ungoliant

yeah fixing this would be nice. i stopped using layers a while back because of these issues. I've been grouping things by using func_statics instead. upon release of FM, I would just convert back to worldspawn. But yeah, having layers that work properly would be.... really good.

i'm liking this idea, I think all custom content should be freely available to all those who wish to use it for TDM purposes without needing to 'track down' the original author of content like whats happening here in this thread for St. Lucia assets. There is a further complication here, though. For instance, in my FM i will be using multiple pieces of custom content created by a contributor that I have explicit permission to use. I cannot, however, put a note in my release giving permission for others to use it, although I do think the contributor would intend for that content to be freely available to mappers, even though that is not explicitly stated. But it's not really my place to say. To the best of my knowledge, my FM is currently the only place where this content is used, so people may mistakenly believe that my permission is required to use these assets. In other words, without such a system as quoted above implemented for each FM release, and maybe even each individual piece of custom content that's created, the simple task of acquiring the rights/permission to use new custom content could end up being a tedious, time-consuming chore. I vote that permission to use all custom content be (voluntarily) stamped with some sort of non-commercial limited use policy for TDM purposes by willing contributors, and also something in each FM release that uses such content. Maybe someone draw up some legal mumbo-jumbo in a sticky that mappers/contributors could copy/paste in their FM releases or material file comments, etc etc.

if people start copyrighting individual TDM assets with use by permission of author only, i'm gonna be somethin pissed, tell ya what . I dont see much point to making this entire project totally free and open source if we're going to start getting stingy who owns what assets, yeah? Whats next, prefab sets for $5.00?

w00t. bring it on!

yeah, you could go sortof Assassin's creed style, make a story about different generations of a thief family/guild in different eras.

i know theres definately some problems with rotating light sources, as the A-Z guide says never to rotate them. I tried it once, and it screwed things up. I've never had any problems dragging in vertex mode though. probably unrelated..?

yeah, i remember around the time when i had first downloaded DR, but had not started the A to Z yet, opened RttC with DR, and saw a huge "visportal" thing sticking in the middle of the street, and was like "wtf is that?" I think when I started mapping, I may even have had the audacity to start spamming new threads about content already posted in the wiki/forums too. Or did I. Ahh those were the days, eh

yes! the crossing pieces look nice and overlapped. btw is the color accurate or did you put it under a yellowy light? Also, i'm not sure if a nail is really necessary at every junction, looks a little weird, but only when looking up close. thanks for your work on this! I think in the future, maybe we should implement other repetitive TDM model resources as similar decals, like the black iron fencing and things like that

white painted wood. the type that flakes and has lengthy cracks like its been standing in the sun every day for 10 years. you know why

Epicness!!! Can't wait to try out the cards. totally snagged my idea right out of my head about guards carrying and drinking out of bottles, but hey, less work for me right? Although, I still think I have another good idea. Random drunken wobbling, stumbling, and staggering animations. If AI triggers a stagger animation while walking up/down a staircase, then halfway through the animation he ragdolls and tumbles down the stairs, then gets back up again and resumes patrol after cursing a bit .

yeah, noticed that. my mansion walls are littered with ivy decal patches. one of the the other big pains about the transparent sheet is it seems that other patches do not show through behind the transparent part of it (in DR), so if you have 5 different foliage patches stacked on top of eachother, in DR you only see 1, but you can see all the brushes behind it through the transparent texture. kind of a confusing pain. and the edges really look not so good when you get up close in game

Yes it is a very good time to start playing TDM. Let it be known that 2010 will be remembered as the Year of The Dark Mod.

