LDAsh

...and just incase anyone is wondering why this is a big deal:-

So here we go, someone on the #etlegacy IRC channel was able to help me dig this up... Freehand Adaptive Terrain Editor:- http://www.violae.net/temp/FATE_0_13_Win32_setup.zip I read that it doesn't export, but after playing with it I found that indeed it does, it's just not in the menu. Go to 'Edit Mode' and 'Export', but just put in a name for the 'Export Map' field and omit the map type extension. It does indeed export brushes in a map file, which can be loaded into Q3Radiant, which can be converted to brushDef3 which can be loaded into DarkRadiant. I had some trouble controlling the deform widget on Win7, but it does work with WinXP. Whether it's the OS or some dependency or my particular setup or whatever, I have no idea. It does work, however. I'll have to try it again with compatibility mode. And yes, like the screenshot above, it can do concave shapes. The shot above was just pointing out that the widget itself should be more like a standard 3-axis graphic, but despite it pointing up you can indeed drag it on the XY axis, just make sure the base of the widget is highlighted, not the arrow. Anyway, I've been looking for a way to get terrain into Radiant as brushes, even though they would inevitably be exported again as mesh tiles. The reason is so that individual brushes can be tweaked right there in Radiant, instead of needing to go back to a heightmap or program and export again, or just trying to be content with placing other structures or mapobjects on the terrain as a static mesh that can't be edited on-the-spot. The alternative is the Quake map exporter for Blender, which does also work, and is far more powerful, but far more tricky to make work. In the long-run, I'd rather get that working perfectly than to stick with this, but I'm still happy this could be dug up...

Thanks to ToKu over at Q3W forums who posted a 'stairwell generator' - That actually really did help a lot, because I threw the filename into Google and hoping to find some old lost FTP folders, and sure enough:- http://urtmaps.prkl.org/tools/ SurfaceGenerator is something that does pretty much what I was remembering. I read it even was based on the previous 'Mapgen' so I think it does everything. There are also a couple of terrain tools I was looking for, something called FATE. Sounds like it might be marginally better than EasyGen or GenSurf, but I'm not sure because I can't find it anywhere. (edit: a treasure-trove of Quake-mapping tools here:- https://www.quaddicted.com/files/tools/ ----------------------------- (edit: all I can find of FATE is this screenshot, but anyone who knows anything should instantly see why this tool would have been great to preserve! But I think it really is gone...)

So you used the same HDD to format and reinstall Windows, or do you still have the drive with the borked MBR? This also happened to me and I had a lot of luck recovering files using this:- https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I agree completely, and I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what these tools could do... If I remember correctly, they could generate things like spiral staircases and corkscrew tunnels and funnels and other formations that would be very tricky to do manually. These are not "map generators", more like "brushwork generators". The focus is that it would spit out these formations created from individual brushes, not patches or models, so they can still be textured and edited in Radiant. Not to be 'brushed aside' as someone looking for a 1-click make-a-map-for-me solution.

http://www.swift-mazes.com/ Yes, I was playing with this a few weeks ago and that's what made me remember these other older tools. Honestly, personally I don't find this particularly useful because it's more for blocking-out a layout rather than doing smaller specific objects. I've also been playing with the Blender Quake Map exporter. I can get brushwork into DarkRadiant using "Q3toD3", but a huge problem is that everything is a third bigger than it should be, which means trying to scale it down with infinite recursive decimals (0.666666*) and that can never be perfect. I can get it precise to 0.125 grid for 16384 unit area and snap all vertices to the grid, but anything beyond that will be off. That still allows for some nifty brushwork that would be otherwise many headaches to do manually in Radiant.

I vaguely remember some tools that could spit out a .map file of various customised shapes and objects (like stairwells) and I wanted to dig them back up and see how useful they still are, and see how one might go about using them to expand upon with more scripts. Although most of them are for idTech3 if not idTech2, I'd still like to try. But, you know how the internet is these days... http://mapgen.nerius.com/ QuArK is also interesting to look into for some of its quirks. I also found this supposed "ET Prefab Generator":- http://www.ruizzz.nl/prefabgenerator/index.php ...again with the 404s. Does anyone out there have that 'Mapgen' they could upload? Or could anyone out there suggest other tools that are similar?

Grid size definitely matters when dealing with brushes that aren't on a 90° angle, that's for sure. You want to adjust the brush edges/vertices and keep those aligned to the grid, as opposed to just arbitrarily rotating a brush around and intersecting them together, even if it seem like a harmless 45°. You run the risk of having vertices that aren't going to place nice with floating-point accuracy in the compiler, even if the brushes seem okay in Radiant. This can cause havoc with carving/merging the compiler does and can cause leaks, or other anomalies that prevent the map from compiling/running, or if it does run cause other glitchy issues. Maybe one easy thing to remember is to select your rotated brush, press V then I, then press CTRL+G. Still not as preferable as adjusting vertices/edges manually. Turning things into mapobjects is a way to go since they are treated differently by the compiler, but for that reason need to be understood in terms of visibility.

Angles like that are tricky and the compiler is going to be fussy with them. It really wants everything on 90° angles and 8x or 16x grid. You should consider having your angled brushwork contained within neater caulk brushwork like that surrounding it, which will then jive much nicer with visportals and preventing leaks.

