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Sotha's mapping thread


Sotha

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I don't see any problems with the size of the margins between the buildings--there's no way they could be compressed enough to drop the texture size by half.

 

That's just a sloppy C&P from the preview from this thread to prove it is possible. The red cross is at the center of the texture.

 

post-144-128542379279_thumb.png

 

You have to think long-term here: if we don't compress it NOW, we can NEVER compress it, because once it is released, mappers rely on the texture coordinates being the same. So we would forever stuck with space-wasting textures. And other people who think "heh thats the way to do it" and then copy it and we would end with even more etc.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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That's great Sotha, I've been wanting to do something like that for ages, but never got around to it. :)

 

I don't see any problems with the size of the margins between the buildings--there's no way they could be compressed enough to drop the texture size by half.

 

Thanks, nice if they're of benefit to the mod.:wub:

 

If someone insists on working on this, here are the source tga:s.

http://www.mediafire...8cq0blm4em46yav

 

Just make sure it's fairly easy to get the objects aligned without parts of other objects being visible. If the alignment is too difficult, the texture will be rather useless.

 

That screenshot of yours look really really dense. I'm somewhat sure *I* would have difficulties getting several patches correctly aligned with that texture. There is not much room for error: the patch has to be of EXACT correct size and that's takes a lot of time for me.

 

EDIT: yeah, but then again once the mapper has twiddled and finally gotten the buildings exactly aligned, cloning and placing the patches is rather trivial. But getting a few patches aligned is going to be major pain in the ass.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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Yes, but you've crammed them in so tight that there is absolutely no leeway there. Mappers would have to make sure their patch or brush is *exactly* the size they want the final building to be, because even the slightest rescaling of the texture will cause overlap. That's awfully unfriendly for mappers.

 

We have literally hundreds of textures with WAY more wasted space...is cutting this one texture from 1024x1024 to 1024x512 going to provide such a performance saving that it's worth making mapper's lives difficult to use it?

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Yes, but you've crammed them in so tight that there is absolutely no leeway there. Mappers would have to make sure their patch or brush is *exactly* the size they want the final building to be, because even the slightest rescaling of the texture will cause overlap. That's awfully unfriendly for mappers.

 

Uh, huh?

 

* You simple create a patch mesh (3x3), and roughly resize it the size you want

* you then use the texture tool to cut-out the building you want (tight fit or not, it allows simple drag of the borders until the cutout matches)

 

post-144-128542901844_thumb.png

 

Whether this is a tight fit (like in this example texture TDM already includes), or has 100 px space doesn't make much difference, as the texture tool is so easy to work with, allows sub-pixel accurancy and you can zoom in even, that it is literally done in a few seconds.

 

* afterwards, you can resize your decal patch as you want,and the building will always just grow (e.g. the texture stays as it is, tight fit or not).

 

Edit: Screen too big, will attach in next post.

 

Where is the problem?

 

I agree that we could drop a few buildings and add a few more pixels space, but not THAT many. Is saving the mapper a few seconds per map really worth that every player needs a few more megabytes video ram?

 

We have literally hundreds of textures with WAY more wasted space...

 

Yes, and thats why I didn't focus on this before release - we should have catched this before :/

 

Edit: Also, I'd like to remark that "optimizing texture space"is (except compressing as DDS, which helped) something we completely forgot. Even most mappers never check how much MB their map uses in a given scene, and so if it would run on a 256Mybyte card, or not (er very choppy that is). End of edit.

 

is cutting this one texture from 1024x1024 to 1024x512 going to provide such a performance saving that it's worth making mapper's lives difficult to use it?

 

If we always answer this question with "no", then we will end up exactly where we are now - literally hundreds of wasted textures. You have to start *somewhere*.

 

Edit: If your map uses 255.5 Mbytes video ram, and you add 512 Kbyte, yes, it will make a difference. It also will make a small difference in loading time, but this will only be visible if you cut out space from dozends of texture. End of edit.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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promised screen:

 

post-144-128542921472_thumb.png

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Oh, I didn't know about this texture tool. I always align with surface inspector. Good to know, thanks!

 

While mapping yesterday, I realized that I want to make a firewood shack. We do have a firewood model, but I don'w want to put hundreds of those to ruin performance. Thus my little sunday texture project started: I decided to make a texture firewood stack.

 

Gimp has this nice plugin called texturize, which does not need particular expertise to get things stacking. I played with it a little and got this:

6778102.png

It should tile in every direction decently.

 

It will have normalmaps and everything. Ingame shots later.

 

EDIT: oh, I'm trying to figure out where to save these without the need to change paths later. This certainly isn't

/wood/boards

and it isn't

/wood/panels

 

Or is it

/nature/foliage?

 

Or should I create

/nature/wood

or

wood/natural

 

EDIT:

after thinking this, I'm going for /nature/wood for the time being.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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Oh, I didn't know about this texture tool. I always align with surface inspector. Good to know, thanks!

