CorwinWeber

Meh, I can cope with taking a mostly finished map and loading it into Hammer for some finishing work if I absolutely have to. The viewports thing.... the best way I can describe it is that the whole program feels like I'm working in 1024x768, but with none of the benefits like readable fonts. If I'm lucky I can see one room at a time in the viewports and using the 3d window is kludgy as hell. In DR? No problem. I have one window for most of my editing and can quickly switch between top down - side - front views, and one window for 3d. They also feel like I'm actually working in 1280x1024.

Actually TDM's genre just doesn't do it for me. I have used DR for editing regular Doom 3 and would love to use it for Half Life 2 and Portal editing. I wasn't a huge fan of Thief and I'm essentially burned out on fantasy altogether. For what TDM is, it looks great. I can appreciate that aspect. Just not my thing. The editor is fantastic tho.

Actually I love DR and loathe Hammer. It hasn't had an interface update since about 1998. It's clumsy as hell. You have to be in the 'right mode' to do anything and it takes four or five steps to do something that takes 'click and drag' in any Radiant based editor. I finally managed to tinker with the settings to make the font in the program large enough that I could actually read it instead of it being so tiny, but if I have a part of the interface that's just in my way.... my choice is to completely remove it, (if I can find that option) or just deal with it. No moving it to an area that's out of the way where I can still use it if I need it. It's not officially supported by Valve and doesn't seem to be actively being worked on. Personally I'm not sure how anybody makes levels in Hammer. Tiny viewport, no way to scroll that viewport incrementally, (even clicking the scrollbars sends your perspective over by about a third of the screen) and basically none of the aspects of interface design that people have figured out over the last decade or so. Radiant in general (and DR in particular) is an elegant program. I can actually do what I want to do in Radiant without having to fight my tools every step of the way. DR adds more options into that, and does so in the same general way. The models menu? Works. Textures list? Works and I can actually read the name of the texture. Changing my perspective so that I can actually see what I'm working on? Works. None of this is true with Hammer.

I didn't realize DR used C++ for plugins... thought it was all python....

Brushes yes, patches no, lights.... sorta. The patch function at least just wouldn't work. So far as I know, Source just doesn't use them at all. Lights could potentially get a bit funky... or not. There are dynamic lights in Source, but they don't work the way idtech dynamic lights do. That would mostly be a compiler issue tho.... not specifically something the editor would need to worry about much. Python alone won't do the trick, no.... but there's a set of libraries and other functions (all GPL) called hllib. GCFScape uses them to extract files from the GCF's, and a python add on could call the same function to give the editor access to the assets. It's the sort of thing you don't have to do with idtech4 because a pk4 file is basically just a renamed zip archive.... so it will just open with no further fuss. And on an unrelated note.... I find it odd that my browser's spellcheck chokes on idtech.... but not on idtech4.

Ok, so.... for example making a copy of the doom3.game file and editing it appropriately would be a start.... there would be more tho, I know. It would have to get into the GCF files to get the assets. Now, that's possible.... there are libraries available to do it. I'm just not sure whether that could be done outside of DR itself or not. Maybe a python plugin to call the right functions?

Sure.... you'd just need to extract the pk4 files.... but I'm not sure how DR would go about finding that....

The issue with that is that apparently there's a way to make GTKRadiant work with HL2.... but the instructions all seem to have been posted years ago on webhosts that are now defunct.... My impression is that Source's structure isn't different enough to make the two completely incompatible, just incompatible by default. It's not that it won't work at all, it's that it won't work without tinkering with it. Ok, I despise Hammer enough that I'm willing to tinker.

A while back I was looking for a way to make DarkRadiant usable for editing Source games as well as idtech games. I've been poking around and I'm still interested, but I'm not exactly sure where to start. I guess what I'm looking for as a starting point is to find out how DR knows where to look for a game's assets? Is it the .game file? Is it one of the libraries? Combination of both? It has to be more complicated than just editing the doom3.game file and renaming the result, I'm just not sure how much more complicated it needs to be.... ** edit ** ** sigh ** I just realized I posted this in tech support rather than editor's guild.... please feel free to move the post if that's appropriate. My bad.

The last beta I tried was an improvement, but it was still a pain in the ass. Don't think I've tried 53 yet.

