just discovered decals..fun fun

[ithel]

I just discovered decals and how they can, as someone else put it, "dirty up" a mission. Using them, I was able to transform a brand-new wagon into a weather-beaten-and-abused "gypsy" residence. I'm really beginning to enjoy DR as an expressive medium and to appreciate its flexibility as a toolset.

[nbohr1more]

Looks great!

 

We have another Life-er

[Shadowhide]

I'm really beginning to enjoy DR as an expressive medium and to appreciate its flexibility as a toolset.

 

ha ha !

 

 

[Baddcog]

Just because it can't do everything you'd ever want it to possibly do doesn't mean it's not flexible and easy to use Shadow,

all engines/editors have limits and it's up to the author to work within them.

 

But many editors have more severe limits than DR.

[Springheel]

I'm really beginning to enjoy DR as an expressive medium and to appreciate its flexibility as a toolset.

 

Cool!

[New Horizon]

Just because it can't do everything you'd ever want it to possibly do doesn't mean it's not flexible and easy to use Shadow,

all engines/editors have limits and it's up to the author to work within them.

 

Greebo has really put an extraordinary amount of time into revamping GTK Radiant into the Dark Radiant we have today. I would love to put the very first build side by side with the latest version to see how much it has changed.

 

But many editors have more severe limits than DR.

 

Yes, they certainly do. I would love to see someone try to make a TDM mission using nothing but the buggy built in Doom 3 editor.

 

If it hadn't been for id software once again making their old tech open source, we would never have been able to put together such a comprehensive toolkit. The stim-repsonse editing, conversation editors, and all the extra goodies that have been added to DR would not have been possible.

[nbohr1more]

( I think ShadowHide just wants to start an argument with Greebo. He's like a kid doing rebellious things to get his father's attention )

 

Oh yeah... supposed to ignore... supposed to ignore... nevermind... supposed to ignore ...

[Melan]

Nice job, ithel.

 

And please, let's not turn this into yet another Shadowhide thread.

[demagogue]

Decals are great. If there's an issue with them, it's that there should be MORE of them.

[I4cTaffer]

Is it possible to place so many decals that it would cause FPS to be lower?

[Melan]

They are still textures. An already performance-heavy scene could slow down even more if you added decals everywhere. However, the main culprit would still be the scene itself, not the textures.

[I4cTaffer]

Ok cool. I feared i may have placed to many but something else may be the culprit to my woes.

[Sotha]

Each decal generally produces two tris. A single AI is something in thousands of tris (3000-5000 if I remember correctly). You can put an insane amount of decals before your FPS gets an impact.

 

Heavy scenes Melan is talking about can be optimized with noshadows and encapsulation/visportalling.

[I4cTaffer]

I have visportals at every opening. i am not familiar with encapsulation.

[Melan]

That just means building your mission compartmentally, in well-visportalled pieces (say, unlike my first TDM mission ).

[nbohr1more]

One thing you can do to reduce the performance impact of decals even further is to select a large number

of them and make that selection into a func_static. This works even better if every selected decal is using the

same texture.

[demagogue]

I never thought of that because I wasn't thinking of them like brushes, but of course that's an obvious thing to do with them, along with the border work and other detail work.

[Sotha]

Heh.. I thought func_staticifying decal work is something everyone does by default. Guess not. I even make those func_statics "solid 0," but am not sure are they non-solid anyways.