Skaruts

For example, when you're monster_cliping some part of your map there's no point having that filter on until you're finished. Meanwhile this helps navigating the 3D view and you can also see how things look more clearly in that view. That's one example that stuck to my mind since recently, as I was watching Springheel's speed mapping videos, and at some point he expressed his annoyance at that. That was also when I thought I could try to tackle this again too. Also the visportals, as OrbWeaver mentioned, among others. Yea, I figured the translucency would be hacky. I never intended this to be a definite solution, though, since the ideal one would always be if DR supported it. It's more like a next best thing, I guess. That this creates extra geometry is indeed a bit of a set back. It's ok while building the maps, but then you only have have a sense of the real performance whenever you remove it... I don't know how annoying that may become. I never get to that point with my maps...

I don't, but it's ok. I wasn't the one with the issue, I just managed to replicate it. I'm not really making any FMs at the moment either, so...

Yup. It does.

Can't the unnecessary geometry become a bit of an issue, though, in dmap times or at runtime? Especially if stairs are detailed?

That's how I managed to. In a 256x256 room (128 high). There's two sets of stairs in the map, to the left of player start is the one I managed to fix before, and to the right is the original one with the problem. stairs.map.txt EDIT: I just made it solid 0 and looked at it from the inside, and doesn't seem like there's any faces facing inward. Someone mentioned this before, and I was wondering.

Just for the record, maybe the other setups work too, I only tried that one. The reasoning was just that separating each part of the staircase in its own func_static that makes the engine calculate their geometry separately, making it cleaner and without each part interfering with each other (or the walls/floors). Since excessive geometry seemed to be the problem, I though that would be the way to go. Though, as far as I know, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, anything that isn't sealing geometry should always be func_static anyway.

I'm currently adapting my textures to it. I found a little slight problem with the text of some of the back ones showing up in front of the text of some of the front ones, but that may be down to adjustments in the alpha channels. I'm gonna play around with it. It's probably not a big deal, though.

Yea, it works now. To be honest I'm still not happy about it though. The transparency brightens the back ones a bit too much for my taste (this was one of the problems I had with other blend modes). I juxtaposed yours and mine for comparison: I'm not sure that that's a big problem in practice, but... personally I rather not have it. My shadow material needs some fixing though.

I just recreated the staircase, and found it actually somewhat easy to get the same problem, and I think it's related to excessive geometry cuts, although probably still caused by a bug. As I made the walls longer/shorter I got different results (or no bad results in some cases), one time it affected the wall where some tris had different lighting, another time the wall had a black triangle, and then I got the exact same problem as the OP, in the staircase itself. All the problems with walls could be solved by making the staircase into a func_static, but the last one couldn't. The way I solved that one this case, that you might want to try, was by using rich_is_bored's 3rd setup (with a slight difference, but may be irrelevant -- see in spoiler below), and by making three func_statics out of it: - one for all the boards - one for both the big ramp and the big block - one for all the leftover triangle-steps below the boards.

I'm not sure that makes a difference. What I mean is that, looking at the last screenshot you showed, the engine cuts the geometry below all the steps in one way, but for some reason it does it differently on just that one step.

Not just that, it's not cutting triangles below the step (the wooden board), as it does below all the others. That empty triangle should be 3 triangles.

So that was the one... I figured there had to be a way to do it using alpha. Seems like you had the same problem with extra geometry too. Putting it into a .pk4 is a good idea, though. Could've done that myself. Though they will be overridden if the user has unpacked these files to folders. Thanks. I'll still be using my own textures, as I rather have those lines on some of them (and a bit more translucency), among a few other things, but this was nice to know. EDIT: Noticed a problem, though: some textures are invisible behind some others. (Not just behind monster clip, most of the tall brushes have faces invisible behind the adjacent ones.) (The bright strip below the monster clip is normal though, it's just a different wooden floor I have there.)

@Zen3001, could you share the map? (question for others: should he share both the .map and .darkradiant, or is just one of them enough?) Could you maybe also share your dmap log for comparison? (to get the dmap log in a text file use the console command clear first (to get rid of unnecessary garbage), then dmap your map, then do condump dmaplog.txt. Then share the content of dmaplog.txt -- dmaplog.txt is an arbitrary name, you can call it whatever you want. You can check the condump command here, near the bottom.)