I've never seen such plugins, you don't happen to have a link, do you?

I think there's something odd about Doom's implementation of lwo. I can't get lwo's from Blender to work right either.

No, I haven't. Actually I get exactly that same error when I try. I've been working with original models and focusing on ASE as a format, so it hasn't been an issue. I've also been working more with Blender because AC3D does seem to be missing a few features I've needed..... that might just be because of the demo, tho. Blender's less of a clusterfuck when you find some decent scripts. Kind of like Photoshop in that respect.

I've been working with AC3D and so far I like it. It's not free, but it's cheap. (I think it's 40 bucks, which compared to Lightwave and such is nothing.) It's also cross-platform, Windows, Mac and Linux all have native versions. There's a two week free trial and I've had decent luck with it so far, I think the trial disables plugins but not much else.

The good news is that most of my custom models now look normal in the editor. The bad news is I still have one that shows up white and untextured in game.... although I made your changes and now it looks normal in the editor..... //doom3/base/textures/base_floor/ghotile3.tga is one of the textures and //doom3/base/textures/base_wall/steel.tga. Tried removing the .tga and that didn't change anything. I can try remaking that model.... it's two textured cylinders.... should only take a few minutes....

WOOT! Fixed it, thanks. I changed my path to just \\doom3\etc..... and now it finds it. Hmm.... lemme try that with forward slashes to see if that still works.... ** edit ** K. Oddly enough, it doesn't seem to care whether you use forward or backslashes. Thanks! (Figured there was something I wasn't doing.)

Ok, trying..... for reference, what is purgatory? Your system? Part of the directory structure?

Yeah.... me either.... Maybe it's my sobriety.....

Yes, it's an ASE. I have yet to get LWO working right overall.... besides, I've gotten the impression that ASE just works better with idtech overall. Here's one, ASE renamed to txt. Again, Doom sees it fine and actually DR can see the textures, it lists them in the model browser when I select the model. It just doesn't display them in the editor. pipecap2a1.txt

So I started modeling, (ac3d is actually very good, if Blender aggravates you as much as it does me, check it out. Two week free trial.) and I've come across an issue..... when I create a model, all is good. I browse to my extracted textures and apply them to the object. Object is textured in the program, but when I insert the model into my map it comes up with the blue and black 'shader not found' texture. Oddly enough.... it DOES work right in the game. (Um, usually. I'm tinkering with one right now where this is not the case, but overall, Doom displays them fine.) I figure there's something I just haven't told DarkRadiant about where to find the textures used in the model.... I'm just not sure what and where to tell it....

Yeah, some googling let me know about uv face mode, but not really what replaced it...

Ok, I think I've figured out a major part of the problem with Blender.... it goes back to what Fidcal was saying about the lack of a tutorial. There are dozens... hundreds of tutorials out there for Blender. Plenty of information. This isn't the problem. What IS the problem is that the Blender foundation makes such radical changes to the software between minor version numbers (this is a HUGE no-no from a development perspective) that 99% of the available tutorials are completely useless because the instructions refer to menu options and processes that AREN'T THERE due to changes in the already cryptic interface. (This is why it's a huge no-no.) Any tutorial for any version number in the 2.x range should be reasonably useful for any 2.x version of Blender. The problem is that while there are dozens of tutorials out there for that range, almost all of them are only useful for their specific version. I'm trying to work through texturing and uv mapping a simple shape. The tutorial I have is for 2.45. The menu options it refers to (switch the display to 'UV Face Mode') isn't there in 2.49. (I have to assume it's somewhere in the interface, but I have no idea where.... it's not where the tutorial says it is.)

