greebo

You mean, I should open a forum thread to get some thoughts before I even started? And post screenshots as soon as I have something? It's the fricking internet after all, where nobody has to deal with anybody else in person, and you might happen to be a fun and relaxed guy in real life, but getting this tone in return when asking for feedback is not exactly what makes this funny for me. I'm always open to listen to mappers, especially mappers, but l need constructive feedback to work with. I'm totally aware that this is not exactly a simple GUI to set up a material in 5 seconds. I have thought about having two "modes", where the simpler one hides most of the controls, where one just sets up the diff/bmp/spec triplet. It's just not there yet, and it was indeed not even the goal for this first iteration, but I can hear you guys that it looks like an airplane cockpit right now. Or maybe that simpler GUI ends up as a separate "assistant"-style dialog on top of this one? Or maybe a separate "Material Creator" GUI that is using the same preview but just features a few controls (no selecting of existing materials, just creating new ones)? Ideas? I've been working on the harder part of that quote, which was #2. Like the particle editor, it should be able to open existing materials, such that users can inspect and play around with them, talk about full syntax support. So I needed to make sure it is able to display every TDM material you throw at it, and looking at the now-defunct iddevnet.net materials page there are heap loads of options - that's why there are so many controls. It should be able to open any existing material, change anything in there and hit the save button without it destroying the original material syntax, which is not going to be easy. My ToDo-List is looking like this: Make DR materials reponsive to changes, so the preview reacts to it Get DR to export materials that have been edited Get the DR renderer up to speed, it doesn't support most of the less widely used keywords Improve the lighting preview scene with configurable light parameters Create that "simple" mode Each of these steps will take weeks, so we're still at the beginning of that story. But still, if the majority of mappers here thinks that this GUI will be a perfect waste of time, because 1) too complicated and 2) nobody wants that anyway, then please tell me right now. I'll focus on a mini-GUI with diffuse/bump/specular and forget about the rest. I'm pushing the commits to github on an almost daily basis. I know that some mappers used to build DR from source for personal use. Anyway I was thinking it would be nice having an automated nightly build which is just building and publishing whatever the code currently is looking like. I don't have such a setup though, I need to spend some time playing around with Github CI, never touched it so far. Creating a new build every day manually is too much work for me for little benefit, to be honest.

Got the first WIP shot to share. Right now the GUI can display and handle all the material and stage keywords, had to extend the parser here and there. The material is read-only (so it's currently more like a material viewer than an editor). The cube in the preview is slowly rotating and has a fixed light source in the scene. You can switch between the lighting modes, as with all the previews. There's lots of stuff left to be done, next step will be to do some ground work on the Material interfaces to make it changeable (it hasn't been designed to be altered after parsing). Once that's done, I will try to get the control bindings working, to see the updates immediately.

It's possible to disable that automatic clone offset (I think it's in the top toolbar). Not sure how many people use that option, but it's there.

Nice, you might have addressed an old issue: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=426

You mean the lights are working for or they are not working for you? Generally, the DR renderer doesn't distinguish between games.

Thanks for the detailed report!

Yes, it's relevant. Thanks for going this far!

You can find the PDBs right next to the release builds on github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/download/2.11.0/darkradiant-2.11.0-x64.pdb.7z

Thanks for the dump. I can't look into this right now, but if you could open an entry on the bugtracker the chances of me forgetting are smaller.

Loosely following the discussions on Discord, I think I know where this topic is coming from. The conclusion to solve the past problems by removing the model export functionality from DR is wrong on so many levels, my answer just has to be nope. Besides the technical discussions, I personally find the thought of artists being that retentive about their work a bit strange, at least in the context of this community. If all the folks contributing to the mod had thought this way, there simply wouldn't have been a The Dark Mod at all.

Ah yes, this actually sounds familiar, the DevExpress (WPF) dock manager I once used had the same requirement - one had to set the IDs or the Names of the panels in order to have their layout restored properly. Nice you could track that down, there's not much missing now, is there?

