Bikerdude: - questions

[grayman]

Set up a big light and give it parallel 1.

 

Then press V for vertex mode and move its light centre to point at the moon.

 

Make its bounding box enclose the entire where you want moonlight.

 

I've found that this type of light only works in the area where it resides.

 

If you have two or more outside areas separated by visportals, and you want moonlight in every area, you have to create one light per area. This clobbered dmap performance in my case, so I've avoided using them.

[Bikerdude]

I just went with a simple single light high up inside the map and giving the right colour, light level and turned on shadow.

Edited July 14, 2010 by Bikerdude

[Fidcal]

If it's moonlight then you ought to at least try parallel 1 and move the centre towards the moon. It looks quite different. No fall off, no fading, all shadows parallel everywhere.

[Bikerdude]

If it's moonlight then you ought to at least try parallel 1 and move the centre towards the moon. It looks quite different. No fall off, no fading, all shadows parallel everywhere.

 

Ok ill try and see what it look like..

[Bikerdude]

Particle editor:

 

The wiki article is missing some pictures...Im trying to edit "lantern_glare_simple.prt", to reduce the size of the glare etc.

 

but atm Im clueless...help

Edited July 14, 2010 by Bikerdude

[Fidcal]

I'm not very knowledgeable about doom particles. You might copy the file and fiddle with the values on the color and fadecolor lines. But it might be the material or even the texture needs changing. Have a look for the material def textures/particles/fbeam which is in materials/sfx.mtr which is in base/pak0004.pk4.

[Bikerdude]

hmm that dosent help much Im afraid.

 

The reason I want to use that particular particale effecty is due to is very low tris count. When i looked at it with showtris 1 it only show 2 (leafs?) compared to the multiple fast moving ones on "tdm_glare_lamp_01.prt"

 

I became aware of this when looking at ways or keeping the fps count high in my cathedral map and see it as a way of doing the same thing in my contest map.

[Fidcal]

Sorry I can't help more except to spend a few days setting up a test map and experimenting with the particle and material defs and images. Even then I might not produce what you want.

 

Is it the brightness you want to reduce or the size of the particles or the overall size of the effect?

 

If this is just a halo or haze effect around lights why not use the ones I used in Heart which have very little performance impact. If so, let me know and I'll give you details. They are very simple to set up.

[Bikerdude]

I am using the ones I found in the training mission, I`ll have a look at the one in heart and see if they are the same.

 

What Im trying to do is reduce the size of the effect, as its too big and cutting into brushes etc.

[Fidcal]

OK, well basically you

 

make a simple small patch

give it textures/darkmod/sfx/fake_haze_02

Size it how big you want the halo

make it func_static

place it cutting through the light.

The patch can be any way up, the effect is the same from any direction. I put mine horizontal

Give it eg _color" "0.125 0.125 0"

Give it "hide" "0"

 

That hide is because if it is around an extinguishable like a torch or an electric light with a switch you then need only target this halo from eg, the torch light or switch and it disappears each time the light goes out and re-appears if relit. I don't recall trying this with one of the special light entities though.

[Bikerdude]

oooh, Ill give that a try

[SneaksieDave]

You might copy the file and fiddle with the values

Yup that's all I've ever done. That's where the torch flame particle came from in fact.

[Bikerdude]

More questions:

 

1. how do i turn on of the menu music, or use a command in autoexec.cfg to do it.

2. how do I get the console to auto open upon launch, , or use a command in autoexec.cfg to do it.

 

I'm just trying automate as much as possible, just to make editing that much smoother.

 

ta.

[Bikerdude]

any suggestions..?

[aidakeeley]

any suggestions..?

 

Release

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Bikerdude]

any useful suggestions that make sense...

[Fidcal]

All I can say is:

 

1. Don't know.

 

2. Don't know.

[greebo]

1. how do i turn on of the menu music, or use a command in autoexec.cfg to do it.

You can define your menu music with TDM 1.03 upwards, by packaging a custom guis/mainmenu_custom_defs.gui file in your PK4. With TDM 1.02, the only way to define custom menu music is to override vanilla TDM files, which is not recommended.

 

2. how do I get the console to auto open upon launch, , or use a command in autoexec.cfg to do it.

DOOM3.exe +com_allowConsole 1 +set fs_game darkmod

[Bikerdude]

Ok whats the leaf limit for light sources in TDM/DM3 as I have managed to hit that limit in my contest map -

 

I slowly grouped commons items and saved as prefab then deleted untill i found the cause of my FPS drop - and it was the amount of lights. 90% of the lights are just sources not entities and the no-shadow arg has been set. Im my case there were 40 of the.

 

After removing all the lights Im getting 63fps almost every where bar certain locations and high up.. With all the lights I get FPS drops as low as 23...

[rich_is_bored]

All lights are entities. It doesn't matter if they have a model or not.

[Baddcog]

Lights are deffinately the biggest impact too. I was going to mention that about your brush crate.

Since the shadowmesh on the crates is probably the same as the brush crate it's not gonna save you much more than just using a model. (but a good technic for walls of crates , etc..)

 

There's a command which I forgot, which shows your tris in colors based on how many lights hit them. If they turn white 6+ lights are hitting them and that's big. So you have to adjust their bounds so not as many overlap.

 

That could be your issue. World_ambient is 1, a torch is 2, a torch guard is 3...moonlight, 4...

 

I put a parrellel moonlight in my map to see what it looked like and it dropped from 30 to 20... So I don't know, I might use a few as 'highlights' on certian stuff, but not covering the whole ground area.

[nbohr1more]

If I were Plasticman I could probably explain in full detail how to make a Light texture so that one big light source looks like two or more different ones but alas my Jedi skills are not yet ready :(

[Bikerdude]

There's a command which I forgot, which shows your tris in colors based on how many lights hit them. If they turn white 6+ lights are hitting them and that's big. So you have to adjust their bounds so not as many overlap.

I put a parrellel moonlight in my map to see what it looked like and it dropped from 30 to 20... So I don't know, I might use a few as 'highlights' on certian stuff, but not covering the whole ground area.

Ah yes now that would be extremely handy!

 

And thats why I removed my moonlight a while ago, it was causing a huge FPS drop - shame as it looked really, really pretty..

 

All lights are entities. It doesn't matter if they have a model or not.

Ah so I guess another question would be, how many entities to a leaf..?

Edited August 4, 2010 by Bikerdude

[nbohr1more]

r_showLightCount ?

[rich_is_bored]

I don't know about any limits on a per-leaf basis. All I know is that Doom 3 had an entity limit of 4096. This may have been changed for TDM.