Damn, man, you got me! And check this out:- I joined just 2 months after you did!!! You know why I joined? You do, because I was getting way too itchy every night rolling in puddles of sweat thinking about you. Please get over yourself. I'm not going to keep coming back here because honestly I'm still not even sure what you're trying to say. I'm part of some secret underground troll-brigade whose sole purpose is to destroy the almighty oneofthe8devilz because we're just too damn jealous? Get help. Seriously. I asked where the textures came from because I assumed you made the map. I then looked back and looked it up and found the map. This was a crime, apparently. ...I'm done here.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Devastation? Maybe you're confusing me with someone else? I have way better things to do than to follow you. I've been a member of this forum since 2005, FYI.

We are expected to tread on egg-shells around people who take criticism of projects and turn it into personal attacks and even explicit threats of violence... that won't turn out good for anyone. I was going to write a chunk of text, but I will leave it to simple logic - is it more likely that toxic stalkers are hot on his trail and following him around with ready-made sockpuppet accounts, or that he is dragging around this personality and flamewars ignite where he goes. These could be reasons why he is still looking very lonely all by himself here. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/14015-idtech-coop-medievalfantasystealth-universe-projects/?p=437135 This is the best advice he can receive and only he can take it. We can't constantly sit and try to carefully spoon it into his frothing maw.

Are all those textures from Hexen: Edge of Chaos? How about the map itself? ___________________________ Ah, I found it:- https://www.moddb.com/mods/sikkmod/addons/nightmare-burrows

I used a program called Araxis Merge to compare some LWO files, and it seems like there is a character set to determine the length of the material header prefixed to it. Apart from the headers themselves, the rest of the files are identical to each other. There are 2 references at the top and bottom, and if this prefixed character is not corrected, then Radiant doesn't want to play nice. I'm convinced it can be manually edited, but trying to figure out how to "count" the material length needs to be figured out. The reason for it being off by 2 is possibly because of the forward-slashes, or possibly because it's using a couple of other characters to count with. xmodels/security/pythagorasdetector1 0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwx rmodels/storage/twixsixbarrel1 0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqr

Should be possible with something like WinHex, by adjusting the material header reference and then offsetting the bytes by however many extra characters you needed. Would just like to add, according to my tests, LWO vs ASE will save you some MBs on your HDD, but won't actually do much for load-times or performance, AFAIK, incase that was a concern for anyone.

Actually I realised something interesting - this different winding issue is even in the software itself, as seen in the viewports:- The way you see it in Q4E is how it would be exported from DR, but not how it's displayed. So in order to get this type of geometry correct (where every triangle is important), it should just be done in "Q4Radiant", as difficult as that program is to use compared with DarkRadiant, at least it's WYSIWYG.

Sorry to bump this over a year later, but coming back to this issue, that Meshlab fix only really works on perfectly flat meshes and my other simple tests. If trying to fix a piece of terrain that has already been thoroughly articulated, only some of the edges can be fixed. Toying with other options usually destroys it in one way or another. Turning some edges is still better than it all being the complete opposite winding, but, for actual use-case it's still a lot of manual tidying up to get the geometry in and out of Radiant in a reasonable way, for such finely detailed terrain. I don't want to be offensive, but, realistically perhaps the reason this issue has been so overlooked for so long is because nobody has actually tried to do this kind of thing before - fully and finely articulating large chunks of vertex-blended terrain, and then optimising it outside of Radiant, and bringing it back in again. So I've come back to looking into the Python script. I've played with a few things in the script (as mentioned in the first post) but nothing is getting it right, if it works at all. Hopefully this final beg might result in a solution, but whatever the case, Merry Christmas to all.

I have to say, this is outright embarrassing and the whole thread should be nuked from orbit. You would figure, the project would be trying to gain/retain as many mappers as possible, so it can continue to grow, instead of drama and flamewars ripping everything apart. And so we'd see more additions here:- http://www.thedarkmod.com/missions/ Which it's interesting to compare the amount of times Bikerdude's name is found on that page, compared to Judith... just saying.

Up to 1024 resolution version is free to download if you login and you will have 15 free credits each day.

This came to mind, if 1024 is enough texels for you:- https://www.textures.com/download/substance0045/127923

https://www.sharetextures.com

https://www.cgbookcase.com/textures/ Also, Poliigon have recently updated their license to forbid use in commercial and "open source" projects. Although I don't think they can legally pull the rug like that (on content they offered before changing the license) I'd still advise against using it. It's a shame they did that, I can't help but feel it's a sleazy attempt to wrangle cash out of people.

At 200K, you'll never get this into TDM in a way that won't affect performance unless it's in a closet where that's the only thing in the scene. That's why I recommend looking into MeshLab, because you stand a chance of performing decimation (which is much better than anything Blender can do) and bring it down to a reasonable polycount for real-time rendering, then bake all the details back into it from the original high-poly mesh.

https://patternpanda.org/ Although I think the normalmaps are pretty cheap, a few materials here might be worth looking into.

And after looking there, you're going to want to look here:- http://www.meshlab.net/