Dragofer

Adding in glare particles for the lamps didn't work so well. They seem to stay active no matter if the lamp is on or off. I've tried using "start_off" or "extinguished", putting a "toggle light" or "trigger" response on the lamp entity, triggering the lamps with a premade lever, there's always the glare. The existing arc light also has particles that won't switch off, so it makes me wonder whether it's a bug? What can be done instead is to leave it up to the mapper to put in their own particles, and it looks decent enough without particles. Although it saves some effort, and might help new mappers if the lamps already came premade with particles. Here's the view at my testing range: To lighten up the mood amid all this testing: lamps in all colours using _color spawnarg. Maybe for a christmas mission, or some sinister place that wants purple/dark blue lamps. (The colour is much more evident when there's no particle, maybe that's going to be the main argument to make them appear without particles by default. This screenshot also shows the problem my lamps and some of the stock electric lamps have with barely lighting up their own walls.)

I've got my finally smooth spherical lamps set up as lamp entities and they're working normally except that there seems to be a problem with the light origin. My lamps don't illuminate the wall they're mounted on unless I move the model's origin or the whole lamp forward 16ish units. It seems the light diamond is too close to the wall: in DarkRadiant the light diamond shows up at the model origin, which is always the backplate of the wall mounting. That's even though I've changed the spawnarg for light_centre_offset to put the light centre inside the bulb. (Note that I'm inheriting from the quiet electric light template) Also, I've seen that the existing electric fancy wall lights have this problem too and fit the above description. Is there an extra line in the def that can move the light diamond away from the wall? Or would it require changing the model origins?

Contact is back up, no worries and my apologies for the wait.

Great, this worked exactly as it should. Thanks for posting this here Xcen. Now to setup the new custom light entities. The wiki as far as I can find doesn't seem to have something about setting up new lamp entities, but the existing lamp definitions describe the spawnargs well already.

The setup of reverting to a slightly older version of Blender (2.70) and using exporters made with TDM in mind was promising because it produced properly smoothed test objects like a metal sphere and torus. But when I made a new copy of one of those lamps from scratch in Blender 2.70 it had the same smoothing problem again: metal is flat, glass is smoothed. There must be a problem with how I've set up the lamp at some point while modelling it. On a sidenote, I've seen now that even the old setup in Blender 2.74 is capable of making properly smoothed test objects, so it's unclear whether reverting to 2.70 was needed. I'd very much appreciate if someone else who uses Blender tried to export what I have. This package has both the original and the remade .blend files, the .lwo exporter that I use (also .ase) and an already exported .lwo model: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ugb26n73t1kjuxl/spherelamp.rar?dl=0

Work is back on track after a bit of a pause and Of Brambles and Thorns has breached the 25000 brushes, patches & entities mark. Storywise I'm still looking for that knot that ties everything together in the end but things are more and more coming together. As for when it's finished, it looks like this one's going to be a long haul with all the bells and whistles so plenty to go.

Looks very mysterious, with the particles.

Your tracks and Marteau's tracks have a chilling style that's different from many of the tracks in TDM as I see them. I'm very glad to see more in this style.

These are great soundtracks, and what I like very much about them as well is that I haven't heard anything like these before in TDM. Many of these tunes remind me in particular of this ambience - Dark Ambient Music #4 Void (and also #6: Dreaming of Nowhere and #5: Lost Tape). It's one of the more haunting styles, in my opinion. While listening to the ambients I made soundshaders for them so they can be tried out ingame. They'll show up in the DarkRadiant editor in the ambients list, all starting with gast_. It should go into the /darkmod/sound folder (create if necessary), and it's actually a .txt file that was renamed to .sndshd, so can be opened in the .txt editor. The sound files themselves should go into the /darkmod/sound/ambient/ambience folder. Dropbox - gast_ambients.sndshd It's very straightforward to make soundshaders, just copy-paste an old one and replace the ambient name and the filename. Here's a template:

Answering that question on its own, you can use stim response on the lamp to change the skin when triggered.

The team uses a SVN while others simply post links to filesharing sites. Most use zippyshare - personally I use Dropbox because I think it has a clean interface, has folders and holds on to files a long time.

