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is anyone as bad as me at learning new software interfaces?


c0mputer-fr0d

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I mean I have a really tough time with software interfaces, especially with things like dark radiant. I've just always had the problem of having a bunch of ideas but can never figure out how to make the software do what I want. I first noticed it when I started using a program called reason 5 and then when I tried using photoshop I wanted to die. Is anyone like me in this respect and would anyone want to make a dark radiant for dummies guide?

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Go to View > Window Layout > select something and see what it looks like. The View menu contains things associated with editor views, things that are visible to the user, anything having to do with view and possible related things.

 

For me, the key to learning any new piece of software is to just take some time on your own to poke around and click on things, see what the different things do.

 

When you create a box brush, and then deselect it disappears?

 

 

What are you using to deselect, backspace? Try ESC. I think backspace is delete. If you changed key mappings, make sure you're deselecting.

Edited by Lux
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About the disappearing brushes: I seem to remember the default colour setup for DR makes unselected brushes almost the same colour as the grid. You can pick another colour theme using the Colors menu (under Edit I think)

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Also be sure filters are off or deselected, if you are creating a brush and the current texture is being filtered, it disappears.

"The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out."

- Baron Thomas Babington Macauley

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Yea I was using escape. I changed my color scheme to black and green so I can see the unselected brushes now. Now I just have to make it so I can see the rendered map in the top left view, I just see blackness. When I load into the map I can't see anything despite putting a light down , and then I die.

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Make sure your player start is inside your map boundary and isn't too far off the ground. You might be falling to your death as map starts. If it's all dark, do you have an ambient light in the map? (Create entity > darkmod > lights > ambient > ambient_world, make sure its origin in in your map, then stretch the light's boundaries very wide, bigger than your whole map will be. Finally, with your ambient_world still selected, open light inspector (press L) and set its value (using the color picker) to about 20 for map set-up purposes. You can dim it later).

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setting minor grid lines to dashes and major grid lines to dots is also very helpful if you dont want to just find a crazy-ass colorscheme. that is the way i'm doing it right now.

about black rendered cam window: try using "render in fullbright textured mode". should be on the toolbar above the camera view window

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It's context sensitive, depends on what you have selected:

They'll be greyed out if your selection includes an entity.

If you have only worldspawn brushes selected, more will be available.

If you have nothing selected, they all should be available.

 

Other things change in there too, like player start, revert to worldspawn, convert to func_static.

"The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out."

- Baron Thomas Babington Macauley

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Morning fr0d, guys. Is it still not working? Mapping is fun if it's working of course and you can see your work in game, not so much otherwise. Are you running dmap on your map before loading it? Dmap does the preprocessing, and the output of dmap is needed in the game, so if you've not run dmap since you last made changes you might be repeatedly loading an old version of your map into TDM. Beware of using the testmap command which I think is mentioned in the tutorial and which does both a dmap and loads the map in game. The problem with it is that it won't halt and give you error feedback if there's something wrong with your map, it'll just load the last version which did make it through the dmap process.

 

If it's still a problem, post a copy of your broken map (just the .map file) and I'll take a look this afternoon. The forum will only let you post images or text files so add a .txt extension before attaching it... eg somemap.map.txt

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I found one of the forum suggestions from another thread useful.

 

Creating a shortcut to TDM and naming it TDM-[mission] and then in the shortcut properties putting +dmap path/path/mapname +map path/path/mapname

so when you click it, it runs dmap and starts the map you've been working on.

 

Saves a lot of fiddling every time you load the map to test. Not sure who initially suggested it but its a real time saver.

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It might just be my bad eyesight but I simply can't edit without two screens. It's the same for Hammer and 3D modelling software; anything that requires the use of viewports always ends up way too cluttered for me to see properly. If you're getting sick of the editor after 3 hours you may want to take a break and consider whether or not you actually want to go through with it. If you can't see why it would be fun, you're never going to make it through the creation process.

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It would be fun if I didn't get snagged on every tiny problem that most people don't see to get caught on and there is no help for.

 

how can I apply a texture to a whole room at once?

 

Hey good news . I loaded up dark radiant and stuff just started working. I mean the rendered view now works, the textures actually apply to walls, but I still can't see anything when I load in. Really strange program this is.

dromed was way easier than this.

Edited by c0mputer-fr0d
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