BEAR

Alright, I've been meaning to get around to this sooner but better late than never. Fidcal and I have been working on trying to modularize a map so that it can be worked on by multiple authors, and we moved into the idea of making more modular prefabs of buildings and what not for easy insertion into any map. The purpose of this thread is to discuss and coordinate that effort. I'm far from the most knowledgeable or talented mapper around her (see: least), so lets try to come up with as many tips and ideas as possible as the start to a wiki article on the subject. I'll start out with a few ideas of Fidcals in our Hoarders thread in level editing: To expand on what he said, I think mappers should even consider doing single floors of more rectangular buildings. You could even have a bottom level, intermediate floors to be as many as needed and a roof, so the mapper could change window styles on the single pre-made floor and copy it as many times as needed and change the texture and build a building really fast. And the first obvious question for the many of you who have done such nice work so far: is any of it reusable? If so, see if it could be reasonably easily pulled out and made into a prefab. The thread is facades, but it could be houses or any other kind of building that could be plugged into a map for added variety. As Fidcal suggests, try making the building reasonably deep, at least deep enough on the side walls that it could jut out in a street or be inset equally easily. Hopefully people familiar with making premades can chime in with some hints for those of us who are less experienced. My first order of business I think will be to make a few tunnel premades from my collaboration with Fidcal, and perhaps the building that resulted (regardless if we'll actually be able to use that much of it). Feel free to chime in with some screenshots to get feedback on whether something would do well as a premade.

Thats great, I had those problems myself when I was visportaling and it drove me mad. I ended up finding that if I jutted interior walls through the exterior walls of my church it would keep them from going away. I never tried the grid-snapping part. I also found it happened sometimes when I chopped up a worldspawn too many times in odd ways, so deleting the offender and remaking it in a bigger section sometimes helped. I'm going to have to go back and try that now

After playing L4D and STALKER I've come to have a much greater respect for randomness in games. I'm not sure it important in a thiefish game, but man does it make for better replay value.

Haha, I did that once myself too. You want to right click when you have the brush selected and click "create entity" and browse to the entity you want. Alternately you can select the brush, hit n for the entity inspector and click on the classname and down at the bottom of the inspector "choose entity class". You certainly don't want to type it in manually. I thought there was some plan to fix that or at least make it to where you couldn't change it yourself, I think I submitted a bug report about it at the time.

This is true, but patches are incredibly useful so it would behoove you to learn them sooner rather than later if you are going to do much mapping (not to insinuate that you don't know this already). They are really quite simple when you get used to them. The most important thing to remember is have fixed subdivisions, otherwise its a pain to get things to line up. There is a good tutorial on patches on the wiki and there are others that deal indirectly with them (like my tower tutorial which I just remembered I left unfinished). If you have specific questions on patches feel free to send me a pm or something, I'm not expert but I've learned a lot about them in my own work and I'd be glad to help you out. They can be frustrating to do at first (especially until you realize how important fixed subdivisions are).

Have you considered patches? From the image I can't quite see what needs to happen, but anything that involves a curve I generally go strait to a patch. They are tricky in the beginning, but once you get the hang of it you can pull off some neat stuff.

Oh, I love that. I'd love to see some outdoor maps from every season.

Could you post some screenshots?

Please tell me you've done a good bit of doom 3 mapping before this. Why is everyone so stinking talented Really though, your stuff looks very good.

I don't think he meant what you think he meant.

Cool, that sounds like it should work pretty well. I keep meaning to look into them them but I've been too lazy.

Does the whole thing have to be accessible to the player? Could an illusion not be created with a 3d skybox or something?

I'm not particularly knowledgeable with scripting and fancy stuff like that, but I have the impression this would be done more by subtlety than actual coding. I imagine you could script an event where you could break some glass and have the target also die that would be a lot easier than making the glass actually kill the guy. It seems like the kind of thing I usually find is done in multiple parts, recreating the effect without all the real world elements. Also were you playing TDM on a computer in your dream or were you IN TDM in the dream. If the former you need to have more exciting dreams! Also I hear there are slutty scullery maids in the TDM universe confirm/deny.

I don't know much about GUI's, or the sound issue really, but could the sound issue be solved by sound propagation? Do you have a door between the rooms? Is there a visportal? I know they effect sound propagation, so it might be that portal is open and you want it closed until you actually go inside the room. That might keep the monster from hearing you. You can read up on wiki's how to use visportals, but suffice to say make sure the visportal surface of your visportal brush is touching the door (putting it inside the door usually works) and the portal will stay closed until you open the door. Hope this helps.

Another vote for Tunderbird. Its basically an alternative for microsoft outlook (though it might not be quite as bloated as outlook). Its got a large open source community on its side so even if it lacks a feature that you want, chances are someone else has created it. It will do all the basic filtering, foldering, multiple email account stuff efficiently and at the end of the day thats what really matters. Annoyingly it doesn't have a minimize to tray option out of the box, but there is an addon for it that will allow you to have it running in the system tray all the time. You can get it here

TTLG started getting hit by a lot of spam lately too, they forced registrations to be approved by an admin while they figured it out as well. Wonder why this is happening so much lately.