Hardly anyone respects speed limits, that's my point. It's only where they have radars or something. Yea, human trafficking is actually a broader problem, indeed. As for bicycles, they're forbidden to circulate on the road here (anything that doesn't have a number plate is). Yet there's still plenty of them doing it. The cops don't really do anything. And it's annoying. They could go on the freakin sidewalk, like I do, but they don't!

It's true that they're made under that assumption, but I didn't argue that that wasn't the case. I said the result that can be observed over and over is that people will find ways around laws/regulations/taxation/etc. They're made under that assumption, but that assumption is wrong. A good way to visualize this is with prohibitions (leaving the rest aside for a moment). What determines how effective a prohibition is, is the amount of demand that there is for what was made illegal. There's an inverse correlation there, the more demand, the less effective the prohibition is. You can see it with drugs. They're illegal, and yet so many people still take drugs. In fact, many will take drugs because it's illegal. That was my case and of many of my peers. It's a lesson that should've been learned 100 years ago in the Prohibition Era. When they made alcohol illegal they created Gangsters (and inflated crime rates). The reason for this is because most people wanted alcohol, and criminalizing something people want, only has the effect of moving it to the black market where people can still get it. When they made alcohol legal again, most Gangsters disappeared (very few turned to drugs) because people will rather buy from the store legally. Gangsters were essentially out of business then. The war on drugs today solves nothing, and inflates crime rates (and gang violence). I suspect if drugs (all of them) became legal everywhere, cartels in mexico would be mostly out of business, street gang kids would have to get jobs, etc. Well, prostitution would have to be legalized too, and pimps would have to get jobs as well. Meanwhile, crime rates would drop, because there would less shootings, less beatings, less human-trafficking, etc etc. Essentially the same outcome they saw when they legalized alcohol 100 years ago. With taxation is the same thing. In my country the gov had the bright idea of taxing tobacco, more and more over time. When the price started becoming too much of a problem most people didn't stop smoking, they started buying larger boxes of tobacco (for manual tubing), because they're much cheaper. That's how things stand currently. Last year they decided to start heavily taxing sugary beverages (Coke, Pepsi, etc) -- of course, the consumers pay the taxes, not the companies. There's plenty of loopholes out there for people to not pay taxes. People are always coming up with more. No one who's conscious of it likes to be forced to comply to something they don't agree with. And then there's the example I gave about regulations and how companies ran away from them. Speed limits is another good example of a useless regulation. A lot of people probably don't even know the limit of the street they live in. Guns is a good example too. All around europe it's way easier for a criminal to buy a gun than it is for a law-abiding citizen. The former buys it, period. The latter has to get licensing, go through bureaucracies, maybe even do some tests for mental stability, and so on. Regulations around guns only serve to keep law-abiding citizens unarmed.

Do you mean this, by any chance? // Tels 2010-06-25 // Used to texture SEED blocks/regions textures/darkmod/sfx/seed { qer_editorimage textures/darkmod/sfx/seed noSelfShadow translucent noShadows nonsolid noimpact { blend add map textures/darkmod/sfx/seed } }It's basically the same thing, though.

@OrbWeaver, you're right. They do add geometry. Specifically, it adds both the functioning visportal and the geometry, like you said it might be the case. So the only difference the color value I added makes is that it makes their brush invisible. You can sort of see it in the video, how the geometry is cut around them. The engine already seems to cut geometry at portals, but with default materials you notice less cuts, which tell you there's no brush there. However, they seem to function properly, as far as I can tell. (If by any chance the video has no sound, it's because I have no sound card at the moment.) (On a related note, my materials don't seem to affect maps that were dmap'ed with default materials, unless you dmap them again with mine.) I suppose this problem can also affect other things, like triggers, ladders, clips, etc. Indeed that would be the ideal way to go about it (probably would be best as optional, as many people are probably used to it as it is). That way you could make it use some proper transparency too, unlike mine.

I didn't mean performance, I didn't notice any behavior I wouldn't expect from visportals. I don't have maps of my own with a lot of stuff yet, so I've tested this with other already made maps. They seemed to behave as I would expect. To be clear, using r_showportals does show the portals where they should be. Not sure what you mean by that, though. Forget that. I see what you mean. I'll do some more testing to see what it's doing. I was gonna post a video of visportals working ingame, but it's taking ages to upload, so I'll post it later.