Oh man. I could give it a shot by compiling against the wx3.1 sources in Linux to see if it's as broken there. The dev cycles of new stable releases are almost painfully long in wxWidgets, the 3.1 branch has a few wxGTK bugs less and has been there for years. Users are even "encouraged to use this release, including in production", but it's still not available in a single Linux distro.

Great, I like this a lot! Let's hope the docks support some kind of saving/restoring, then I'm all for replacing the 4 existing layouts with AUI-based ones.

I don't mind adding another screen layout, if it really helps productivity.

I rarely activate that layout... doesn't surprise me that issues are creeping in. If it bothers you, please add it to the bugtracker.

There seems to be a problem in wxGTK 3.0.4 when calling wxDataViewModel::Cleared(): https://trac.wxwidgets.org/ticket/18603 I actually posted in this very topic regarding a different crash in wxGTK, but the original issue report is about the tree view being wiped out by Cleared() instead of being reloaded. In the most recent master commit I worked around that problem by re-associating the data view model, so this problem should be gone now.

Ok, thanks, I'll have a look at the search issue later. It's likely that the Cleared() call in wxGTK is more devastating than I'd expected - it should refresh the view from the model.

Only briefly confirmed the issue, it's tracked now. From what I can see in the debugger is that the second time around no call to "loadEntityClasses" is performed. I have no idea why this doesn't have the same effect in Windows, but I guess the wxDataViewModel::Cleared() implementation in wxMSW is not really doing anything. The fact that the EntityClassChooser is a singleton doesn't really help. Population is threaded and working very fast, so my first measure would be to remove the Instance() stuff and make it a regular dialog that is instantiated each time it's shown. The problem will most likely go away with it, and we don't need to monitor the GlobalMainFrame to get rid of the instance on time during shutdown.

Don't have time for until Friday, but I can have a look then.

Oh crap. Are you already investigating it, or should I have a look?

Nice, thanks for the confirmation! Still not the final fix for this type of problem, but for now it'll do.

Thanks, tobi, that was quick!

DarkRadiant 2.11.0 is ready for download. Next to bug fixes and GUI improvements (also to the recently added TDM Game Connection plugin) this build enables users to manage their favourite resources like materials, entities, sound shaders. The search function of resource trees has been improved too. It's recommended to prefer this version over any previous release. See the pre-release testing thread for a few feature highlights. Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/2.11.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks go out to all who helped testing this release! Please report any bugs or feature requests here in these forums, following these guidelines: Bugs (including steps for reproduction) can go directly on the tracker. When unsure about a bug/issue, feel free to ask. If you run into a crash, please record a crashdump: Crashdump Instructions Feature requests should be suggested (and possibly discussed) here in these forums before they may be added to the tracker. Changes since 2.10.0 Feature: Managing favorite resources like entities, textures and sound shaders Feature: Extended/improved the search feature of resource browsers Feature: List model definitions in Model Chooser Feature: Initial GUI improvements to game connection plugin Fixed: Collapsing a brush while undoing cannot be undone Fixed: Skin Chooser starts with expanded All Skins root folder Fixed: Projected lights don't rotate around their origin anymore Fixed: Default scale & natural function producing stretched results Fixed: Script dialogs don't scale when window is resized Fixed: Material parser doesn't recognise materials with no whitespace between name and block Fixed: Treeview search box can overlap with the search result Improved: Prefab Chooser preview has better initial view origin and angles Improved: Imported prefabs are now created at the cursor Improved: Added option for "ai_see" spawnarg to Light Inspector The list of changes can be found on the our bugtracker changelog. Have fun mapping!

Cool, didn't know there's an extension, but hey, why am I surprised? Visual Studio Code is underestimated, imo, it's fast, has built-in Git support, there's an extension for virtually everything, and its development is moving along very quickly. It was stunning to see how easy it was to launch gdb and step through the C++ code in Linux, it requires almost no setup.

Confirmed, and fixed in source (#5507).