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OrbWeaver

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Posts posted by OrbWeaver

  1. The problem with the ambient lights not working in render mode. Is that something we will be able to fix, or is it more up Spog's alley? It might be a further deterent to beta mappers if they can't see the ambient lights properly rendered.

     

    I will have a look into this. Initially I thought that the light texture was ignored, which would mean the functionality was missing from the renderer, but further tests reveal that some textures do work (lights/biground1 for instance). This is encouraging since it suggests that the code is already in place to handle this; hopefully it should be possible to recognise the ambientlight keyword as well.

  2. One suggestion. Would it be possible to move all the lights out of the entities menu and drop them into their own menu under Add Light? It sent me for a loop initially that I could only add a normal light and then have to go into entities to select the type of light I actually wanted.

     

    The way it works is that Add Entity gives you the complete list, while Add Light and Add Model just give you a quick path to two very common specific types of entity ("light" and "func_static"). I could theoretically add more hardcoded shortcuts like this (perhaps "Add moving light" or something), but I wouldn't want to go down the route of special-case subsearches.

     

    Also, can the textures menu be tidied up a bit too? In DarkRadiant, I can only load all of the darkmod textures, I can't select specific groups for faster viewing.

     

    A Doom 3-style media browser is on the to-do list.

     

    Sorry, one last idea. Could the light, entity and prefab menus have a search field or perhaps just the ability to press a letter to take you further down the list?

     

    Not sure what you mean - are you referring to a shortcut key with ALT?

     

    I'm really liking where you're taking DarkRadiant orb. It's looking great.

     

    Glad you share the vision. Hopefully I can prove wrong my own previous assertion that there is not a game level editor in existence that isn't unfriendly and bug-ridden.

  3. Is it the collision mesh that determines how it rests on the ground? If so a simple box probably won't work for a rock.

     

    Yes. Yes.

     

    If you zoom in small you should be able to fit the brush to the size of the model fairly well. You can also shave off parts of the brush with the clipper tool before exporting, as long as it remains a single convex brush.

  4. DarkRadiant 0.5.1 is available from SourceForge:

     

    http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.p...lease_id=434137

     

    Fixes:

     

    - Changing an entity keyvalue now sets the map status to changed so it can be saved

    - Dragging a model now updates in realtime, rather than waiting for the drag to finish

    - Textures should now display correctly on ASE models

    - Application should not crash on Window 2000 due to the presence of global.xlink (which has been removed anyway).

     

    Enhancements:

     

    The huge right-click entity menu is GONE. Instead there is a context menu with options to add a light, model, entity and (eventually) a prefab at the current location. The selection of an entity uses a separate dialog with an alphabetical list of all entity classes (with typeahead search).

  5. One interesting thing I noticed is that the demand definitely does not seem to be linear with respect to what's thrown up on the screen. When I turn so that just a few spheres are on screen, the hit is huge, but as I turn more so that more are visible, the performance hit increases at a decreasing rate. Probably some kind of magical J.C. optimization doing that. Then again, because of that, my results might be somewhat worthless because the magnitude of hit in comparison to how close they're both approaching zero.

     

    I wonder if this is related to what Gildoran was saying about Doom 3 expecting hardware to be fillrate-limited rather than transform-limited. Perhaps in a Geforce 4 the two are more or less the same, so that sometimes one dominates the other and vice versa.

  6. But does this mean we can't see render mode while editing? That is a really BIG drawback I think! Perhaps it isn't really

     

    There is a render mode, available by pressing F3. Currently it is very limited and only displays a rough approximating to Doom 3, with simple lights (no custom textures) and no shadows. Hopefully the framework is enough for further improvements; unfortunately I am not yet much of an OpenGL/graphics programmer so I don't know how easy it will be to add these features.

  7. Welll... that involves creating material files for all my textures with the ambient light tutorial I have.

     

    No it doesn't. You can use multiple light sources, including some with a suitable ambient lightshader applied.

     

    I thought that was the Doom 3 engine. I thought that went without saying.

     

    Only if you make it so. You can use as many light sources as you wish, although don't go too far above 2 or 3 if you can avoid it for performance reasons. Pitch black shadows do not exist in real life because there is always another source of light.

  8. More detail, less flat texturing and blocky architecture.

     

    More subtletly, fewer extremes of light and dark (most of those shots only have one light source, everything in shadow is black).

     

    Less garish, cartoony colours.

     

    More of a coherent visual impression, less ad-hoc placement of random objects and brushes with no overriding style.

     

    HTH.

  9. Yeah, the only way to do true volumetric fog is by using a particle effect. Perhaps you could modify your snow/rain emitting texture to emit very large, slow-moving smokepuff particles (which look good as fog if they are sufficiently faint). You might not even have a performace issue if you used large enough sprites, as you would not need that many.

  10. What does LSCM mean?

     

    Least Squares Conformal Map (also Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopy). It has something to do with the algorithm and the way it tries to preserve local angles.

     

    Cool spider BTW, I have made several attempts to model a spider in Blender but never quite managed to get the proportions right.

  11. Do you mean LSCM?

     

    I can look at an LWO in Blender and tell if it definitely is UV-mapped, although I don't have sufficient confidence in the import script to declare that it isn't (since it may have one, but the script failed to import it).

  12. * Quite a lot of models and geometry show up as "shader not found" in the preview even though they work in game. Under investigation.

     

    One cause of this problem has been identified (it may not be the only one). DarkRadiant is incorrectly attempting to use the *MATERIAL_NAME rather than *BITMAP to identify the Doom 3 shader to use for an ASE model. As a temporary workaround you can make an ASE model render correctly by editing the *MATERIAL_NAME to specify the Doom 3 shader.

  13. At the least, you're surely going to do adequate research into the way people spoke in medieval England and only use words which they would have used?

     

    I'd like to see the adequate research that demonstrates that the modern-sounding swearwords and phrases in question ("What the fuck?" etc) were actually widely-used by the medieval population in the same way they are now, rather than just appearing in a modified form in the occasional piece of Shakespeare.

  14. *make the map first (of course) then get the exact outline of where you want the fog to go and create a large image (2048x2048?) that has the transitions you want. Use this as your lighttexture etc.

     

    If the fog doesn't obey the light texture (which it seems not to), this won't work.

     

    The only other solution I have is to use the bind light at map start thingy. Though that means the fog is always with you.

     

    Yes, but you can script the light to change intensity, colour or fog density (shaderParm 3 I think) based on the player's position.

  15. I had an AMD home-built machine which idled at 60 C and went up to 68 or more when processing. The die was rated to 85 C, which I would have thought of as fairly typical, so I would be surprised if a mere 60 C would cause a lockup.

  16. I'm sure I do somwhere, I'll try and dig it out. As I recall I actually had to remodel the object since the low-poly mesh structure was crap (it had been decimated from the high-poly model).

     

    As with most of my models the texture was not spectacular but the addition of a UV map allows a more skilled texture artist to take over if required.

  17. I quite liked Blenders approach and after watching a video tutorial on how to use it I found it very easy and intuitive.

     

    Have you tried the Live LSCM feature in later releases of Blender yet? You can produce your original unwrapping, pin some vertices, move them around and watch the entire map deform in realtime as you drag.

     

    Also there are some new additions in 2.42, including an "Angle-based" unwrap which is supposedly better than LSCM (something to do with warping, I haven't investigated much), and much easier seam-creation tools (just choose two points on either side of a model and Blender will create a seam automatically along the shortest path between them).

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