Just Introducing Myself.

[Epifire]

Hi all! Being a Stealth game fan (especially Thief) although I hadn't had a copy of Doom 3 for quite a while I made sure to swing back here and pick up the Dark Mod when I did. Been stunned at how well this Mod has been supported and couldn't help but want to try my hand at building something in it. I am familiar with BSP mapping and working with brushwork from my work in the Source Engine but the Id 4 Radiant Editor usually struck me as a more difficult clunky sort of program after many tries to work with it myself.

 

I was persuaded to want and try it when I read about the Dark Editor, because I know when an Editor gets support, it's serious. Not even Valve really supports the Hammer Editor anymore so I was stunned. Anywho after spending a big chunk for the better part of two days, I think I managed to get hooked on building in it. Just getting started but wanted to hear some critiques on a little test map/wine cellar I built in the period of two days...

 

 

 

Really loving this editor and how well things have been improved since previous versions I had tried to use before this one. I hope after I come back from vacation here I will be able to dig into refining my knowledge of entities and AI more so that I could plan a mission at some point. Between work on my current mod (which has been really slow lately) I hope to really get into this game and this community. Thanks for reading my post and I am looking forward to getting to know people here.

[Baddcog]

Welcome.

 

Very nice shots there, looks like you've got a good handle on space, textures, etc..

[demagogue]

It looks great. It's reminiscent of the cellar in In The North (which is a good thing).

One thing, are those stone blocks for the ceiling? Large stone block ceilings (or any stone for that matter) aren't very physically viable because (I've read) they have such low tensile strength, they tend to just cave in at the seams. It's more realistic you'll have a wood plank or plaster ceiling. One *might* get away with bricks immersed in gobs of mortar, but even that is pretty rare, and only for a top ceiling not for one making up the next level's floor unless it's buried quite a bit maybe.

[Melan]

Welcome, Epifire! As Baddcog wrote, there is relatively little to add: you have a very good sense of perspective, detail and light. The pipes are a great addition, and I also like the small channel running in the middle of the scene. BSP and patches are both pretty easy to work with in DarkRadiant, so if your building style leans that way, you will find the toolset very accommodating.

[Sotha]

Welcome aboard!

 

Fantastic shots! Not much addition suggestions.

 

Maybe some details like decal scorch marks on the torch and the ceiling above it. Is the location frequently inhabited? Spider webs?

 

Remeber to make detail stuff into func_statics and set unimportant things to "noshadows 1" to save perfomance.

 

Keep up the good work!

[Melan]

Noshadows isn't necessary in cramped environments like this. It's in wide-open spaces where those bits of performance are necessary.

[RPGista]

Yes, welcome! I like the proportion of the space, the textures used and the objects (decoration, pipes and furniture) that are set up in a way as to cast expressive shadows. Great work.

 

Demagogue - Finally haha, someone that thinks like me (in respect to keeping in mind limitations of traditional construction); I ususally dont say anything because most players will never notice these things and that would require extra work and attention from the mapper, for virtually no gain.

[grayman]

Terrific work, Epifire.

 

Welcome to the mod.

 

Looking forward to your missions.

[Bikerdude]

Cant say anything more than the others have said.

 

Very impressive work for a newbie :-)

[demagogue]

Demagogue - Finally haha, someone that thinks like me (in respect to keeping in mind limitations of traditional construction); I ususally dont say anything because most players will never notice these things and that would require extra work and attention from the mapper, for virtually no gain.

 

I used to never notice either, until I saw someone else complaining and asking "How is this roof not caving in?", and ever since then I can't not notice stuff like that, heh. I don't mind that it happens since it's not an issue for gameplay or even aesthetics -- people don't have to care about it like they should, e.g., about making borders, breaking up dead space, & not having everything so boxy -- but I'll point it out in case someone does care about it and just didn't notice, or it's not a big deal to them & no worries.

 

In any event, the screenshots look great so he's got the fundamentals down. That's what's most important.

[Baddcog]

 

 

In any event, the screenshots look great so he's got the fundamentals down. That's what's most important.