It sounds like you've already seen the wiki page, but here is another link that seems dead on the wiki that I'll update. http://www.katsbits.com/htm/tutorials/doom...ing_outdoor.htm As Komag and Dram have said, you have to drag the vertex of the parallel light away from the center to make it directional. The light will project parallel to the line between that vertex and the light entity itself, so that can kind of tell you what it will look like (I need to add some screenshots to the wiki). Another good idea as portrayed in that link is to create a parallel ambient light pointing in the opposite direction that doesn't cast shadows, it creates a nice ambient effect. If you are still having trouble I could send you a test map I have that has moonlight set up, so hit me up if you need it an I'll email to you.

Does this not sound similar to the problem that was discussed earlier about default doom3 models not showing up in DR? I recall the same problem when I was working with stock doom 3, the models and entities all show up in lists but not in the renderer. Also, I would suggest setting up Theif's Den and using it to run your maps. It is a good gateway into The Dark Mod and will give you a taste of what materials you will have access to in the long run. You can find a lot of information on how to install it from the wiki. Hope this helps!

When you say "outside the skybox", what do you exactly mean? Do you have a 3d skybox somewhere in the map apart from the box containing the actual map? Typically, when I create a hollow box, I make the entire thing caulk and then select the 4 faces inside (cntrl+shift+click to select 1 face) and change the texture. A safe bet would be to use the common>caulk texture. I know there is some discrepancy as to where you actually need to use caulk, but its always worked for me. I'd try that and see where it gets you. In your actual map, if you have a portalsky texture on the inside, you will still probably need to make the rest of it caulk (seems I've had trouble with that before, accidently selecting the entire brush and changing the texture to portalsky instead of just the inside face). Often what I'll try is just retexturing everything on the outside in caulk to see if it fixes the problem, and work my way back 1 step at a time.

I've had some odd issues with leaks here and there, and usually there is an issue of some kind to be found, even if it isn't obvious. A few times I've found myself making the outside box that seals the world really big, or overlap the brushes when it keeps showing a leak where there should be none. As greebo said, make sure that there are not entities outside the box that you cant see. A way to possibly check is to select everything you can see (shift click and drag mouse) and copy it all and paste into a new mission and see how that works. If the map is small enough, upload it here and see if we can take a look at it. I'll be glad to give it a try on my machine and see if it does the same thing, or see if I can find the problem.

What I meant was this text: I don't know if it needs changing, just so long as that is just a line to give newcomers an idea of what kind of missions they will see, and not a guideline for me (or anyone else).

Cool, no reason not to spread the info around as much as possible. One thought, do we actually have a story for a character of TDM? That is probably a stupid question that would best be answered by looking around, but I'm feeling lazy(er). I'm fairly familiar with the universe that things are set in, but the character itself is, I imagine, totally up to the FM authors, is it not? I just wondered because I don't really see why every FM would have to involve a master thief in the city. Being in the same universe is fine, but I can imagine being able to think up all kinds of scenarios that would fit with the universe that might not involve a master thief.

I imagine it is quite possible to make a good tower out of brushes. My first attempt was pretty miserable, but it was about the first thing I really tried in DR. The problem is, even if you make a really good tower, it is a lot of work placing windows and making holes for them that don't cut the tower up into a trillion pieces. I also think that windows are probably over-rated. After going through visportal hell and coming out the other side, I'm a little less fond of transparant windows than I was at the beginning. They make visportaling a fucking bastard, and generally reduce performance. As stated here, I've found a window trick that I rather like that I would use in the tower, but its not nearly important enough to warrent the work it will take. Someone might take 1 look at it and move on and I might spend days trying to get the windows working. I can see that real windows are a luxury to be used sparingly when it benefits gameplay. I kind of always wanted to build real things, something the player can explore with all the properties of a real place, but that's just not always possible. Plus, I wanted to make a lighthouse, I just didn't know how to do it before

Problem is (assuming I can make it look non-weird having a sky projected right into the windowframe), if I had multiple windows, it would be hard to make them not all show the exact same thing. If I wanted the camera to be right outside the window pointing at something so that you could see it from the inside, all the windows would show the same shot. If it were just a skybox shot, I don't see that would be too much of a problem. It would give the illusion of being able to see through the window without the performance hit, but it would be a tricky endevour to be sure. It might be a nice thing to use once here and there for effect, but probably not all the time. Your other idea of making a portalsky cylinder outside the tower would probably be more effective at having a fully windowed tower, but that would make the initial tower construction tough, but not impossible. With proper planning I believe it could be done. Probably build the tower in sections, breaking for gaps the size of the windows at regular intervals. I kind of like the idea of having the windows follow the stairs in a spiral, but that would be a right pain (if they are to be see through). Regardless of whether I do any of this, you've given me a good bit to think about. The deeper you go in mapping the deeper you realize you can go (like many things it seems), you have expanded my mapping universe, I hope you are happy!

Ah, that was helpful. Thanks Dave. I remembered seeing stuff like that around and was wondering to myself "How did they do that again?". I like to think I've gotten fairly proficient with patches at this point, but there are a lot of things I have to think about before I can do them. I think I should just be able to split an area just wide enough for a door, but I don't think I'll bother making that many window holes. I've kind of abandoned see-through windows for the most part anyways. I might create 1 window that the player can see out overlooking the church and leave it at that and not worry about making a bunch of them.