@OrbWeaver, I've tested quite a few visportals after having this in my game and I didn't notice any problems (I used r_showtris, and r_showportals). Iirc I also tested for internal leaks. Is the map parameter what makes them render in game? Visportal is set to _white (and it showed white in game before I added the color value), but in other materials it's set to their actual texture. I tried removing that parameter at some point, but iirc that made translucency stop working for the editor. At it is though, I've noticed no problems at all. Though I'm not that experienced in this engine, so I could easily have missed something.

I create one thread... I wasn't thinking of asking anything else, either.

You ought to read Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics". It's a good read. The market does regulate itself. The market is complex, but simple example are used to explain how that is. If you sell rotten fish, you're giving me better chances of stealing your clients selling fresh fish. Consumers will drive the market away from you. The real questions in all of this are: Which is worse, the market with problems, or the regulated market with more problems? This isn't weasel description of it. Regulations are costly and imply barriers to entry: they inherently hinder competition. And which is more sensible, a few people deciding for everyone else what everyone else should and shouldn't do, or everyone deciding for themselves what they should and shouldn't do? Maybe there's a place for some regulations as I've said before, but how do we solve the problem of "you give them an inch and they want a mile"? The pressure there comes from all sides: politicians want to regulate, big businesses want their market to be regulated, and many of the people ride along. What do we do about those regulations that aren't needed and still get voted in by bureaucrats who refuse to accept they're useless? What do we do about those that get voted in despite being easy to show to be problematic and they still refuse to accept it? Consider this description of the difference between the most regulated part of switzerland and the least regulated part of it. (EDIT: in that link, I mean the first answer by a Stefan Metzeler.) A functioning legal system that punishes harm and fraud goes a long way. Mind you that this is not the same as regulations. Are you aware that the current system is built on fiat money and that the government is what's driving the economy? It's not flowing free, and this money didn't come up naturally. The Fed "despite [their] best efforts" doesn't seem to hold it still, banks have been regulated like hell over the decades as well as most markets. I'm not sure there's anything to suggest a free market can't crash on it's own, but as we've been observing over many, many decades, regulated markets certainly do. I didn't claim it was the lowest polluter, but the least polluted. But even still, can you compare it to china or the soviet union before it fell? But indeed, there's a lot of pollution from industries. And it's a huge problem. Notice though that regulating the entire West hasn't changed a thing in china and some other countries. It seems things will only change there when the markets move in some other direction. Some people in the Mises Institure argue that full on privatization would mitigate pollution. Their arguments are actually interesting. No one pollutes private property, because they can be sued. Also notice that regulating the entire West, has made many companies move their means of production elsewhere. So there they aren't regulated anymore, so there goes the usefulness of regulations, and on top of that, money is being spent there, people are being hired there, and ship transportation is being bought from there; not in the west. (It's a thing I haven't touched yet, but is worth keeping in mind, that laws, regulations, taxation, bureaucracies, etc, they all always result in people thinking of and finding ways to work around them.)

Done.

