Editing Tip of the Day

[Springheel]

Might be better to make them individual patch prefabs then, so that mappers can set the texture to match their cave and stretch them as needed for variety.

[SiyahParsomen]

there is no way to texture cone patches seamless in DR afaik. That's why I say give up on patches.

 

lately edit: possible with creating one from a plane patch, but this time it gets distortion on texture.

Edited April 1, 2012 by SiyahParsomen

[Bikerdude]

Jesus, did you make this in TDM..?

[SeriousToni]

Hm I guess to Skyrim

[nbohr1more]

No that's the "Dear Esther" mod for HL2.

 

They want to see how close they can get to that level of detail.

 

Many of those stalactites\stalagmites look like sprites rather than models though... (using the ole "always face the camera" trick ala Mario 64 trees)...

[SeriousToni]

THAT is the source engine? Whoa!

[betpet]

Dear Esther is quite an experience. You will either like it or you won't but it's a spectacular achievement with the Source engine all the same.

[SeriousToni]

The description always sounded totally boring, but as I see what they made with the source engine, I might give it a try someday..?

[Baddcog]

Meh, Source...

 

It's almost the exact same as DR. It has paintable displacements which is nice for terrain/texture blends and even painting on grass sprites. But dynamic lights just completely kill FPS.

[ungoliant]

yeah, i noticed there isn't a shadow to be found anywhere in that shot.

[Baddcog]

Well, Source does have baked lighting. But that shot is all models, displacements are nice for ground. Very simple ground. I guess the sandy ground could be a displacement, but it looks like it blends into the rocks too well. I think it's all models.

[SiyahParsomen]

Quote from PranQster to prevent sinking bodies when they are KO'ed in sleeping:

I have an unconscious/dead ragdoll body in my map in progress. I found one way to keep it from sinking into the model below it is to use a platform of nodraw_solid underneath the body. You should be able to place such a brush within the bed model and test it with a ragdoll on the bed. Adjust it's top surface height until the body lays just on top of the bed (then delete the ragdoll)... then a blackjacked AI should be able to stay on top of the bed like the ragdoll did.

Edited April 13, 2012 by SiyahParsomen

[SiyahParsomen]

Quote from Grayman about preventing ambient light changes when entering a new location:

 

When entering a new location, the lights in that location can contribute to the overall ambient value. When passing from a dark location to a lit location, or vice versa, the effect can sometimes be jarring.

 

There's a spawnarg you can set on info_location entities:

 

"ambient_light_dynamic" "0 0 0"

 

This keeps TDM from adjusting the ambient value for that location when the player enters it. I've had to use it in a few spots in my WIP to turn off the sudden change in ambient light.

[Xarg]

Ah HAH! Is that how you do it.. actually, I wonder if that can be used to fake pupil contraction and dilation.. how do the values work? Does 0 0 0 prevent it making any changes to the ambient, positive values make the ambient lighter, and negative values make it darker? If so, can see situations where you'd put a vp and info location at the doorway to a brightly lit room with unextinguishable lights, and have it set the ambient lower, to fake pupils contracting from the bright light, and some poorly lit areas bumping the ambient up slightly to fake pupil dilation... maybe even mild colour based changes, so outside is more blue, a brightly lit room is darker but more orange etc..

[Bikerdude]

How do speed up Dmap/Map, as its like watching paint dry?!

• If your finding that DMAP is taking ages, you need to DISABLE vsync from the main menu! For example, I'n Sotha's case Dmap went down from 7min with VSYNC On to 1min 20s with VSYNC Off.
  
• But don't forget to re-enable VSYNC when playing missions as it reduces choppiness, stutter and tearing.
  

[ungoliant]

While screwing with visportalling and leaktesting, I noticed there is a filter to hide visportals(of course), but there is no filter that can isolate them. So here is a filter I made to hide everything except visportal brushes:

 

type			match					   action
--------------------------------------------------
entityclass	.*							 hide
entityclass	worldspawn			 show
texture		  .*							 hide
texture		  textures/editor/visportal				  show
texture		  textures/common/nodraw				show

makes it real easy to quickly select all visportals in the map for layering, or turning to stone for leaktesting, or whatever purpose you may devise.

