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Some Questions About Darkradiant


Bukary

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I personally have found examining other people's maps very informative. It's how I learned to best construct frame-rate-friendly architecture in DromEd, by making the most of the portaling system. And also how to get certain effects, like archways. It just required close examination of OMs. And also the FMs done by people who also understood the basics.

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huh? struggle? it's extremely simple.

 

Basically, the model's groups must have their materials named as a material in a material file (.mtr)

 

Unfortunatelly correct material names in model and in *.mtr files is not enough to force model to work with Radiant. And, what is most strange, not always. Sometimes it works sometimes it not works. "Sometimes" Bug? But at last I found solution. Every part in model (talking about *.ase from 3dMax) with different material should be named as full path to this material:

 

Lets say that we have materials: //base/textures/wall_brick1 and //base/textures/wood_dark1

 

And the model with two parts: covered by wall_brick1 textures and by wood_dark1 textures

 

First part of model should be named: textures/wall_brick1

Second part of model should be named: textures/wood_dark1

 

Since I've started to use "path" names everything working good.

Edited by MRYS
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I've been learnig bsp, texturing and patches in Radiant for the last few days.

 

Here's my first room in Radiant. It's the first thing I managed to build with the use of additive geometry. Perhaps it doesn't look nice, but I am not going to build Doom FM, so this room goes into the wastebasket eather way. I'm only interested in building Thief levels. B) The whole room is made of brushes and patches (with the exception of doors and barrels in the distance).

 

bukpokoj17my.jpg

 

bukpokoj29yt.jpg

 

bukpokoj33cm.jpg

 

Now I'll try to build some outdoor location and learn sky boxes. I should also start lights-in-Radiant lesson, because, as you can easily see, I'm not very familiar with Radiant lightning techniques. I hope that such excercises will at least allow me to start trying to get the DM toolset for beta mapping. :blush:

 

I hope you still won't mind me asking questions. :)

Edited by Bukary

Cartographer's Note FM: in production.

Download Old Comrades, Old Debts FM or Mistrz Effects demo and see my old projects!

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Not bad at all! :)

 

If you need tips or help just pop in and ask, we'll help :)

 

Yeah D3 lighting placement is extremely important performance wise, if you have more then 3 lights hitting one surface it slows down badly. This is of course a problem now with the current hardware, in the future it won't be a problem i can imagine.

 

But anyways, try to avoid 2+ lights hitting the same surface and you're set.

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Yeah D3 lighting placement is extremely important performance wise, if you have more then 3 lights hitting one surface it slows down badly. This is of course a problem now with the current hardware, in the future it won't be a problem i can imagine.

 

But anyways, try to avoid 2+ lights hitting the same surface and you're set.

 

As a very very rough rule, yes.

 

There is no magic cutoff at 3, it's just a case that more lights = more overdraw, which has a performance impact. The performance drop due to overdraw is a function of the amount of overdraw (i.e. the r_showLightCount colour) AND the screen area of the overdraw, so a small area of 4-light overlap will have relatively little impact.

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In 99% of cases more then 3 lights per surface = bad. Obviously if you have a flat plain you can have 6 lights and it might not have much effect. But yeah it's to do with overdraw, but the simplest rule to follow is no more then 3 lights per surface.

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Do you know any good tutorial that is focused on lights in Doom? You know, how to make spot light, projected light, animated light, ambient light etc.

Cartographer's Note FM: in production.

Download Old Comrades, Old Debts FM or Mistrz Effects demo and see my old projects!

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In 99% of cases more then 3 lights per surface = bad. Obviously if you have a flat plain you can have 6 lights and it might not have much effect. But yeah it's to do with overdraw, but the simplest rule to follow is no more then 3 lights per surface.

 

The problem is that it's a binary heuristic that doesn't correspond to reality, with the result that some mappers go to extraordinary lengths to split brushes etc. to avoid seeing blue in the lightcount view, with negligible results (including myself until I realised what a waste of time it was).

 

All other things being equal, a whole screen full of 3-light overdraw would be 50% worse than 2-light overdraw which would be twice as bad as a single light. However unless you are removing a whole screen's worth of overdraw the difference will be much less than this - for example, 25% of the screen going from blue to green with no other changes would give you a maximum of 13% performance improvement (which you won't actually get because there is a lot more going on than just rendering lights). Similarly, 25% of the screen going from cyan to blue (4 lights to 3 lights) would give you a maximum of 8.25% performance benefit - even less signficant alongside all the other parallel rendering tasks.

 

So yeah - keeping track of light counts is important and "maximum of 3" is OK as a rough guide, as long as people don't think that there is some boundary at >3 where the performance suddenly drops.

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I read that the problem is that doom merges brushes that have the same texture, so if you have a whole building all with the same brick texture, will it merge it all into one big brush?

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

character models site

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I read that the problem is that doom merges brushes that have the same texture, so if you have a whole building all with the same brick texture, will it merge it all into one big brush?

 

It merges coplanar adjacent surfaces with the same texture at compile time. This means that if you were to split up a floor brush into several brushes, it would not honour your splits when compiling to triangles, but would aim to produce the fewest tris in any case.

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I believe there's a compile option to turn that off if it really bugs you, but I've heard turning it off usually does more harm than good.

 

If there a specific place where you don't want the engine to join adjacent faces, you can nudge one texture unnoticably, so the engine figures it can no longer join them while keeping texturing the same.

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NOw that my warehouse map is getting huge, and complicated, I'm going to have to learn all the tricks for optimising, because it's running quite badly in places ATM.

I'm still not sure I understand the use of caulk brushes even.

