Skaruts

It was this problem, which seems related to .lwo. Perhaps it's also related to Blender. But I tried .ase and still had it, so I just went back to lwo. It actually depends on the lighting, sometimes it's there, sometimes it isn't. Either way, the hinges are small and dark, so I'm not sure I should worry about it.

I was wondering if there's any videos or pictures of the really early developments of TDM. I like seeing what things once were, to contrast with what they've become. And by the way, who started it? Who's to blame for this marvelous thing? EDIT: I've seen some of Springheel's earliest videos, but it already looks like TDM was in a somewhat advanced stage there.

Yes the parts are separate, and you never know what someone could do with that. That's the reason for that thing sticking out of the left cylinder, as well as the caps. What I was suggesting in my last post was this: For some reason the game isn't giving me bad smoothing without those edge loops now, so that's great.

I was trying to stick with textures that are already in TDM. There's a metal_plate_rivets01 texture that could do the job, but I still need some extra faces (hexagons) that I can unwrap on top of a rivet. That still inflates the poly count somewhat, considering there's 32 of them (32 hexagons, 4 tris each = 128 tris). That would make the whole model roughly 650 tris if I'm not mistaken (with simplified hinges overall).

I didn't plan to have anything in the model that needed any kind of details to begin with. The foldable models came as an afterthought that I thought might be nice to have. The first hinges I made had no bolts, it was only later that I thought they might seem too bland on a closer look. Not sure how to proceed with this, tbh. On one hand I never made normal maps from models (only from textures), on the other hand I'm not sure how I would apply the normal map to it, since the bolts use a different material from the plaques. If that makes a difference; maybe I'm on the wrong mindset. The wiki doesn't seem very helpful. Perhaps my quickest option would be to see if there's a texture that already has bolts in it and use it for the whole plaque...

Is a normal map justified if the only significant detail in it will be the bolts?

Well that helps a lot. Thanks. (I need to spend some time looking at all the shortcuts...) Although, there is a little nuisance -- not sure if it's a problem with my keyboard -- that when I'm pressing WASD and press + or -, it stops moving. It would be nice to be able to change the speed as I go. Might also be nice to have some visual feedback on how fast the camera is going (I don't see any, at least).

True. They're a scary 684 tris each. (the picture is one of them) I think I could have those bolts flat, maybe 1 less side on the cylinders (they have 7), and if I'll keep those corners I might be able to do so with one or two less verts in the curves (or make simple corners), and they might look ok without the rounded ends. I did a quick test and that might reduce them to ~150-200 polys each. I have to keep those edge-loops at the ends of the cylinders to keep the smoothing consistent (they look skewed without them). They'll take the bulk of the polys either way, as the paintings themselves are just as simple as the ones already in TDM (~30 tris each). But I think I could streamline them a bunch.

Do I smell socialism there?

Well, I've pretty much finished the models, I think -- skaruts_triptychs.txt -- rename extension to .rar. If I've made no mistakes, then it should work just by placing the files in their respective folders (as they are already organized in the archive). The archive contains: skins: ska_decorative_wall.skin models: triptych_01_left.lwo // non-foldable version triptych_01_right.lwo triptych_01_middle.lwo triptych_02_left.lwo // foldable version triptych_02_right.lwo triptych_02_middle.lwo prefabs: triptych_01.pfb triptych_02.pfb // unfolded triptych_02_folded.pfbDue to the nature of how the painting textures get split up between the parts of the models, some of them don't look right, and so not all paintings are available as skins, and some are available in one and not the other. You can still perhaps force a skin by bringing it from a normal painting, but I've not tested that. This is currently only a decorative piece. I've no clue how to turn it into a loot painting, although I suppose it has to be made into an entity, and perhaps that's something that's out of my reach. Poly count on the foldable version ended up being much higher than I initially expected (2820 tris). The hinges took the bulk of it (and I needed some extra geometry to work around bad smoothing, which ase format didn't seem to resolve). I wouldn't call it a trivial model, so perhaps it should be used sparingly. I don't know if there's an established procedure for making models available, so if there's one please let me know.

To be clear, I'm not saying it shouldn't be in the game. On the contrary, it could be a nice mechanic. My train of thought came from noticing people seemingly thinking of it mostly as a way to look into rooms, and not out from rooms, and I think perhaps the latter ought to be taken more into account.

