've had with New Things in the past. It was fun to even recognize that I was a 'mop' in that New Thing back in the past and a 'geek / fanatic' in that other. Even recognized some 'sociopaths' from the past. As for the end, well, I think it is natural that all things come to an end eventually and delaying the end is the only thing we can really try to do. And when the end comes, it is not too bad either if the Ending Thing brough joy while it was still active. That joy and experience will increase in value, because memories have the habit of getting gilded. Perhaps 20 years from now TDM is long gone and we have a bunch of us old farts hanging around here remembering in how exciting circumstances TDM got Greenlit, or how frickin' unfair that teleporting flaming revenant in Transaction was (what was I thinking!)

Nice videos, Springheel! I added a link to it from my modules-video comments.

Cough cough coercion cough cough... ;D Anyhow, well said. If everything we do was honed to absolute perfection, we would not have finished anything. Good enough is good enough. That's good rule. Then next time, we can do it a bit better if it is not too much extra work.

Peer review won't help, because like grayman said, it is too late to change them. *If* someone makes new modules to TDM core, perhaps then it would be a good idea to do some team peer reviewing. But my personal experience is that whatever you do, and no matter how well you do it, and no matter how much others helped you to perfect it, someone else *will* find some component of your hard work, which they can (rightly or not) criticize. And that is of course irritating, and it burns out unpaid voluntary workers ultra-fast.

Hmm. I might be wrong, but didn't doom 3 use total pitch blackness? That way you had to use the flashlight and you could not gamma-cheat your way out of it. Also modern games like Rust have pitch black nights that force the player to use light sources. Increasing gamma does not make anything visible in the darkness.

Maybe I'll just add a text annotation on the video that mentions it is not the default lighting method plus a link to the A-Z guide lighting section. That should cover all eventualitites.

Part 7 about lights is up. @Judith, The benefit with nightvision approach is that the mission will not look so washed out, which is why I wanted to use this here. It has not been experimented with much yet. I do agree that the nightvision is probably not the newbie mapper's default choice, which is why I talked about the ambient world lights in the video. Should have probably talked more about it though. It probably isn't a terrible mistake on my part, though, because most likely the newbie mapper will be referred to the A-Z guide anyway, and that covers the ambient world lights. I am thinking that if I calibrate myself properly in the training mission gamma room and set the nightvision lamp brightness to decent level, it will work for the majority of the people. If it doesn't, the player can always tune their ingame gamma settings to the brightness level they please.

Uploading the next video now. Part 6: Backyard Details https://youtu.be/f-oFxWs8cWQ Should be up in 20mins or so. Edit: uploaded!

What Springheel said. You can still do any kind of geometry with the func_statics. Just keep the sealing brushes blocky-90-degrees. You won't be losing any interesting shapes... The only thing you will lose is the bug hunts for weird problems. I am happy if you have not encountered those. Weird sealing problems are easy to fix, but pain in the butt to locate.

Ok. I googled around and found out how to activate the noise suppression, but for some reason my system does not have the tab which has this microphone option. I don't know how to get that enhancements-tab. Sorry about the inconvenience. I hope it isn't too bad. The modular way is the best way. That is what all the modern games use nowadays. The difference here is that I make the modules in DR, because I am not so good with real 3d-modeling software like Blender. <- This exactly. Thanks Obst! --- In other news: Interior designers flee in panic. New part is uploaded and ready for viewing: Part 5: Interior Details

If you keep your sealing geometry in grid 8 and 90-degree blocky and as simple and straightforward as possible, the risk of getting leaks is greatly reduced. Maintaining the mission is much easier. Using this blocky-simple-sealing-geometry -approach, I've never had much issues with leaks and weird results. For example, when I made Glenham Tower, I lost a lot of time bugfixing a weird sound leak. The sounds from the outside was leaking inside the tower, even though the tower was properly sealed and visportalled. It turned out that sealing worldspawn must be 8 units thick. I had slanted 8 units thick, so it was thinner than 8 units. This caused the sound to leak. When I widened the slanted sealing walls to slanted 16 units thick, the sound leak went away. Had I used simple, blocky approach then, I would have not lost time to seek out the issue. Also, as veteran mappers know, slanted geometry may start deteriorating due to the floating point rounding issues. At least at some point it did, it might have been fixed already. In short, hours of mapping experience indicates that keeping sealing geometry as simple as possible (8 units thick, 90-degree blocky, non-slanted) is generally predictable and safe. Using slanted sealing geometry may result in strange and hard-to-troubleshoot issues, i.e. "asking for trouble."