I'm Ungoliant - and I don't do stuff. 27, I am the epitome of typical American mediocrity. I have an associates degree in Computer Networking that I've never used and is now 7 years outdated, and half a BA in Computer Science that I dropped out of 2 years ago. I leave most things I start half finished or make no practical use of them, work the system, and eat taxpayer dollars. Some things that I have started, done fairly well at, and then abandoned include: chess, poker, piano, violin, computer progamming, and home construction. Since the 3rd grade i've probably read 1000+ works of fiction/fantasy. Most of the time, my professional career consists of sales jobs, and playing poker. Both fluctuate between flush and bust on a revolving basis. Sometimes I'm so broke i need food stamps. Sometimes i just have thousands and thousands of dollars lying around that i don't even know what to spend on. (Right now I'm in total bust phase and feeling somewhat moody about it). In my current free time, (and there's lots of it), i replay video games that make me nostalgic like FF7, or Thief. I also very much enjoy working on my TDM FM, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and watching public access television all simultaneously. I'm currently employed as a front desk clerk at a 2 star hotel, but i don't think i'll be there long

with the aforementioned articles deleted and v-synch disabled, the map runs at 35-45 fps. strangely enough, as long as i keep the view mostly off the ground, which is one big ol' flat brush, it will average 45-50 fps even if looking straight at the entirety of the mansion. can't claim to understand that at all. anyways, them be good numbers, so i think i got some texture designing and patch tessellation reduction to do. i'll bite the bullet on the 5 fps floodlight reduction, cuz it pretty much looks awesome.

the system seems to make sense to me. From an intuitive perspective when a sound comes from another room/visleaf, it would likely come primarily from the door/window/corridor, which is exactly where visportals should be placed. i.e. my roommate's bedroom is adjacent to one of my bedroom walls. When my roommate has sex, the sound primarily propagates from my bedroom door which is on the far side of my room away from the true direction of the noise, with some lower pitched sounds that come at a quieter level through the wall. this results in a sound like my roommate having sex in the hallway outside my bedroom, which i do not altogether appreciate

now that is hella useful information, and matches up exactly with my experience testing this map. My small attic rooms and the main menu show up as 60fps, and other rooms show as 30, 25, 20, 19, 15, or 14 fps (not sure why on the 19 and 14, but they blink rapidly between 19-20 and 14-15). would suck to be at 30 fps and then achieve real performance improvement that does not show visible FPS improvements up until you get to 60 FPS. now if i'm playing TDM, and have vsync enabled, and the map i'm playing runs currently at 30 fps but it could be at 48 fps without vsync...... why do i have vsync enabled?

did you read my last post all the way through? all the areas except purple including the fence area, including the lights, i deleted and then ran. it capped at 30fps. those above areas EXCEPT the purple areas have now been figured out(for the most part). As far as that purple area goes, theres no way on earth I'm redesigning those doubly arched trim patches as brushes for that relatively small amount of polys. if anything i'll just reduce the patch tessalation by 1 or 2 and that will work fine, although reducing by 2 i think will result in a triangle looking trim sticking out of the wall on the Z axis, yuck.

technically there is no texture "inside" a brush, but i think i know what you're saying, and you are correct. there are 6 faces to a cube, if 2 cubes are adjacent, and the adjacent faces that do not show are nodraw texture, it will STILL leak. pain in the a$$ much? yes. but thats how it is. if you changed it all to a 'regular' texture and theres still a leak, check the pointfile to see whats up, and it should accurately reflect where the leak is, as opposed to just going straight through a solid textured face, such as what happens if one of your non-visible faces in that brush is no-draw. caulk does not render, but it does seal against the void. if you make a wall/doorframe completely out of caulk, it will appear to be invisible (or black?) and any other surfaces it is adjacent to will also appear invisible in game. my guess is if this caulked surface viewed from one side leads to another visleaf that is shut off, it will appear black instead of invisible. I haven't done this myself, but thats my guess.

<3

i know exactly whats going on here. I had a similar experience when i was starting my first map, a tower i was making had a crap ton of brushes on it that were z-fighting only at the corners, so i tried to fix it by texturing all the internal non-visible faces of each brush as no-draw. It didn't stop the z-fighting, but i didn't change it back from nodraw either. 40 hours later i was testing for leaks, and the result was, even if all the other faces of your brushes are solid textures, and are vertex aligned with no holes, the nodraw texture on that 1 non-visible side allows a leak to go STRAIGHT through a solid texture. Like, in the pointfile, it totally looks like the line goes straight through a solid wall. Maddening!! Before i finally figured out what the problem was, i almost threw my monitor out a window in frustration. In other words, re-texture all your nodraw pieces in your walls/doorframes/etc to something solid. Caulk should not be a problem. Like MD said, make sure nothing thats supposed to be solid is a func_static. P.S. CSG Subtract on everything FTW