Is caulking supposed to increase performance in the realtime render window in the editor as well as in-game? IT doens't for me.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

character models site

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The purpose of caulk is to seal a level from the void without drawing anything. If you have patch meshes acting as walls of a room, they won't seal it, so you need to put brushes behind them. The brushes will never be seen by the player, but prevent the map from leaking. If you give them a normal texture, there will be a little bit of overdraw during the render pass where D3 fills the depth buffer. If you texture them with caulk, however, they won't even be seen by the renderer.

 

As far as I know, no efficiency tricks have an effect on the editor, and the only thing you can use to improve the editor's performance is the far clipping plane.

 

The main way to improve performance in-game is careful placement of lighting and vis portals.

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I believe there's a compile option to turn that off if it really bugs you, but I've heard turning it off usually does more harm than good.

 

If there a specific place where you don't want the engine to join adjacent faces, you can nudge one texture unnoticably, so the engine figures it can no longer join them while keeping texturing the same.

 

With regards to lighting there is a simple test you can do - compile the map with the lightCarve compile-time option, and playtest. If you see a large improvement in framerate with lightCarve activated, then there is potential value in splitting brushes along light boundaries. If you see NO improvement in framerate, then don't waste any time manually splitting anything.

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How do you compile with the lightcarve option, it's not in my bsp menu.

Also what about ambient lights?

IF you have a nice 1, 2 or 3 lights on everything, and then you add a big overall ambient light in just to bring the blackness of the shadows up a litle, , it puts every thing up a notch to 2, 3 and 4 lights on your surfaces.

WHat do vis portals do?

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

character models site

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WHat do vis portals do?

Here's a nice explanation:

http://www.modwiki.net/wiki/Visportal

 

Could anyone explain how to create ambient, spot, projected etc. lights? Or point us to some good tutorial?Is there any?

Cartographer's Note FM: in production.

Download Old Comrades, Old Debts FM or Mistrz Effects demo and see my old projects!

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How do you compile with the lightcarve option, it's not in my bsp menu.

 

There is a way you can add it, by editing on of the CFG files although I can't remember which one off the top of my head.

 

To invoke it manually type dmap lightCarve path/to/mymap.map at the console.

 

Also what about ambient lights?

IF you have a nice 1, 2 or 3 lights on everything, and then you add a big overall ambient light in just to bring the blackness of the shadows up a litle, , it puts every thing up a notch to 2, 3 and 4 lights on your surfaces.

 

That is true. You have to plan light placement carefully including ambient lights (but not fog lights, they have no impact at all according to my tests).

 

The best thing to do is let FPS be your guide (assuming you don't have an absolutely wizz-bang graphics card that hides performance issues from you) - if a scene is lagging, lightcount is a good area to investigate.

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Here's a nice explanation:

http://www.modwiki.net/wiki/Visportal

 

Could anyone explain how to create ambient, spot, projected etc. lights? Or point us to some good tutorial?Is there any?

ambient and projected lights are achieved by selecting a texture in the drop down list or making your own.

You have to be careful with ambient lights though, because they ruin the normal and specular maps.

If you are using them, use them on a very dark setting, almost black in fact, is enough just to raise the shadows from 0,0,0.

 

THat vis portaling is all very simple when applied to a couple of connecting rooms, but how the hell do you use it for a whole outdoor level, because the portals have to be sealed off right up to the sky brush, and it's a lot more complex geometry than a flat ceiling in a room, and anyway, if the portal goes up tto high, you'll be able to see it from almost anywhere anyway, so it'sll be open, and then there's all the static meshes which I guess the renderer will look straght through anyway, so the portals will be open behind them.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

character models site

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ambient and projected lights are achieved by selecting a texture in the drop down list or making your own.

You have to be careful with ambient lights though, because they ruin the normal and specular maps.

If you are using them, use them on a very dark setting, almost black in fact, is enough just to raise the shadows from 0,0,0.

 

THat vis portaling is all very simple when applied to a couple of connecting rooms, but how the hell do you use it for a whole outdoor level, because the portals have to be sealed off right up to the sky brush, and it's a lot more complex geometry than a flat ceiling in a room, and anyway, if the portal goes up tto high, you'll be able to see it from almost anywhere anyway, so it'sll be open, and then there's all the static meshes which I guess the renderer will look straght through anyway, so the portals will be open behind them.

 

It's the same solution as in DromEd.

 

Your city streets are actually tunnels. The ceiling of the tunnel is actually a skybox.

 

Your buildings don't all have to be the same height for this. The buildings are actually facades with varying heights, and the tunnel height is the height of the highest building.

 

Open up OMs in DromEd to see the tricks they used.

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If you want to go a little more advanced, you can study what some of the original DX levels did... They were pretty well designed, and often had the ability to go on top of buildings. There was one level where you went up on a crane, and could see across a whole complex of warehouses - but they did it in such a way that the doors into the warehouses were all obscured from view, so all you saw was a bunch of extremely low-poly exteriors to the warehouses, so the view wasn't too taxing.

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Yeah I remember saying exactly that in another thread :)

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...=database&st=50

This is the thread where I first pointed out the misleading idea instilled by the "Cyberdeamon in new york" Doom 3 screenshot.

 

and on that page I said this;

In Deus Ex, I played a mission where you could get to the top of a really tall crane and see the top of every building. "Oh noes they broke my rules!", right? No. Every building was a perfect, simple box. And by no coincidence, every door into every building was hidden behind another building or on the opposite side of the building, so that from the vantage point you could not see into a single doorway - so all those portals would be deactivated.

 

Just one of many tricks you can use.

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