It shouldn't take me two years to learn how to make a basic girder. That's nonsense. I've used everything from Photoshop to AutoCad. And yes, I picked up the basics of using the Doom level editors in an afternoon. Wasn't tough. More complicated and impressive stuff? I'm still working on that.... but I'm getting it bit by bit. With Blender, we're talking about taking weeks to figure out how to make the modeling equivalent of two box rooms and a hallway. I'm not even in character modeling yet. Nothing bizarre, nothing terribly complex. What complexity there is is largely due to having a large number of items in a given model.... but while there are a lot of them, they're regular. Replication is your friend. What's giving me problems? I can express some of it at least: The 'objects' you create don't act like objects created in other software packages (such as CAD) or like objects in the real world. Your 'object' is just the little primitive shape created by the editor, even after extrusion when you would EXPECT that now that you've extruded a cylinder, your object is now the large, extruded cylinder. There is also no way (apparently) to select all of said extruded cylinder. The interface is counterintuitive. Clicking and dragging doesn't move or deform an object unless you use some obscure, poorly documented (and unintuitive) key combination.... and even then it rarely moves or deforms it in the way you want it to. My first attempts at extrusion, for example, extruded wedges out of a cylinder. Every.... other.... wedge. Why on EARTH I would even want to do this in the first place still escapes me.... let alone why it's the default behavior. The controls are wonky. I've used worse.... try driving in HalfLife2, for example.... but still, they're pretty bad. Panning around your item basically works, but it's irregular and clumsy. There seems to be a heavy emphasis on animation at the expense of usable tools (and the documentation of said tools) for creating static models. I quite frankly don't give a damn about camera angles and lighting. I want to make an object. That's all. I don't WANT hippos in pink tutus dancing around it. Minor nitpick: It's ugly as hell. You have grey, mauve, and grey. Occasional swaths of pink and puke green. For artists, the designers don't impress me here at all. No program should ever omit 'File,' 'Edit,' 'View' and the like. My method of exiting the program should only consist of 'killall -9' when the program has crashed, not because I can't find 'File > Quit.' The workspace and objects are too arbitrarily small, and the workspace can't be changed. Get working on anything of a usable size, and you're off the grid. You also can't manually enter in the dimensions of an object. (No, I don't want to drag it out to the right size.... especially when the right size is several dozen times the size of my available window. I know how big I want it, let me type the number in.) Too.... much.... crap. There's so much going on on the screen that the viewports end up being too small to be usable. Frankly, outside of small detail work, I can't SEE what I'm doing. The documentation. Oh, the documentation. I've written software documentation. Professionally, even. I'd like a long, heartfelt talk with the authors of this documentation. Preferably involving some Thorazine, jumper cables and a baseball bat. Failing that.... forcing them into a basic technical writing class (at gunpoint if necessary) would be a start. It skips steps, avoids mentioning issues that I later find out are common problems and skips ahead to what the author thinks is interesting when what you're looking for either doesn't get mentioned at all, or only gets mentioned in passing with no useful details. There's a reason software interfaces are the way they are. That reason is that THEY WORK. Messing with this is something that should only be done for a very VERY good reason, and I'm not seeing that reason aside from art students either not knowing anything at all about software design, or deciding that they just wanted to do things differently for the sake of doing things differently. Bottom line: To do even the most basic things I have to dig through a half dozen websites to find a vague description of how to do what I want, then I have to jump through five flaming hoops just to make a thrice-damned support structure that I could make in ten minutes in a more well designed program. (I know this, because I've done it. Checked out AC3D this afternoon, and I'll probably be buying it after the trial runs out. The girder that was giving me fits? Ten damn minutes and I cranked it out.)

Modeling is complex, but it's not THAT complex.... Blender doesn't use conventions common to all programs, regardless of OS. It also doesn't use conventions common to all graphics programs outside of one particular branch of 3d modeling. For those of us like myself that cut our teeth on AutoCad.... it's frustrating as hell. The problem is that you find yourself asking over and over again 'why are you doing that?' and the explanation (when you can find it) invariably triggers the second question: 'why the hell would I even WANT to do that?!?!?!?!?!' It's not written for exporting to games, no... it's written for making cheesy CGI movies that nobody else will watch but look great when you're stoned. Sorry, I'm letting my frustration bleed through.

I'm actually looking at other programs. I despise Blender with a passion that rivals that fires of Hell. (Which, since I'm looking at doing models for Doom 3, is actually kind of appropriate.) Stuff should NOT BE THIS COMPLICATED. Nothing makes sense. I can create a model, can't select the whole model after I'm done.... stuff like that. I've tried both 2.49 and 2.5.... and while 2.5 seems to be an improvement in some ways.... it's horrifically bad in others. Come on.... this program doesn't even have File > Edit > View etc.....