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Sorry about this but I'm having another problem, I decided that I would now take the plunge and start mapping, I made a good start with prefabs and models and only used 1 brush, I then added an amdient light and a streetlight model that I used before that was pre lit, using F3 it showed the light was working but the alarm bells started ringing when I used light inspector and Omni was faded out, projected was selected but none of the functions in the right hand pane were usable. No prelit light source works in game.. do I throw the computer out of the window and become a monk?? or do I uninstall Dark Radiant and reinstall it?. Thanks Peeps.

Hi guys, through the "cheats" topic I got the idea, that it would be quite useful, if there were tags for missions (the post was about removing the killing restriction in some missions to suit the prefered play style). I don't know how easy or difficult this is, but with them, it would be quite convenient to pick missions with playstyles, environment, etc one does want to use. This could also be expanded to other mission properties. I remember a discussion about climbable drains, handles on doors, that cannot be picked and other things the map author chooses for himself. That way these things would be clearer and as I said before, it is easier to choose missions with playstyles that suit oneself. What do think?

One of my favorite things to do in Doom 3 was punch the light on the chain and watch the shadows dance around. How come the dangling candles/chandeliers in TDM are immovable?

I spent some time working on my WIP map today and ran into a situation with a multi-layered structure with oil lamps on each floor. The problem was that I could see both levels of my structure simultaneously and the radii of my lights was too tall and I got a lot of overlapping lights between the floors of my structure, leading to bad performance. I was able to solve the problem using a method similar to one I used in the "pit" portion of Requiem and since it works so well I thought I'd share it. Note that proper use of visportals will most often solve overlapping lights, since you can lock some of your lights behind a closed visportal where they won't render. So only use this method if you have geometry which makes that impractical. Overlapping lights (i.e. lights whose radii light up the same objects/geometry) are one of the most common performance killers in TDM. Unfortunately the standard light entities have two issues which make it a common problem, especially if you're lighting up geometry where you can see through more than one room/floor at the same time: a) For the sake of realism, the light entities need to be attached very close to a wall (for torches) or ceiling (hanging lamps). This means that a large part of the light radius is going to be poking out the other side of whatever wall/floor you attach it to. If you have any other lights nearby, like in the next room or the next floor, you'll get overlap. b ) The default light texture on light entities (usually biground_torchflicker or biground_candleflicker) produce a relatively weak light which means you need a relatively large radius to compensate. The result is that the radius of your lights is normally going to be much wider/taller than the geometry you're trying to light up. The following is a step-by-step walkthrough of one solution to this problem. This solution is meant to be used in situations (like mansions or multi-level structures) where you have many lights in proximity and need to make sure they're not touching each other for performance reasons. A drawback to this method (besides the time it takes to set it up) is that it will generate more entities in your map than if you just used standard lights. I start off with a two-story structure with two wall mounted lamps, one on each floor: 1) When you select the lamps in Dark Radiant you just see the model. You don't see the light that it will generate. But when you load up your map, the light is present. What's happening is that the entity has a default light attached to it which is spawned when you load the map. You can find it by looking at the lamp entity in DR and checking for the "def_attach" spawnarg. For these lamps that spawnarg is set to "light_candleflame", which is the light entity that's spawned on the lamp when we load the map. All of these various light entities can be found under Lights->Light Sources in the entity viewer. 2) Now that we've identified which light is being spawned by our lamps, the next step is to add the spawnarg "def_attach -" to the lamps. This removes the default light, so that if you were to load up the map, no light would be emitted by them. 3) Next create a 'light_candleflame' entity, position it on the lamp, and use the "bind" spawnarg to connect your light_candleflame to your lamp entity. Now if you load up the map, your lamp will look and act just as a normal lamp entity would. But since you can now see the light that's being cast in DR, you now can customize the spawnargs of the light. By itself this is a great way to eliminate light overlaps because you can just tweak the radius of your light (as well as color, whether it casts shadows, etc) instead of relying on the default light entity radius. At this point, after creating my custom lights and tweaking their radius a bit, here's how everything looks in Dark Radiant. You'll noticed that I've still got the light radii overlapping through the ceiling. In looking at this situation the only way I can have these two light not overlap each other is to move the lamps up and down the walls until they're farther apart. Sadly I can't do that without the lower lamp ending up hovering over the floor. Not only that, but if I move the lights farther apart the light will no longer significantly illuminate the ceiling even if I boost the light's brightness to 100. Let's solve the first of these problems: how do I get these two lights to not overlap without moving my lamps farther apart. The solution is to create a second light. 4) First, create a 'light_extinguishable' entity (found under Lights->Base Entities) and give it a radius such that it's just barely touching the ceiling and the floor. Give it the same light texture/color/ etc of the light_candleflame, and bind it to the lamp with the 'bind' spawnarg. If you want shadows to be cast from the direction of the lamp, move the light center on this new light to above the lamp (the light center determines where it looks like shadows are coming from. You can select it by clicking on a light and going into vertex mode. Then just move the vertex at the center of the light around). 5) Give the original light_candleflame that we created a radius of 1 1 1 . This will make the light so tiny that it won't cast onto any geometry. The reason we don't just erase it all together is because a) it creates a light flame particle for our light and b ) it will generate smoke etc when our light is extinguished. Once done to both lamps, this is what it should look like: Voila. We've now got two lights on top of each other that don't overlap and will act exactly the same as a normal lamp entity would in game (i.e. extinguish, turn back on, etc). Now let's solve the final problem: this setup is great but if I load it up in-game, the lights are very dim across the ceiling and floor, even if I boost the light brightness to 100. Because only the very edge of the light's radius touches the ceiling and floor, the illumination will be quite dark. The solution is to create a custom light texture. Most lights in TDM cast a light texture, basically a 2d image painted along the light. The light textures for most lamps/candles are based on the "biground" light texture, which ends up making the lights pretty dim. There's another light texture called "brightround" which when applied will make the same light incredibly bright. My custom light texture is a brightround which flickers like a torch. 6) Create a custom material file with the following contents (or just use the one I have with the test map): //This is a brightround with a torch flicker. Very useful if you want to avoid light overlaps because you //can have a much brighter looking light at a much lower radius than with the standard torchlights. lights/brightround_torchflicker { lightFalloffImage makeintensity( textures/lights/brightround ) { forceHighQuality // no shadow down or up map textures/lights/brightround colored zeroClamp red ((.05 * sintable [(time * ( 2 + Parm3 ) ) ]) +.95) * Parm0 green ((.05 * sintable [(time * ( 2 + Parm3 ) ) ]) +.95) * Parm1 blue ((.05 * sintable [(time * ( 2 + Parm3 ) ) ]) +.95) * Parm2 } } 7) Select our light_extinguishable and open up the light editor (by default press L). In the light editor apply the brightround_torchflicker texture to our lights. You'll notice that when you do this the lights become, much, much brighter. In fact you may need to lower the light's brightness (also in the light editor) to get them looking normal. Tweak the brightness to your satisfaction and you should be good to go. Here's how the lights look in-game. You now have two working lamps stacked on top of each other without any overlap. The same trick can be used to have non-overlapping lights on either side of a thin wall, etc. Hopefully it'll be useful in your mapping endeavors . LightSolution.pk4.txt