yes the floodlights and streetlamps cast shadows, in fact i did it that way on purpose because the shadows cast on the walls accentuate the fact that my mansion exterior is not a bunch of flat surfaces, but is in fact 3d. the circular tower parts actually get thicker on the higher floors as the trim builds up, and some of the colored bands that encompass the building are indented inwards, and the windows have actually been cut into the walls and are not just textured slices of the exterior. the shadows make this show (i like my work to be appreciated ) removing all lightsources except ambient_world yields about a 5 fps boost, for a total of 25-30 fps, where it was 19-25 before. as a comparison, in HoLS, my lowest framerate was at the entrance in the 'private sector' and ran 15-19 fps. keep in mind, only one wing of my mansion is ~finished, and when walking outside the player will always be able to see at least 2 sides (unless i block it out somehow, and i dont really want to). Additionally i can't see a way to block out ANY of the roof portion of the mansion as the whole thing is crazy high steeple towers from front to back. Only 3 tower roof areas have been raised up thus far on the front side of the mansion. as an update, after removing the 2 off-white lattice fences the ivy grows on, the dense cylinder columns and their 4 ivy decal clones, all the black iron fencing on top of the front awning thingy, and reducing all the horizontal patch tessellation of the upstairs tower trim (there were 9 pieces on each tower above the windows that had subdivisions of 12x3, reduced to 3x3), amazingly the FPS went from 25-30 fps to only a constant 30 fps.... i really thought itd be more than that. hmmm....

thanks for the feedback guys. regarding the rack/trellis/lattice, yes it would seem a texture would work better here, but using brushes it literally took about 2 minutes to make, and i wanted to see what it would look like. @Tels yeah its a func_static with noshadows 1 set, and the sides that should not be visible to player were painted nodraw, not caulk. not sure if thats any better. @Serp yes the lack of white wood textures in stock was somewhat dissapointing. If you do want to make one thatd be sweeeet. regarding the columns, i used a very dense cylinder to create these, but to make matters worse, i shortcutted the ivy decaling on it by cloning them (twice each!), and adding 2 of the larger ivy decals stretched to fit the patches. perhaps it would be better to do it the old fashioned way. regarding the decals themselves, like i was saying those 65 patches were only the ones in the visible area of the first SS, and that area wasn't even done yet. I'd estimate this front wall would have roughly 200-230 ivy decals before its finished by doing it this way. hmmm that sounds like it would work, like for instance, one giant patch stretched to fit around the circular part of one of the towers, then a couple more to cover the flat parts of the walls. is this the best way? because i got noooo idea how to texture things, (but i'd like to learn, and this sounds like a good excuse to do it). if i did, it sounds like itd be a total pain to align things together and avoid things like covering up all the windows on accident.

for the most part, the building interior is indeed empty, however all the rooms inside are completely sealed off with no leaks, so the only thing that should be rendering at that spot is the exterior of the mansion and surrounding walls / skybox (which at this moment is all 1 visleaf, but apart from the mansion wing shown, is completely undecorated or cut up into more towers). there are about 9 total decal textures used that are all located in textures/darkmod/decals/vegetation edit: melan, i do intend to dirty it up a lot, and do some beveling, among other finish work, but thus far i have only been working with the vegetation decals. in fact, theres tons of decorative work i'd love to do here if performance issues don't end up getting in the way. I worry because geometry of this mansion wing is made up of ~900-1000 brushes, ~550 patches, minus however much the skybox takes up.

performance issues are starting to gnaw at my brain. the following SS has about 65 ivy decals / models on the visible section of this wall. They are all visible from both sides (which is unnecessary and i'd like to fix that). I wonder 2 things: does this look like crap? if i plaster my whole mansion (pretty largish) in this way, is it likely to run most computers into the ground? if either of these is true, is there a better looking / more efficient way to decorate than just spamming patches with decal textures everywhere? where i haven't actually completed a full fm yet, i'm not sure how much detail i can get away with in a single visleaf, and i'd hate to do another 5 hours work for nothing trying to make this thing look good.

ditto. shift alt LMB is equal parts winnitude for default select single item AND spam click cycling through items that are on top of eachother in either grid or camera view.