MirceaKitsune

First of all, no I did not forget about or abandon this project! I've been busy working on one of the most complicated parts I had to dive into so far, which took both a great amount of work as well as some developer learning in the process. I'm also working on a ton of games and animations at once, making it very hard to find the time. Today I finally have something new to offer. I'm happy to announce that the mod now has its own original bow! It is a compound bow, designed to look modern while otherwise working in a very similar fashion. It's still incomplete, but I managed to finish the bow and arrow models as well as the animations... I still haven't looked into how I'll "teach" the AI how to use it, and new sounds are the next priority. Currently there's only an implementation for the broadhead arrow, but a container arrow has been prepared for implementing the equivalents of other arrow effects (water, fire, etc). The original compound bow model and texture was created by ScoutingNinja and is licensed CC0, you can find it on its Blendswap page. The 1st person animations for it were created by me from scratch, also CC0 as far as I'm concerned. As usual, you can find and try out TheDarkModule from its Gitlab repository. Let me know what you think!

This isn't really a question, thus I hope I can be forgiven for posting it here. I'd like to kindly ask a little favor, if anyone has a moment to take a look at it. Could you please import the model file "models/darkmod/weapons/broadhead.lwo" into Blender, then attach the *.blend file here for me to download? I don't know in which pk4 that file is exactly, and I also don't know if I have a working lwo importer. Thank you. If anyone is curious as to why I need this: I'm struggling for months to get a custom arrow model working. No matter how I export the lwo file of my model, TheDarkMod refuses to accept it. I am either told that the collision model could not be loaded, either the engine instantly crashes without clarifying exactly why. I'm hoping a blend file showing the exact setup of the vanilla arrow model may help me out, especially as far as the setup and texture of the collision mesh is concerned. [EDIT] Never mind: I found it and managed to import it successfully.

As far as my repository is concerned, I'm still halfway through implementing the new modern compound bow. So far I'm stuck: The lwo of my arrow model causes idTech 4 to crash, without making it clear why that is.

It's beyond me how and why so many programs still use allocated memory segments, instead of just using variables which revert to their default value when not allocated! eg: int is 0, float is 0.0, string is "", bool is false, etc. idTech 4 is a relatively old engine, but I'm seeing this even on modern software... come on! In any case, since it's only a few kb and I plan to post those on Gitlab anyway, I'm attaching the custom arrow lwo files here in case anyone wishes to take a look at them. Obviously they have no material or texture, but it's only if anyone else wishes to debug with them. https://www.sendspace.com/file/nuql6w

Ah, okay... I thought that was the reason for the crash. The only logical assumption in this case is that the exported model has a bug that's causing idTech 4 to freak out; I'll play around with the exporter options and other parameters, and see if anything makes it go away.

------------ Game Shutdown ----------- ModelGenerator memory: No LOD entries. Shutdown event system

I haven't manually configured any LOD settings, but that's what the console output is saying. What else could it be? Clearly it's induced by my lwo file, as I don't get the issue if I'm not using it in the def.

Having new issues with my custom arrow model. I seem to have fixed the missing collision mesh problem, which was likely due to my lwo exporter using the object or mesh name for the material which I had not considered renaming to the texture. Now however I get a crash, apparently due to a LOD mesh causing memory issues (I obviously don't plan to have LOD models for the arrow). Here is the log when running TDM from bash. Anyone know what may be causing this and how to get rid of it please? --------- Map Initialization --------- Map: test glprogs/ambientEnvironment.vfp glprogs/ambientEnvironment.vfp ----------- Game Map Init ------------ collision data: 3 models 343 vertices (8 KB) 623 edges (21 KB) 275 polygons (19 KB) 22 brushes (3 KB) 71 nodes (1 KB) 394 polygon refs (3 KB) 58 brush refs (0 KB) 454 internal edges 0 sharp edges 0 contained polygons removed 0 polygons merged 57 KB total memory used 2 msec to load collision data. map bounds are (1088.0, 1088.0, 800.0) max clip sector is (68.0, 68.0, 50.0) 0 bytes passage memory used to build PVS 0 msec to calculate PVS 2 areas 0 portals 0 areas visible on average 8 bytes PVS data [Load AAS] loading maps/test.aas48 [Load AAS] loading maps/test.aas96 [Load AAS] loading maps/test.aas32 done. [Load AAS] loading maps/test.aas100 [Load AAS] loading maps/test.aas_rat [Load AAS] loading maps/test.aas_elemental ConversationManager: Found 0 valid conversations. Entering tdm_main() Exiting tdm_main() Spawning entities signal caught: Segmentation fault si_code 1 Trying to exit gracefully.. --------- Game Map Shutdown ---------- ModelGenerator memory: 12 LOD entries with 0 users using 96 bytes. --------- Game Map Shutdown done ----- Shutting down sound hardware ----------- Alsa Shutdown ------------ close pcm dlclose -------------------------------------- idRenderSystem::Shutdown() I18NLocal: Shutdown. ------------ Game Shutdown ----------- ModelGenerator memory: No LOD entries. Shutdown event system -------------------------------------- shutdown terminal support About to exit with code 0

What I'm planning to do is a very in-depth and more detailed conversion. I'm not sure how it will all look and feel until I get there, but if it goes according to plan I think it will be very good. Making new weapon definitions has proven the most problematic task, but once that's done it will be a major milestone.