So i've met a bit of a crossroads as i'm doing the final tweaks on my map and I can't decide if I like the look of a cool blue ambient over the entire world or not. I've set my ambient_world entity to have a little tinge of blue to it and I like the look of it but at the same time it feels a little too much. With the blue tinge the _color is set to "0.01 0.06 0.10" and just regular is set to "0.1 0.1 0.1" What do you guys and gals think of this? which looks better to you and why? I picked the scene below because the lights in the warehouse are by default blue and this is the most blue area of my map so with the ambient light and the blue warehouse lights this is the most intense color mixture i'll get throughout the rest of the map if that makes sense. Blue ambient: Regular ambient: edit: here's another more normal scene for comparisons sake Blue ambient: Regular ambient:

I have decided to start experimenting in the world of ambient music. Eventually I plan to create a whole album and release it to the thief communities. But for now here is a taste of two tracks I created http://youtu.be/Yvy9Ajys1Ro

I'm trying to achieve an effect and I'm hoping someone might know a way to do it. Say I have a model of a sphere. If the sphere is being hit by a light from one side, the bright side will be bright and the dark side will be black (or whatever the default ambient is). What I'd like to do is have ALL sides be equally bright when hit by light. I don't want the sphere to glow in the dark, however. So I can't use an additive blend material. I want it to be lit only when there are lights nearby, but I want ALL of it be lit, not just the side facing the light. Essentially, I'd like the sphere to behave as though it is being hit by an ambient light. Noselfshadow won't achieve this affect...additive blends won't...anybody know of a way to do it?

Does anyone know if a GUI renderDef's lightOrigin and lightColor fields actually even do anything? No amount of fiddling with them seems to change anything. Edit: I've discovered the issue and will create a bug report.

Im using info_location entity to raise the ambient light level when outside in the street, but when moving from one viz leaf to another where said viz leafs are in the same info_location zone the ambient light level keep changing.. Can anyone remember if there was ever a fix or work around for this? as its bugged me for years.

So I was playing the alpha game from the guys that created Penumbra and I noticed they had a neat simple feature in regards to the way ambient light works - like Doom3/TDM, in that game if there are no ambient lights in the map, shadows are pitch black, but there's a radius around the player inside which details start to become visible (around 15-20 meters?) - you start to see things gradually as you aproach a pitch black area (would probably be a simple way of simulating better eye perception at close range). Technically you could say its a very subtle omnidirectional lamp attached to the player, and what is good about it is that you can still see things you need when you are reasonably close to them, but far away areas are hidden from you, keeping their mysteries and surprises. Not only that, but even this simplistic aproach is a lot more realistic than TDM's ambient world light washing over the whole map as far as you can see to infinity, that literally kills the sense of darkness in several overbright missions (not even talking about the way it makes most textures look bad and washed out). I was wondering if this could be added to the mod somehow as an optional feature, or if it could be accomplished by a mapper without needing to edit the engine - I can see many situations where it would be desireable to keep the player immersed in true darkness, but still able to barely see close by things as he investigates them. Its hard to see in this video because there are generally lights around, but its visible in the flare scene, he throws the flare but you can see that the area around him is brighter than the far corners of the room (which are pretty much completely dark): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaXDvR2sw-4

So I have the following material def - lights/metal_diamond_pattern3_new { description "projection for metal_diamond_pattern3 single pane" { forceHighQuality map textures/lights/metal_diamond_pattern3_new colored zeroClamp } } lights/plain_leadglass_shadow { description "projection for plain_leadglass" { forceHighQuality map textures/lights/plain_leadglass_shadow colored zeroClamp } } What the hell in that is causing TDM to crash on map load..?

Hey, Every time I've try to use the Full Editor when PM'ing someone, and every single time I get an error. Whoever is in charge of the forum, is it possible that this could be fixed? Thanks Neon