It's the kind of thing that often breaks immersion for me personally, when you can do something to this object here but not to that other exact same object there; like fake doors that can't even be interacted with, it always brings me the good old invisible walls we all loved to mind. I'm not against it, I just avoid using it in my maps, unless I run out of ideas or time. A boarded up door, probably. A door with a glass window, I'd rather do that than a keyhole thing. A keyhole gives you a FOV of about 5 degrees anyway if more on the realistic side. You only see what's conveniently placed right in front of it. Keyholes were never intended to be peeked through. I don't imagine this being of that much use, though. Might be a worthy second way of knowing whether the patrolling guard is passing by in the hallway, but I don't imagine mappers having 10 or 20 actual uses for this in any single map. It would be the occasional evesdropping scene or something, which isn't something any mapper can do (involving conversations and other advanced mapping stuff) and you usually don't find more than one or two of those in a mission -- if any at all. It may become a mechanic that's rarely used, such that the player may not even recognize the visual cues anymore when he sees them. He may even skip the entire point of it and just pick the lock and step in.

Perhaps it might be useful to keep links for the latest versions of the scripts in the first post. Someone looking for that might have to re-read the whole thread. Or like me, someone who hasn't yet read the whole thread might be wasting time downloading one of the previous ones. I've tried using your ase exporter, but something's wrong. The exported model isn't textured. I'm using R Soul's Material Manager, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. Nevermind that. Seems like the problem was that I had several UV layers.

Always wanted to play a mission where I crawl over the rafters in a room where a bunch of pompous nobles are having a party.

I think for the purpose of these models, at the moment I'm gonna focus on finishing them with the existing paintings in mind, even if they weren't made for triptychs (Execution fits the non-foldable model quite nicely). Maybe later on I tackle something different. Or if someone wants to tackle it, go ahead. I'm planning on handing out the models for TDM if you're interested or for anyone who wants to create paintings that fit them or use them in missions. If I felt confident about my painting skills I might even try making some originals, actually.

Once upon a time oil was peaking. Then they came up with fracking and the problem was gone. This plays out all around, people always come up with something. Need is what drives innovation the most. I once heard an economist say that the only resource that really really matters is imagination, and that's pretty much infinite. And the more I learn about these things the more I think he's right. Increased consumption is what drives production costs and prices down and standards of living up, etc. Welfare is built on the premise that people need it, but it exists at the cost of the rest of the people or at the cost of debt, and contributes to lower productivity and employment rates. It distorts the economy. Global warming is expected to cause crises, wars and famine.... Or just different lifestyles with different booming industries. Who really knows? Look at all the inventive entrepreneurs that gave a shot at replacing combustion engines when oil was thought to be peaking. I suspect the cooling systems industries will be booming in 20 or 30 years. Among others. Who knows what people will come up with. Maybe we walk through refrigerated tubes to our car, and then to work. Consumerism today will be what keeps your standards of living high enough that you can buy what you'll need then. Climate change may just cause the markets to shift. People sort themselves out and figure out ways to survive. Even though the climate change is happening faster than natural ones, that doesn't mean people can't adapt. It's not like it's happening from night to day. Maybe many people will die. Or maybe people will come up with ways to save many people from dying. There might be some political instability and divisiveness, but then there always is... We're living it as we speak. Politics and political systems have still not evolved beyond that. Also, you never know when AI programming will actually be useful to solve serious problems. You do your thing and your kids do their thing. Those that do their thing do it best, and are most useful in that way. I think you ought to be saving your bottle caps though. That threat is just as eminent.

Man this sucks... Not sure I ever played his missions (probably did), but even though I've never been too active around here before I remember his name. Taff in piece. I know this has gone by, but just for the record, one's PC is probably way too personal a thing to leave the hands of the family or close friends.

