Spooks

Ooh, the visleaf information is very informative and I haven't seen it around so it's great to have it explained, thanks. To be fair, I've only skimmed the Light Textures and Falloff Images wiki page as I'm still busy hammering out geometry in my map, but it's nice to know ahead. I've not seen any cubemap lights in TDM, but I do see them mentioned at the end of that wiki page, are those what you mean or something like using 'envshot' images for light textures?

I've been wondering if I should put pairs of visportals on some of my windowpanes in my map, like in Komag's tutorial video, but just about the only thing about visportals I don't get is what's the actual difference, performance-wise, between a closed and an open visportal in a situation where there's next to nothing being rendered in the open visleaf anyway, like in the picture. Or is it that the entire visleaf is rendered anyway but r_showtris will only show tris that the player can "see" in there through that visportal, hence the need for pairs of them in certain situations? And another thing I've been meaning to ask, I've thought of using a number of small ambient lights to simulate radiosity/light bounce paired with a principal, shadowcasting pointlight in order to avoid the light bleed of one big ambient light while still being able to change the ambients' color independent of the pointlight. You can see how it's set up, 3rd light from left to right is the principal one, and the other three are biground ambient lights that overlap for better color blending. Now the thing is, I know lightpasses on surfaces are the engine's biggest FPS eater. But is it so bad if it's just small ambients rather than shadowcasting pointlights? I know, I know, this is an extremely lazy method to do this sorta thing and I would be much better off creating a custom light falloff texture (and I probably will later), but I'm wondering for the sake of science.

I've been on a DarkRadiant binge today and I'm coming down from the 20-something hour high. In the later part of the day I decided to experiment with cubemaps on textures and just generally try come up with good lookinpoint and ambient light, with satisfactory results: Just the crappiest test map, but the materials weren't too hard to hack together. There's obvious oddities though, like the sofa being huge in that second screenshot. I know environment maps aren't supposed to align like real reflections do but the envshot command giving crappy pictures just exacerbates the issue. I guess there really isn't a proper cubemapping pipeline, you gotta make a material definition for every single texture, on every single cubemap you'd want to use. I think it's definitely usable though, with some way blurrier and generic cubemaps (maybe even the default gen1) it gives a nice illusion of wood varnish, or a particularly wet surface. Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to crash to bed and sleep until next week.

Thanks for the suggestions! I've been messing with particles tonight and I've some pointers on your particle question. From my experience DarkRadiant always saves the particles made in the particle editor in DarkRadiant/particles, even if you specify a different folder. So if you have your DarkRadiant not installed in the same directory as TDM (as is my case), that might be your problem. The particles are supposed to go in /particles, which should be in the same folder that also contains your /maps folder. BTW, I'm experiencing weird behaviour with the tdm_lamphaze_wide particle and its variations. The _color spawnarg works without "Use Entity Colour" being enabled, but only when r_usesoftparticles is set to 0. Other particles are fine, it's probably just the texture used in those ones that's somehow doing it. Don't know if it's that much of an issue being that most people won't have soft particles disabled but I don't know why it's the way it is and it's ticking me off.

Damn, Bikerdude, those soft shadows look sweeeet. They're making me salivate for the next release! Ontopic, I've been looking at hillside Italian towns, I really like the winding streets and verticality. The map I'm working on right now is pretty much flat, but I'd sure love to try my hand at something like this at some point.

On the subject of lights, is there a spawnarg or something to make a light seem to move about? I don't mean flicker. In atdm:fireplace_brick, for example, stand near the flame with player shadow enabled and you can clearly see the effect of the shadows moving. I can't seem to find a way to replicate the effect. edit: Heyy, it's the light_moving entity. I ended up manually having to copy a bunch of inherited properties and then I found I could just use it instead. Oh well, you could say that posting the question made me look extra hard so the forums did help.

Thanks for the warm welcome, been lurking for the last couple of days and that. I tried both binding it and inputting it directly in the console, but when I put it in the cfg it worked straight away, thanks! edit: I just realized my problem was I was consistently typing "_impulse27" as "_impulse 27" I've been so used to the Source engine impulse syntax that my eyes were plain refusing to see it right, over and over, hah.

Hey guys, I can't seem to find the cvar that will let me see all the areas that the AAS has generated in-game. _impulse 27 isn't in (anymore, I suppose) and aas_showAreas doesn't work (as most of the aas_ cvars for that matter). The only thing that's worked for me is tdm_ai_showAASarea, but that only shows the nav area under the one AI I've put in for testing.