 

exactly

[Epifire]

I wondered about changing that stone to something else since it was originally supposed to arch in the middle of the room. Not exactly squared away on everything either, cause I had the intention of adding in scorch decals for the torch and so on but litterally had not gotten that far as to know where to go for applying decals. I have been working and doing nearly all my mod work on my current Ravenholm mod for Half-Life 2. For a long time I have been studying the architecture and design of it (which by the original ispiration) had been inspired by the Haunted Cathedral mission from TDP, cause I guess one of the lead devs at Valve was a major Thief fan.

 

Current work from Source is in this project I hope to see finnished...

http://www.moddb.com...ravenholm-world

 

While I am waiting for things to fall into place so that I can do more work in my current project, I think there should be well enough time for getting a better working knowledge with Radiant so that I can start to work on a good mission. I am sure that the Dark Engine has it's limitations and I want to learn them as well, but it should all just take some time in researching things. I think maybe figuring out the static model development pipeline would help a lot though since Radiant appears to work very well with pre-modeled assets for heavily detailed structures. Thanks for a very warm welcome though guys, it's really appreciated coming from the more harsh communites I am used to. Looking forward to getting some more stuff down when I get back from vacation (where I reside typing this currently) so I'll talk more with you guys then!

[Bikerdude]

Very impressive work on RH:W. Glad to have you over here doing stuff on our little mod ;-)

[Melan]

I am sure that the Dark Engine has it's limitations and I want to learn them as well, but it should all just take some time in researching things. I think maybe figuring out the static model development pipeline would help a lot though since Radiant appears to work very well with pre-modeled assets for heavily detailed structures.

The main limitation a mapper used to other engines can run into is architecture which leaves too many visportals open simultaneously. I ran into it with my first mission, and while amazingly, the game still ran and rendered most of a medium-sized map, performance was excruciatingly bad at points, and sound propagation was out of the whack - AI would come running from distant corners of the map if one of them sounded the alert.

 

WRT static models, it is an area which has not been investigated by TDM mappers yet. They should work fine, most of us are just used to BSP (coming from Thief editing may be an influence).

[demagogue]

Yes if there were one piece of good advice to give a relative beginner, it'd be to read up on good portal placement. It's good to have them zig-zag a bit so space is broken up a lot and there's no long lines of sight down them or giant unweildy open areas. The nice side-effect of this is it tends to lead to more interesting & organic architecture too, I think; not so boxy & linear.

[Obsttorte]

Use "r_showPortals 1" in console to see the portals. The open ones are green, the closed ones are red. This way you can also check out that all your visportals are working.

With "r_showTris 3" you can see which surfaces are currently drawn. This can be of help if you occour slowdowns in some areas of the map.

 

But I think as long as you stick to interior areas performance shouldn't be a big problem, as long as you don't fill the place up with tousends of particles or so. The main problem are huge outdoor areas, as the Doom3 engine isn't really designed for that.

 

According visportal placement check out these links to get a feeling

• http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Visportal
  
• http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=City_Street_Visportal_Tutorial
  

Good luck.

[RPGista]

You gotta love HL2's ragdoll anatomy, atmospheric effects and physics /destructables. Realy like the birds in the mod too, the map in the main page trailer was pretty cool.

[Baddcog]

That mod looks pretty cool.

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As said above the visportals are one of the main issues. Hammer on the other hand does it for you and you only have to do a manual placement once in awhile if you can improve performance. (I did quite a bit of TF2 mapping)

 

They are as easy as dragging a brush to fill the gap, right clicking ortho and selecting : make visportal

 

But the biggest challenge is mapping around them.

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Biggest performance hit is shadows. Unlike Source (in which one dynamic light can completely tank FPS) Doom3 can handle them pretty well. Where they see a hit is if multiple lights cast shadows on the same tris. Typically up to 3 sees no real perf. hit. 4 starts to show and 6 pretty much tanks out FPS.

 

But it's pretty easy to keep the number below 3 and still have good lighting. Of course moveable sources like torch guards and candles can increase the number anywhere so you need to leave a little buffer room for that.

 

You can also make entities non shadow casting, etc...gotta pick and choose which ones won't be noticed, which will look horrible without shadows...

 

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Static meshes work great for details. But we've only got a few, doorframes, some buildings... Would always be great to have more. We really need some good arches and whatnot but I've somewhat lost interest in it atm and have probably 3-4 arches sitting around unfinished.

 

But we can change func_statics of brushes and patches to models in DR, or export them to models. While not quite as good as a modelling suite you can do some pretty decent work in DR to use for this stuff (or just save as prefabs to load at anytime, benefit of prefab is they can still be altered in DR by anyone at any time).