That I know of there's no way around it, so it doesn't matter how you choose your layers, you can't solve that problem. You can't specifically hide all the wall models in Room1Walls at the same time that Room1 is checked, if Room1 includes those walls too. Using the hide functionality for this kind of thing is not preferable as it's an unwieldy tool: when you unhide, you unhide everything you've hidden. I didn't make that layer thing a suggestion but I will on the wishlist. Used that kind of thing extensively for years. It's a simple functionality that can boost your workflow by a ton (maybe not simple to implement, though). I'm just suggesting useful extra stuff here, stuff I think are good ideas, not arguing that the existing ones are crap or that the lack of these can't be worked around. It's just that certain tools are more handy for certain situations and it can't hurt to have them, if the devs are able and willing to get them in. Although if what I suggest already exists (as it was with number 2), then I'll be glad to know about it. And by the way, about number 3, that's a problem with triangulated models themselves. Some of them are hard to make sense of on their own, and that's what I'm talking about. Layers and hidding stuff are irrelevant in this. And tbh I don't know if there's anything that can be done to simplify the wireframes, I'm just throwing it out there.

Even if shadow maps require back faces, since the nature of the engine requires that you place a brush behind walls to seal things up, doesn't that mean that brush itself will act as the backside of the wall model and so adding that extra geometry is useless anyway? Or am I missing something?

Well the triangle count is just quads * 2 plus any tris that already exist. I avoid n-gons, so at least in my case I think the count should be pretty accurate. EDIT: there are 6 triangles in that shadow model I had there (1 on each side of each rim), the rest is all quads, so that's (600 faces - 6 tris) * 2 = 1188 tris + 6 tris = 1194 tris Thanks for the article on the shadow maps.

Yea... sorry about that. If mods want to merge this with it, I'm fine with that. (If that's possible.) Or should I just copy/paste my post there and ignore this one? I don't mind doing it. I have a few more suggestions to make anyway, so I could do that. I know I have options. I'm just making suggestions that would make things a bit more comfortable for my personal workflow, but which might also do so for others. Ctrl-MMB is very useful actually, but it requires zooming out and finding the place, etc (I'm using one 2D view only). Little things that add up, and in some occasions I'd like to be able to just turn and fly to where I want. Sometime I just want a quick birds-eye view of the whole thing I'm doing, but that's tough when I just set my camera to a speed under 10 for close-up brush work or something. And with Ctrl-MMB we're also back to my suggestion 1 because then I'll have to zoom back in somewhere. A problem with layers though is that if you have the same thing in more than one layer it won't disappear until you hide both. Like if you have a floor on Floors and also on Room1, if you want to hide all the floors, or if you want to hide only Room1, that floor will stay visible either way, until you hide the other layer too. Maybe that's something I could also suggest being tackled too.

I googled triptych art yesterday and it's like 300% of what's out there is about Christ or is too obviously of christian origin... I'm also not exactly sure what to look for, in terms of what's adequate for TDM. I'm also not too acquainted with antique art.

I'm working on one that can be folded. Had to widen the center piece and narrow the sides to make them fold properly, and so this one accommodates to some of the paintings that don't go so well with the other triptych.

Oh! I hadn't realized that. Thanks.

1- Zoom the 2D views toward the mouse location. I couldn't find any option for this in the settings, so I'm assuming this isn't in DR at all. This would make zooming in and out much easier. 2- A search feature on model/skins/texture/etc browsers. I noticed that in some cases if you press Space a text field appears, and it seems like that's some form of search thingy, but doesn't seem to work very reliably. This would make things much easier to find, regardless of how they are organized in the folders. You could always just search for it. Find "by name" might be enough for most purposes, and would be golden in itself, as far as I'm concerned. Although if more could be suggested about this, I'd say it would be something like how Hammer categorizes things with tags that allow for search filters (can also use material keywords for filtering textures). 3- Simplified wireframe on models (optionally just a bounding box). So that models wouldn't turn the 2D views into incomprehensible messes so quickly, but it would also help more easily seeing where model boundaries are exactly, for positioning/alignment purposes and such. Also one more, that I forgot: 4- Add an acceleration factor to the camera movement speed. Since there's no quick way to change it back and forth between fast and slow (have to press P, click camera, change speed, click ok, every time) this would make it easier to do small adjustments to camera position while still keeping the speed high enough to taste, and so that if you kept the movement key pressed you still quickly fly away to that far place you want. This is how it works in Hammer. I think its acceleration factor must be pretty high, so that small taps barely move the camera, but a continuous press almost instantly accelerates you to max speed.