 

No problem, I wasted hours aligning textures via scale/shift before,glad it will save you some time :)

 

Edit: Tip: Select the points (white rectangles) on the surface inspector with either Shift-Click or with Shift-draw-a-rectangle around them with the mouse. Moving the left/right/top/bottom row seems to suffice (e.g. always three points).

 

Because:

 

While mapping yesterday, I realized that I want to make a firewood shack. We do have a firewood model, but I don'w want to put hundreds of those to ruin performance. Thus my little sunday texture project started: I decided to make a texture firewood stack.

 

Gimp has this nice plugin called texturize, which does not need particular expertise to get things stacking. I played with it a little and got this:

6778102.png

It should tile in every direction decently.

 

It will have normalmaps and everything. Ingame shots later.

 

You do fantastic work :wub::)

 

I'd like a more darker version, tho, wood left outside for a while tends to get this dark,brown,cracked, mossy look.

 

after thinking this, I'm going for /nature/wood for the time being.

 

Sounds good to me.

 

Do you have SVN access btw? If not, you should get it, that way you get put your work directly into SVN, freeing us from 5 minutes importing things :)

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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You do fantastic work wub.gifsmile.gif

 

I'd like a more darker version, tho, wood left outside for a while tends to get this dark,brown,cracked, mossy look.

 

Thanks!

 

Here's the non-darkened version ingame:

6778386.png

 

I definately agree with the darkening: the logs shine a bit too much, especially seen in the non-lit stack. I'll darken this a tiny bit and them make also a even more darker version.

 

Sounds good to me.

 

Do you have SVN access btw? If not, you should get it, that way you get put your work directly into SVN, freeing us from 5 minutes importing things smile.gif

 

Nope, I guess now it would be time to get it I suppose. Can I set it up so that I only upload stuff there without downloading? I think I want to keep my tdm-version the official released version.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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I only skim this thread now and again because there's not been many mapping questions but that thing about waste texture space affects the grass edges textures I've been working on. I too found it far easier to leave generous margins otherwise you have to keep resizing the patch. For instance, I make a patch roughly the size of a texture tile, same scale as the background grass, then slide the grass edge to the edge. The opposite end the grass fades to fuzzy then a generous space to overlay the background grass.

 

Now, when I first did it I had it just fitting the tile with almost no waste space. So it became necessary to exactly make the patch the correct size which became time consuming especially when you have lots of them to do. I tiny mistake and you have the edge of the next texture tile showing.

 

I came to the conclusion that empty space should compress to almost nothing in the dds (can I use dds on an alpha-only map?) and load quickly and I believe dds images are stored as dds in the graphics card memory? Anyway, size isn't everything - mapper time and frustration is also important.

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Thanks!

 

Here's the non-darkened version ingame:

 

Looks good! Does it have a normal map yet? I think the dark spaces should be depper, but its hard to tell from the screenshot.

 

Nope, I guess now it would be time to get it I suppose. Can I set it up so that I only upload stuff there without downloading? I think I want to keep my tdm-version the official released version.

 

 

PM sparhawk with your username and wanted passwort, he will set you up.

 

The TDM SVN can be checked out into a sep. directory, then you can either use links (these should be available under Windows, too, as hardlinks) or rename the directories to switch anytime between the two.

 

I have f.i.

 

darkmod_org (svn)
darkmod_release (v1.02)

 

and a link named "darkmod" pointing to whatever version I need.

 

You probably need this:

 

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx

 

described from here:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link#Microsoft_Windows

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Looks good! Does it have a normal map yet? I think the dark spaces should be depper, but its hard to tell from the screenshot.

 

It already has a rather strong scale 3.0 normalmap.

 

 

 

PM sparhawk with your username and wanted passwort, he will set you up.

 

The TDM SVN can be checked out into a sep. directory, then you can either use links (these should be available under Windows, too, as hardlinks) or rename the directories to switch anytime between the two.

 

I have f.i.

 

darkmod_org (svn)
darkmod_release (v1.02)

 

and a link named "darkmod" pointing to whatever version I need.

 

You probably need this:

 

http://technet.micro...s/bb896768.aspx

 

described from here:

 

http://en.wikipedia....crosoft_Windows

 

 

 

Oh no. This looks exactly like the stuff I want to avoid. See, I'm using winXP as a gaming 'console.' I'm avoiding installing anything else except games, bare minimum stuff and nothing extra. Can I manage simply by installing somekind of FTP/SVN program and upload stuff without syncing everything? I'm not contributing that much assets to see the trouble of having an alternate TDM installation and some custom hardlinks.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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You cannot add anthing to SVN without having it checked out before. The reason is that otherwise SVN wouldn't know what you have changed, added or deleted :) The entire point of using SVN is that it can automatically track stuff and avoid/warn of conflicts etc. It also makes easy to stay uptodate.