As far as I'm aware, I should be using the latest version of TDM; The updater says that everything is up to date. I export the lwo directly from Blender, and as far as I'm aware there are no errors in the process. Perhaps I shall look more carefully into the export process too, if no other obvious issues stand out. Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm happy creating the mod on top of TDM; It already has a great engine and code base and AI, and I only wish to make a cyberpunk alternative (DeusEx inspired) which will also be free from non-commercial assets. I've already discussed this a lot in several other threads though, would rather keep this one clean and about the issues I'm running into.

Alright; It appears that when placed on the map as ammo entities, my arrows are completely invisible for some reason (I can only select them from the entity browser). I'm not seeing any obvious messages in the console regarding them, so here is my full DarkRadiant log in case anyone else can spot a problem there:

It's called atdmu because it's part of a mod I'm making for vanilla TDM that I'm working on. Everything that's part of the mod is prefixed with "atdmu:". It's not a static model, but the arrow projectile for a modified crossbow I'm creating. There aren't any other collision files present, which I'm hoping is not a necessity: It's just the lwo file, with of course the texture and material definitions. I don't know if paths really matter, but until I publish my changes on Git I plan to put everything in the proper subdirectory. Right now I used the md5 folder as that's where my crossbow model is also at. And I'll need to recompile DarkRadiant and check, since apparently library updates require that again. As that takes a while, I'll check how the collision material looks like from DR a bit later.

I don't think the paths matter in this way, so it's probably unrelated to my problem. Thanks for pointing this out however; I should move it to a better location for consistency.

I still haven't solved the problem I was last experiencing with my arrow mesh, and would like to get around to that soon. As I said, I made a custom arrow model and exported it to a lwo file, but this causes TDM to crash back to the main menu with the following error: ERROR:idMoveable 'atdmu_ammo_nano_simple_1': cannot load collision model models/md5/weapons/compoundbow/nano_glass.lwoI already followed the advice offered previously, and created a simple convex hull mesh which I then textured with "textures/common/collision" as a test. However even with that texture, the crash still occurs. I was told that having a material with this or other collision textures should make it go away. What am I doing wrong? I understand there are a few alternative textures to "textures/common/collision", but I didn't manage to find them anywhere... can I have an example of one so I can try that as well?

My branch based on the Xonotic assets is called The Dark Module. I chose that name because it sounds futuristic, while also being accurate to what this is (a module for The Dark Mod).

Gosh... that is looking pretty awesome! Really good work so far It's motivating to see something like this in TDM at last. I'd rather have waited till I ported more of the texture packages I'm bringing in from Xonotic. However I can't blame you, since I'm being so darn slow to work on my fork I'm stuck at making new arrow models right now, due to the lwo not loading because of missing collision issues... once I have the new bow in Git I should be able to focus on more things again.

That looks like a fantastic FM, ERH+! It's really nice to see a fantasy map of these proportions in TDM

As a test, I used "textures/common/collision" for the time being. The simple collision mesh was exported properly into the lwo file, which can be seen from the bigger file size. However TDM still crashes to the main menu with the exact same error. Why would this be?

Thank you, that should work then. Will give it a go tomorrow. Any thoughts on why the player head might not be getting skinned? I tried adding that spawnarg on the AI but it didn't cause the head to appear in DarkRadiant. Like I said though the same head works perfectly for the AI, the skin is only ignored when it's on the player for some reason.

Alright; From the looks of it, I need to use "textures/common/collision" as the material. Is that correct? If so I'll add those to the exported lwo and see if the warning goes away. I didn't know it needs to be convex however. So I can't have any inward pointing surfaces or holes in the collision mesh? Shouldn't be a problem, just making sure especially for when I'll be porting more complex map decorations.

Thanks. How do you define a collision mesh in Blender however? I enabled the lwo exporter but it gives me no options to mark a mesh as collisions. Is it perhaps a special material or object name?

Sorry for the delay to reply. I will look into that... although the player is not an entity paced on the map, so I would have to set this from the entity definition itself. Like I said the AI head shows up fine, it's only for the player head that the skin isn't being applied to. I set "editor_head" "1" on both the AI definition as well as the AI head definition. It did not work, and the head still doesn't show up in DarkRadiant when that AI is placed on a map. Also I'm running into a different problem with the next thing; I exported my custom arrow mesh from Blender using its lwo exporter. When I start my map however, I crash to the main menu with the error below. Apparently idTech 4 expects some sort of collision mesh, rather than generating the bounding box on its own... however the lwo exporter doesn't give me any options for such a thing! ERROR:idMoveable 'atdmu_ammo_nano_simple_1': cannot load collision model models/md5/weapons/compoundbow/nano_glass.lwo

That's actually looking pretty neat... I like it! Hard to pick, but I believe the rightmost one is a little prettier.

Heads aren't displayed in DR, especially for the player. An NPC with the exact same head model / skin works fine however.

I did and searched the condump output: No errors about any invalid skins or missing textures whatsoever.