Sinister, eerie elements are things I can always appreciate in a mission

Yes, going back to Blender 2.70a did the trick for making smoothed .lwo models (current Version is 2.74). The interface looks identical to that of the newest version so it's simple to just use 2.70a from now on. Springheel, I've made a test torus here - could you try and see if it opens normally in Lightwave please? The remaining problem is that my existing models made in Blender 2.74 still won't smooth when exported via 2.70a. Now I'm trying to find a way to turn a 2.74 file into a 2.70a file. If it doesn't work, recreating those lamps from scratch is no problem, but I have another carriage model that would be a lot of work to remake. In a pinch I could just make new renderbump versions of materials, but hopefully there's a cleaner solution.

You can convert and uncovert any brushes and patches to func_static as you like, but not if you also have selected an entity from the "create entity" list. It also won't work if some of the brushes/patches are func_static (blue) and others are worldspawn (black) although sometimes in this case you can use "reparent primitives" instead.

Here's another readable container possibility for your collection. Imagine taffing about in a port and looking down to the water to see a mysterious scroll getting washed about by the waves. And, a downscaled ship could take the place of that scroll to be showed off in a noble's room.

Thanks for pointing this out, but there is an explanation for the typo - I had replaced the original noselfshadows line with noshadows, and then for this post typed the noselfshadow(s) back in again to show the original material shader. It's an oversight, sorry. About the smoothing issues, I'd like to try to use an earlier version of Blender with the .lwo exporter, and if that doesn't work just use .ase. The earlier Blender version might come in handy there too if the .ase exporters don't get updated very often. The way it is now, the exporter doesn't function properly if it makes .lwo files that can't be opened in Lightwave. I can always appreciate a pun

Wow... that had me stunned for a good five minutes before I got back to my senses again

There is actually a func_securitycamera entity ingame. It seems to come from Doom3 so it ignores light levels and instead uses line-of-sight, and it has an exploitable bug, but it does have a lot of functionality already. Obsttorte even implemented a camera_gui texture that lets you make a monitor that shows what the camera is seeing. A long time ago I made a testmap with a camera and monitor made-of-patches and an alarm here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/14394-apples-and-peaches-obsttortes-mapping-and-scripting-thread/?p=352597 If I remember right you can put the pk4 file in your darkmod/fms folder and then either start it like a normal mission or use console to open "map cameramodel". In the state it's in now it's best suited for guarding a completely lit up place with obstacles to hide behind, or for letting the player see an area remotely from a monitor room.

Yes, here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dbu1i1thj1ox4hg/renderbump.pk4?dl=0 This is with the copper_dirty and the new copper_dirty_renderbump texture. Thanks for looking into it. Also, a quote from the start of http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/idtech/export-lightwave-lwo-models.php This sounds very strange... I didnt have the impression that the .lwo format could be problematic in this way. This makes me wonder again which is the better of .ase and .lwo. So far as I'm aware .lwo is better in: easier to avoid rendering errors when using shadow meshessmaller file sizebetter compatibility in general with other modelling programs.lwo doesn't split the object into one mesh for every material used

Thanks for your support, I've read through the information you posted, and it seems the problem could be related to the textures. From Exporting *.lwo models for idTech with materials and mesh smoothing: Some experiments: I copied the teapot material and added this line, and used it on the left lamp. That worked (but it also darkened the texture)I looked through the materials for the textures of some existing .lwo models in TDM and none had this renderbump line in them, so they must have smoothing because of a different mechanism. From the forums, renderbump is normally associated with transferring normalmaps from hi-poly to low-poly models. The glass bulb was smooth from the beginning, so in a test I used that texture for the whole model and it was all perfectly smooth.Then I did the opposite test: using only the metal texture for the whole model made even the bulb flat. In another test, I used the generic darkmod/metal/flat/copper_dirty texture, which was flat. Adding renderbump to its material made it smooth. I looked around for exporters and saw that Goldwell uses the same one I do (v1.1 by iPleomax, Post) so it seems it works for TDM, at least back in Blender 2.70. As a test I used the one he uploaded but there was no difference in the smoothing.To test the exporter, I imported a couple existing .lwo models and re-exported them to find that they had no smoothing. The exporter could be broken, but so could the importer, which is also made by iPleomax. Looking at the imported .lwo models, none of them had marked sharp edges or overlapping vertices.Still, I marked sharp edges to separate smoothing groups but that had no effect.Following What are Smoothing Grounps & Mesh Smoothing and forcing it in Blender I intentionally introduced double edges which didn't have any effect. Note that there were no doubled edges or vertices before. I applied the textures from scratch in BlenderRender instead of CyclesRender, which is a different process, but that made no difference. Because of the second set of experiments I've attached the materials for the glass and the metal: Lampglass material - this smooths properly: Teapot material: this doesn't smooth So, what I'm making of these experiments is that in my setup: - whether the model smooths or not depends on which texture is used - my exporter and importer can't reproduce existing .lwo models with smoothed surfaces, but the same exporter was used successfully in the past by another TDM member.