Edited July 18, 2013 by ungoliant

[Bikerdude]

sweet.

[Kvorning]

I'm not sure how illuminating this is, but here goes;

 

I asked about alarms a while back and found an easy way to alert AI without scripts and only 3 entities, and thought I'd share it:

A trigger

A target (Targets>atdm:start_alarm)

And an alarm (Sound>atdm:alarm_sound)

 

The trigger targets the 'atdm:start_alarm', and that one targets the 'atdm:alarm_sound'.

 

There are properties on the entities for controlling the range of the alert, as well as the volume of the audible sound for the player. There's also an 'atdm:stop_alarm', if you need a turn-off switch or something.

 

I found this method to be extremely quick and user friendly, and easy to manage from the editor, so I hope it's also of use to anyone else

Edited August 1, 2013 by Kvorning

[Obsttorte]

void setAlertLevel(float alertlevel) (if you only want to change the alertlevel of some specific ai independent from sound ranges etc.)

[Obsttorte]

This may be mentioned in this thread already, but I thought it couldn't hurt to bring this up again, as it is very useful.

 

Caulk does not cut into func_statics. This means, that you can for example have a rooftop made as a fs but the sealing geometry ends shortly above where the roof starts. This way you can keep the sky in city sections as low as possible, and can still use rectangular visportals of a relatively small size.

 

In addition, caulk gets always rendered as sky, if there is at least one surface with portal_sky texture in the rendered area. You can use small brushes shortly below the caulk top for this purpose.

 

Every func_static gets rendered, if there is at least a bit of it in the rendered area. This way you can even have background objects like houses out in the void behind a caulk wall, if you merge them with a nodraw brush inside the rendered area, and move it's origin there.

[Obsttorte]

If you want to create textures that moves over the time, do the following. Choose the texture you want to make moving and open its material file. Normally you will find something like this:

 

bumpmap path_of_bump
diffusemap path_of_diffuse
specularmap path_of_specular

These are shortforms. The first line for example means the following

{
blend bumpmap
map path_of_bump
}

This would apply the bumpmap to the texture. If one only want to do this, he can stick to the shortform. But if you want to do something with those images after applying them, you need the long form.

 

Now if you want the texture to move over time, you simple need to do the following:

{
 blend bumpmap
 map path_of_bump
 scroll parm5*time, parm6*time
}

Instead of parm5 and parm6 you can use fixed values here, but this way you can manipulate the texture speed via spawnargs.

 

In material files, parmX refers to the spawnarg shaderParmX. So obviously you can't have moving textures on worldspawn, but you can use it on all other entities (especially func_static).

 

This effect is used in quite a variety of places, for example for the holy water and health potions and for skyboxes (the clouds are moving for example). I just used it to create a moving belt.

 

I hope this helps.

[Bikerdude]

I just used it to create a moving belt.

And it looks totally awesome I must say ;-)

[Obsttorte]

When you create custom material files to use with the blending effect of the updated ase exporter, make sure that you apply the bumpmap before you apply the diffusemap, or you will get weird results.

 

I had roughly the following setup (shortened)

diffusemap textureA
bumpmap textureA
bumpmap textureB
diffusemap textureB

and it caused that textureA was using the bumpmap of textureB. After putting bumpmap textureA at the beginning, everything was fine.

[Obsttorte]

You can let the camera in the 3D view look at something by clicking in the 2D view with the middle mouse button on the specific part of the map.

 

CTRL+middle mouse click teleports the camera.

[grayman]

I just used it to create a moving belt.

 

Oh, Lord, I remember creating moving belt textures in Doom.

 

Nice tutorial, thx. I have the exact place to use this in one of my future maps.