[Epifire]

Some really great tips here guys. I really wish I had my PC with the tools right about now so that I could look into these points right now but I am stuck with just reading a lot for now. So just looking at this from a brief perspective seems to look to me that all rendered/un-rendered sections of the map are manually triggered by area_portals that the designer sets up? I have worked with some area portals in Source but they were really when I just needed to chop off some expensive sections that still managed to render when they should not have.

 

Source at current is like the late Cousin of Id so many of these things were either replaced, or improved but pretty much the same general system.

 

Things that so far are still out of my knowledge is how to send commands from map entities to others in the same map (like triggers to a area_portal). In Source we have the Input/Output system, that is he glue of our in-game commands. So I guess you can say I am looking for the alternate systems used for the Dark Engine. Oddly enough some things that trip me up are things like the texture application system, since it seems I can only select a whole world brush rather then just a single face. Or like trying figure out how to move individual vertexes of brushes, over just the simple scale option. Beside those points there, most of it is coming along pretty well and there were no leaks either so that was a plus.

[demagogue]

Things that "activate" (buttons, trigger_brushes etc) can trigger other things when you put the 2nd item's name in the "target" spawnarg of the 1st thing. Then when #1 activates, it triggers #2 (e.g., a switch turns a light on when switch1 has "target light1" as a spawnarg).

 

Objects can also relate to one another with the S/R system, where item #2 will trigger in a certain way when it's in proximity to or touches item #1 (like things catching on fire, or putting out fires with water, etc).

 

A third way to do all sorts of things is with id4's powerful scripting. You can have some event call a script, and then the script will run and can do all sorts of things to any objects in the map. Very useful and powerful. The wiki FAQ has the different ways you can call a script.

 

There's a shortcut to apply a texture directly to the face you click on. There's a wiki article on shortcuts, and that's one of the ones listed on it. You can search for it on the wiki. Something like cntl-click or shift-click or something? Look it up; I can't remember.

 

As for moving vertexes on brushes, IIRC one of the GUI buttons in DR is to go into "vertex mode" (looks like a little square with the vertexes in bold), which makes the vertexes highlight and you can move them individually. (It definitely works for patches, but I think it works for brushes too, doesn't it?)

[Obsttorte]

select single face: ctrl+shift+left-mouse

vertex drag mode: v (or the button on the top that has the edges highlighted)

edge drag mode: e

copy shader: middle-mouse-click on surface

paste shader: ctrl+shift+middle-mouse-click (this is the "projected version", there is also a "natural" one that works a bit different)

(the latter two are essential for working with patches)

 

general hint: if you press ctrl or alt you can see the available commands on the bottom of the DR window. You can also change shortcuts under Edit->Keyboard shortcuts

 

Regarding triggers and visportals: I would suggest to read Fidcal's beginner tutorial, he explained it very nice there. I don't know much about the HL2 engine, but in the doom3 engine visportals (the equivalent to area-portals I guess) are essential not only for performance, but they are also used for sound propagation.

[Baddcog]

here's a tut for visportalling street sections. I did it pretty quickly so just a rough guide:

http://wiki.thedarkm...portal_Tutorial

 

(this one is an explanation of vp's and has really simple drawings)

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Visportal

 

 

Hammer cuts everything up into leafs (well, it cuts terrain brushes). Each leaf has a list of leafs that can be seen from it, so they render when you are in said leaf. The area_portal is a manually place leaf division.

 

Doom3 has NO leafs. So the author needs to make them. And that's done by placing a visportal (aka area-portal).

 

the good thing about hammer is that it's automatic, the bad thing is that it can make way more leafs than you really want/need so you have to change details into func_details (no longer worldspawn brushes), you can also place the hint and skip brushes to clean up excessive leafs or tie them together (been awhile)

 

Good thing about Doom3 is everything can be worldspawn and you don't get excessive leafs (slowdown). bad of course is that you need to place visportals manually. But it's really not hard, you just have to think about placing them at corners/doorways, keeping sight lines lower, etc.. Basically all the same techniques you use in Hammer. That engine doesn't like extremely long sight lines with tons of details either.

We also have func_statics (think func_details) which help keep tri counts down too, and since they are entities they can have shadows turned off, be doors/elevators...