 

In any event, I think you just need:

 

* install TurtouseSVN http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads

* check out SVN into an extra folder

 

Then you do:

 

* just work with v1.02 as you do now, and when you are done with something:

* copy the files into the checked out folder

* right-click it, click "commit" in TortouseSVN

 

That's as simple as the FTP/SVN thing you want and also how I test stuff in a windows XP virtualbox. That also avoids the hardlinks etc, because since your assets are not code related, you can safely test them in v1.02.

 

Sorry that I didn't have that idea before.

 

If you really don't want to muck with SVN, well, then you would always depend on someone from us downloading your stuff, adding it, then committing them (under their name, not yours). Apart from screwing with the SVN version history, it also puts a burden on our already overworked team. :)

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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In any event, I think you just need:

 

* install TurtouseSVN http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads

* check out SVN into an extra folder

 

Then you do:

 

* just work with v1.02 as you do now, and when you are done with something:

* copy the files into the checked out folder

* right-click it, click "commit" in TortouseSVN

 

That's as simple as the FTP/SVN thing you want and also how I test stuff in a windows XP virtualbox. That also avoids the hardlinks etc, because since your assets are not code related, you can safely test them in v1.02.

 

Sorry that I didn't have that idea before.

 

Okay, this sounds more reasonable.

 

Also, I made a scale 10 normalmap and it looks better than the 3. Scale 20 seem total overkill.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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So it became necessary to exactly make the patch the correct size which became time consuming especially when you have lots of them to do. I tiny mistake and you have the edge of the next texture tile showing.

 

Yes, that's what Sotha and I have said as well.

 

Sotha, if you want to send me your files I can upload them to SVN for you. I'll PM you my email address.

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Okay, this sounds more reasonable.

 

Cool, please PM spar to set you up (he might take a few days to respond tho).

 

Also, I made a scale 10 normalmap and it looks better than the 3. Scale 20 seem total overkill.

 

Nice :)

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Sotha, if you want to send me your files I can upload them to SVN for you. I'll PM you my email address.

 

Thanks a lot Spring! I'll wait a few days to see if I want to make adjustments to this and then I'll send them your way.

 

 

***

 

As in entirely other topic.

I just had a long session of monsterclipping in my map. After that my AI buddies' pathfinding was totally shot to hell. It turned out the AI's could not pass a certain visportal. The portal was open at all times (like it should have been) and if the AI was chasing me they would turn and try to get me the other way. The portal was like a wall to them. Also normal path-finding behaved erratically and AI's seemed to ignore monsterclips, waltzing to areas that where forbidden and getting stuck on func statics.

 

I did delete all map related files, except the .map and dmapped again. Did not help.

 

I almost had a panic attack since everything was working perfectly before and I had no clue what was going on. Luckily I realized that the monsterclipping session must had done something since I hadn't done much anything else. It turned out that the visportal in question was penetrated by a monsterclip brush, ie. the monsterclip went through the visportal. When I cut the monsterclip into two parts, each on their own sides of the visportal, everything started working normally again.

 

Is this generally known? Knowing this would probably help some poor mappers avoid anxiety, since it's relatively easy to accidentally surround objects with monsterclip in a way that a visportal gets penetrated.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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Is this generally known? Knowing this would probably help some poor mappers avoid anxiety, since it's relatively easy to accidentally surround objects with monsterclip in a way that a visportal gets penetrated.

 

I'm no mapping expert, but it's news to me. :unsure:

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We've mentioned it a few times, there are a couple of causes of it. If your AI is doing strange things with default patrolling and chasing etc, its usually bad visportals.

 

Note that sometimes the portals with problems are non-sealing in any form and are culled from vis calculations etc, they sometimes still get used for the AAS/AI stuff and can result in unpredictable AI. You wont see these portals with r_showportals 1 or whatever and you may not think about it. Sometimes if the portal is valid but intersecting something problematic you can get crashes at the end of dmapping when AAS is calculated, never really worked out the exact cause but shifting the portal around cleared it up.

 

Other times if you seal against func_static models it can happen, static brushes/patches don't seem to cause it for me but others have said they have had trouble. If you seal against >1 static group your portal can also become a black surface when open, but this doesn't seem to break AI.

 

I usually just do very basic building and visportals then detail later and try do it in one swoop over the confined area so that I can test all of the ones placed are both valid and able to close. I'm also a terrible mapper :)

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Did some minor revisions to the firewood stack texture. I think it turned out rather fine in the end:

6811640.png

 

Springheel, I'll PM you a link for the files if you would be so kind to put it up in svn. Thanks!

 

EDIT: I tried to do a mossy, older looking firewood, but the result was rather unrealistic. The original hires texture is also provided if someone else wants to give a shot at this.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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