Ah, good question! I should have talked more about it in the video. Here I had a simple walls without any features and I still used the modules. It is true that I could have gotten exactly the same result by simply making the walls the traditional way by dragging new brushes between the window/door modules. Sure, using the modules will result in little bit more tris than using the traditional way, but the small extra amount of tris is so little, it does not matter. But imagine if I had spent more time in the module building and made some really fancy looking wall modules. Now I would immediately benefit from the modular approach over the traditional way, because making a single high detail module and cloning it around gets me more details very quickly rather than building each detailed wall section the traditional way. Also the modules give be these benefits: 1) I can control each modules piece shadow casting (a performance improvement tool) and 2) it is very quick to re-arrange stuff with the models (if I build the traditional way, I cannot just reshuffle geometry pieces to get the resut I want.) If the modules were of very high detail, I could also make each module to have LOD detail models (but that's a lot of work). Oh, and also, the wall modules had already textures that were perfectly aligned with all the other modules (I used the FIT operation in the surface inspector). If I would build the traditional way, I would be facing the extra work of aligning every single wall piece textures by hand (lots of boring work). Yes, the engine treats func_statics differently than worldspawn. Someone more proficient with the engine, may correct me, but I think that dmap does not optimize func_statics in any way. This way they can have any kind of weird arrangement of brushes and the engine will just treat it as a model. Worldspawn gets optimized during dmap. This may result is unexpected results if you have made weird brushwork. Thus, IMHO, worldspawn should be just used for simple geometry of sealing brushes (and floors.) Everything else is good to be func_statics. This makes the work less error-prone. The floors must be worldspawn so that the AI can walk on it. The AI does not see or feel func_statics! The AAS nagivation mesh will be applied on worldspawn. When talking about func_statics, I must remind that the AI does not 0see of feel it. All func_statics must be monsterclipped. This will have it's own part in the mapping blog later. Yes. The engine treats func_static and worldspawn differently. The main benefit is that the func_statics are grouped (they are quick and easy to clone around), and I can control the shadows of each individual module, and the func_static can be anything and the dmap will not try to optimize/change it. I always try to build so that floors, monsterclip and sealing walls are worldspawn. Everything else if func_static. It makes life so much easier.

Of course it is okay to ask questions. I hope I can provide an answer, though... I made the support beam 45-degree piece the way I did because it was a quick way to do it. Since the beam is a func_static, it is sort of a model, so it does not matter if the 45-degree piece penetrates into the horizontal and vertical beams. I could have cut the 45-degree piece with the clipper so that it was flush against the beams, but there is no incentive to do so. When working with worldspawn brushes, then the mapper needs to be more careful. I would make sure all worldspawn brushes are blocky, 90-degree and in grid 8. Slanted sealing worldspawn brushes is like asking for trouble.

All uploads have been completed. Obsttorte, thanks for the tip. Where is the noise suppression setting? It's a youtube thing? I'm definitely not gonna re-encode and upload the videos if the noise suppression requires that.

Uploading parts 3 and 4 now. @Jetrell, thanks for your interest. I joined this community around 2007 (wow a decade ago next september! Time truly flies when you're having fun!) and started learning DR. Before that I had fiddled just a little with mapping for Doom 1, Half life 1 and Farcry, but those works were never released. I was just playing around and testing stuff. So yeah, one could say that I have over a decade of hobbyist expertise with game editors. But you do not need years of experience to get basic or advanced level of proficiency. I would argue that if you watch this video series, do the A-Z mapping tutorial here ( http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=A_-_Z_Beginner_Full_Guide_Start_Here! ) and make your own little 1-5 room mission, then you have learned everything it takes to efficiently create missions. Each mapper might have a different mapping technique (or workflow.) The one you see in this video series is the one I have developed for myself over the years: it is fast, efficient and fun. I think, learning the DR editor is quite fast: basically you just repeat simple steps over again (create brush, texture, clone, place). But the mapping technique is the thing that takes longer to develop. Perhaps this video series provides a shortcut for new mappers? Why to map? For me it a creative exhaust. I like to create new stuff. Some people paint or draw, but I'm not very good in those, so I map. One especially fun part in mapping that it has many components: creation of a place out of nothing, telling a story, making fun gameplay, etc.

My computer went to sleep while uploading so the process was interrupted. Now it is finally uploaded. Sorry about that and enjoy!