Some 4 years ago I tried making editor textures translucent, but I couldn't figure out how to work around some problems. Since I kinda returned to playing around with DR (yea that's a good description of all I ever do in it...), I tackled this again, and it seems I found a workable solution. Some people seemed interested in this, so here you have it. Hopefully it's useful. editor textures.txt (rename extension to .rar to unpack) WARNING: As @OrbWeaver pointed out below, my materials add unnecessary geometry to your maps. While I can't find any other side effect, it's certainly possible that there is. Use them at your own risk, but don't ever use them when you're releasing a map or FM. The added geometry may will affect performance. @Zen3001 suggested a batch file to automate deactivating my custom materials before dmap'ing. Here's a preview of what it looks like with my textures. Took the screenshot when I was nosying around Melan's Fauchard map. If you don't know how to use this: Some important things you might want to know: I didn't make all editor textures translucent. Any solid textures (as in, can seal a map) are left opaque, as well as any textures I didn't know they weren't solid. I now know most nodraw types aren't, so I'll have to do them eventually. Some of my textures were made from scratch and are a bit different. You can use the default textures if you want, though; I just decided to make my own because I found this had a few problems with the original ones (the blend mode brightens them a bit, and they seemed a bit too noisy for being see-through). Some of my textures may be too transparent or not perceivable against bright textures behind them. I've been tweaking them for my own taste and to compensate for these problems, but I'm doing this as I go along with DR mapping, so the way they are now is a totally experimental WIP. The blend mode I'm using allows for darkening/brightening the textures to add/remove transparency, respectively. So if you feel some of them are too transparent, or if you're using default textures and they're not transparent enough, you can easily tweak them in any image editor. Since the blend mode brightens the textures a bit on its own, you may find the need to darken them more than you'd expect (mine ended up really dark, but mostly for high translucency). Shadow materials use a different blend mode "filter" that doesn't make darkened textures more translucent, so they may look opaque if using default textures. As you may have noticed in the preview, I added some lines around some textures (clips) to give them the effect of a cage, which helps distinguishing the shapes of brushes that have them all around. I may do the same thing on others, eventually, if needed. In the zip file there's also a test texture-gallery map that I used to lay out the textures and test some stuff. I included it in case anyone wants to take a quick peek at how they look. --------------- Now, the way I did this may not be ideal, and hopefully I didn't break anything. I changed the materials to add translucency, as well as a blend mode, which, after mixing and matching a bunch, was the only one I thought worked better. But then I also had to add a color value with 0 alpha or otherwise the brushes are visible in-game. That part gives me the confusings... I have no clue why that happens. Example: textures/editor/visportal { // ... visportal stuff ... translucent { blend gl_one, gl_one_minus_src_color map _white color 0, 0, 0, 0 // this makes it invisible in-game (not in-editor) } } Originally I had tried adding an alpha channel to the textures, but couldn't find a blend mode that worked properly with it. The one that looked best also made the brushes behind other brushes show up as if they were in front. What I have now is the only alternative I could figure out that works. So if anyone has any suggestions on how to improve this, I'm all ears.

Like I said before, people naturally develop markets and the economy (and currency), but of course, people aren't perfect so problems will always arise. And that is of course regardless of anything, regardless of which system is in place, and the fallacy that's mostly used against markets and capitalist itself is essentially "it has problems, so it's evil" (and often those problems aren't with markets or capitalism). That doesn't mean the system itself is to be thrown away, or even that you can throw it away. Throwing away capitalism is like throwing away evolution. At least so far as it's called capitalism. After decades solving many of the problems you might call it something else. I'd rather go on the internet and find people laying out arguments and ideas about how solve the problems, than finding people having to refute those that would rather burn everything to the ground over and over again in the name of compassion. I don't suppose Venezuelans would now. I wonder if Zimbabweans would, these days: weren't they the ones that kicked out evil white capitalist pigs, only to then cry on their knees for their return because they themselves can't run things properly? I wonder if south africans will agree in some time from now, and if Angolans are still singing that song. Maybe they are, since they're easy pray for sophists of all kinds. I don't agree (and I don't know anyone that does) with the practices of colonialism of previous eras, but one thing they did right was to build working economies in the places they colonized. It's a pity the next generations didn't build themselves upon them. Australia seems to be doing quite well. When it comes to these things people often (deliberately?) neglect to keep in mind all the black slavers who sold slaves to colonialists, and generally anything that doesn't favor the socialist narrative. (Not saying it's your case. I'm thinking generally.) Probably that's why the newer generations of africans hated the colonialists with a certain degree of exclusivity. You know what the funniest thing is, though? The civil wars in Angola started in 1975. Communism in portugal ended in 1974. Angolans were then freed from the portuguese colonial umbrella, which probably left a sudden Power Vacuum, and we all should know by now what that does (Bush knows that well, as he (and all those who lobbied for the death of Hussein, including Hillary Clinton) created ISIS that way)). So I'm not entirely sure capitalism was the problem there in Angola at that point. That song was written in 1975, which is also ironic.

Is there anything he could do to workaround the limitations of the framework he used? He made Papers, Please on Haxe/NME. I would probably have no clue how to work around that. I'd know Haxe enough to make games in it, and that'd be it. I don't know the extent of his knowledge, though.