Thanks! That's the unmodified unlit opaque texture for those lightbulbs, which doesn't have a diffuse map. A better look I think would be to change the unlit texture so that it has a dim white colour, which I think could be done just by tweaking the material. Maybe with a blend line to increase the light intensity, but I'm not very familiar with texture definitions yet. By the way, I figured out what caused the pure black textures ingame - my custom materials file was in darkmod/materials/custom, when it should've been simply in darkmod/materials. Now that this issue is sorted out it's possible for me to make noshadows skins for the lamp metal when they're lit, and to turn the stagecoach into a single .ase model where all the details use noshadows textures. My guess is the stagecoach would fit best in the models/darkmod/misc folder? I've tried a second .lwo exporter by Paleajed / EWOC which didn't smooth anything but it showed that the first exporter did actually smooth the bulbs and all of the oil lamp. There has to be something with how I made the metal base, but the shading was still flat after I removed the double verts and manually set vertex smoothing (edit mode -> mesh -> faces -> shade smooth). Maybe there's a third .lwo exporter, or an .ase exporter that works with this Blender version. There isn't much choice at this moment so it's good you say that Some excellent textures really can be used a lot more, like that teapot one, and in general there are a lot of great textures there already. In Thief 2 custom textures are very sought after because they're much sharper than the originals, but in TDM that doesn't seem to be needed. Still, learning GIMP is definitely on my todo list. That made me wonder how you could make them so you can tell they're gaslights. An electric light would make a buzzing sound, have very harsh light and give a constant level of light or keep zapping on and off if it's broken. While a gaslight would flicker and maybe need a vent to allow the fumes to escape. They both wouldn't react to water because of the glass spheres. The way they're set up now is closer to the electric lights, but to make them more like gaslights you could use the yellowish _lit skins instead of the white _colorme skins and change the light texture to a moving candleflame's. And: great! I can't wait to see

Dunedain19 and I have been consulting in these last days to create a new lamp: The single bulbs come with 704 tris, the double bulbs are 1180 tris. They come with straight or curved gas pipes. Ingame: If you look very closely, you'll see Blender up at the top I tried Blender first to figure out if it would make more sense to use Wings3D, but it worked very well after I sat through Youtube tutorials on how to select and manipulate things. I'd even choose Blender over patches now. (An issue I'm having sometimes is that the models don't stay smoothed, which you can see clearly in the ingame shot at the bases of the bulbs. My other models so far are smoothed. Does some know what could be causing this? Also, I made some noshadow materials for some textures by swapping the "noselfshadows" with "noshadows", which works until they show up black ingame) Here's another: one of the first things I did was to recreate my patchwork oil lamp as an .lwo. That was great because it got rid of the starry lines that were in the old patch one. This one is 586 polys.

A question about textures: if I have one UV map texture for a model and then make three material definitions out of it for wood, metal and glass parts, does that cost more than if I only used one material definition?

The round leather one at the end is my favourites too (and the drawer under the table too), it really makes me wonder what important deed to a property could be preserved in there. Or a letter that travelled a long way through the rain and had to be protected from the weather at all costs. That's the great thing about these containers, they can add their own little story details and they're very flexible with that. Looking at the glass case there in the middle, maybe you'd like to do one for the wall as well? Maybe for a doctor or famous inventor who's proud of his certificate from the prestigious school where he learned his skills and doesn't want it to catch any dust, or hanging in a craftman's well-kept workshop to show that the guild hall has found that highest quality is achieved here.

If I remember right Grayman's cutscenes tutorial had a method to stop AIs from doing random animations when they're idle : http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Cutscenes