Wishlist For Darkradiant

[peter_spy 1603]

Quote

Where belong the wishes for new entities or prefabs?

If you need functional props (models mapped to entity defs), this is probably the best section: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/forum/4-art-assets/

Edited July 17, 2019 by peter_spy

[JackFarmer 482]

Thank you, Peter.

[Geep 266]

I don't know if this is already wish-listed, but after getting bit once again by this aggravating usability issue and having to tediously re-enter my work, let me report it:

Consider a usual popup dialog window, which typically has [Save] and [Cancel] buttons and an [X] in the upper-right corner. Examples include the main dialogs of the Objectives and Conversation editors, and their respective child dialogs.

In traditional desktop Windows, treating the [X] as equivalent to hitting Cancel is poor practice. What you should do is:

1) When [X] is hit, determine if the user has made any changes to the data managed by the window (or its children). Circumstances will suggest how best to do this.

2) If so, bring up this popup dialog:

     "Do you want to save changes to <whatever>?"

     [Save] [Don't Save] [Cancel]

(where [Cancel] here only dismisses the "Do you want to save..." popup, not its parent. Treatment of the other cases is obvious.)

An alternative, acceptable particularly for child dialogs, is to remove the [X] entirely. You can still hit [Cancel], definitely knowing you're throwing changes away.

[OrbWeaver 638]

19 hours ago, Geep said:

Consider a usual popup dialog window, which typically has [Save] and [Cancel] buttons and an [X] in the upper-right corner. Examples include the main dialogs of the Objectives and Conversation editors, and their respective child dialogs.

In traditional desktop Windows, treating the [X] as equivalent to hitting Cancel is poor practice. What you should do is:

 

Typically we aim to follow the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines for DarkRadiant,  largely for historical reasons (it was derived from GtkRadiant, although it only uses GTK on Linux now via the WxWidgets back-end implementation).

However, neither Objectives nor Conversations currently comply with the guidelines, because:

• They are a curious hybrid of instant-apply (creating or deleting objectives or conversations entities) and explicit apply (editing the contents of those entities). This means if you click the cancel or X button, the entities will be left in the map but any changes you made to those entities in the bottom part of the dialog will be silently discarded.
• If they are instant apply dialogs (which the HIG seems to recommend where possible), they should only have an X button to close the dialog, not OK/Done/Cancel buttons. The HIG doesn't specify exactly how users should cancel their changes in this case, but I assume the expectation is that they would use the Undo function.
• If there are supposed to be explicit apply dialogs, they ought not to have an X button at all (although again the HIG is a little vague on this point — it says that instant apply should have an X button, but does not explicitly say that explicit apply should not have one), but should have Done and Cancel buttons which behave as you would expect.

So you are right that there is a usability problem, but the recommended solution is not to have dialogs pop up additional dialogs. Either the changes should be applied as soon as you make them and clicking X just makes the dialog go away, or there should be no X button at all.

Quote

An alternative, acceptable particularly for child dialogs, is to remove the [X] entirely. You can still hit [Cancel], definitely knowing you're throwing changes away.

That does seem to be the shortest path to avoiding data loss in this case, although the fact that entities are created immediately and left in the map even if you explicitly Cancel is still a deviation from recommended behaviour.

[Geep 266]

"Curious hybrid" - that's an apt descriptor of a lot of software projects. Particularly ones that are cross-platform or the work of many loosely-managed hands over many years. It's tough to then try to revise such projects towards a holistically consistent approach.

That said, if you could come up with a few relatively-quick hacks to avoid data loss, I'd thank you.

[peter_spy 1603]

Not sure whether it was already mentioned, but is it possible to eliminate rounding? It's problematic mostly with texture scale and changing light colors. For example, high-res textures often require 1:8 and 1:16 scale-down ratio (0.125 and 0.0625 respectively). The value of 0.125 works correctly, but 0.0625 gets rounded to 0.063. As GPUs get more and more powerful (and have more VRAM), we'll be able to use 2k and 4k textures more frequently. But as of now, we can't scale them down more than 8 times without loosing precision. So a 2k tiling texture has to cover a 256 x 256 units space minimum, a 4k texture has to encompass area of 512 x 512 units, etc.

[LDAsh 54]

Ability for "Fixed Subdivisions"  of "Patch Tesselation" in "Patch Inspector" to be higher than 32, or at least not cap patches back to 32.  NetRadiant can currently load map files with higher values even though the GUI still says 32.  I managed to get up to 4444 4444 which was many millions of triangles.  I think this is a good move to help future-proof the software.

[OrbWeaver 638]

On 2/16/2020 at 1:15 AM, Geep said:

An alternative, acceptable particularly for child dialogs, is to remove the [X] entirely. You can still hit [Cancel], definitely knowing you're throwing changes away.

Close button is now removed for all modal dialogs as of Git revision 8ee8e4213042057192b8a6d36f05c497b513b76b.

[Geep 266]

[JackFarmer 482]

It would be great if mappers could define EFX within DR.

The info location entities are needed for definition of relevant areas anyway.

Thus, I wonder if there is the chance to add a new property there, something like: "efx" and when applied, it should display  "Select Reverb" (similar to "Choose Model/Choose Skin" for other entities).

 

 

 

Edited March 22, 2020 by JackFarmer

[thebigh 102]

The ability to "floor" things along all three axes would be cool. I find myself forever fiddling with the positioning of paintings and such so that they're flush against the wall, without a gap or clipping in to it.

The way I imagine it working is this: go into one of the grid views, say the top-down one. Put your cursor north of the object and use the floor keyboard shortcut, object gets aligned to the north wall. If the cursor is more east than north-south it aligns to the east wall. And so on. Of course, if you used the "floor selection" button on the LHS it would default to flooring vertically downwards.

[Brendon Chung 1]

Hi all! I wanted to share some thoughts on DarkRadiant tweaks & features. I’m guessing most of this has already been mentioned before, but I wanted to throw it out here just in case! Thanks.

Particle Editor
Currently, it’s a bit difficult to judge a particle effect’s size relative to other particle effects, as the camera automatically repositions itself to frame the effect in a close shot. (The ground grid does give a frame of reference, but is only useful for very rough estimates.)

I’d love it if there was a way to “lock camera position” while viewing particles. This would allow me to view a series of effects and more easily identify which effects are small, large, etc., as the camera position would be locked in place.

Texture Wrapping
It would be greatly useful if there was functionality to “wrap” a texture around a brush, as described in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBvj-d2AiT0

Ideally, this would help automate a lot of the manual processes involved in texture angling and alignment.

Texture Browser
For the “Choose Shader” window (S > folder button), I’d love it if there was an option to include thumbnail visual images of each texture next to each texture name. Having it be image-oriented would make it easier to browse textures at a glance.

Also, it would be helpful if the texture dimensions were displayed, either on the thumbnail or in the description.

Vertex Editor
Currently, the editor prevents brushes from becoming concave during vertex editing. It would be helpful if there were an option to temporarily allow concave brushes during vertex editing, as the current convex-only safeguard sometimes makes it difficult to do more complex vertex edits.

Also, currently if I drag a vertex on top of another vertex, the the entire brush is immediately destroyed. It would be great if the vertices were instead merged, and automatically collapsed the missing edges/faces.

Three-Point Clipping
When using the clipping tool to cut along three points, it appears that when I move one of the three points in a given orthographic view, its coordinate in the inactive axis will be reset to zero (i.e. if I move a clipping point in the X-Z view, it will reset to Y=0).

This current setup makes it difficult to do certain clipper cuts -- it’d be a big help if the clipper didn’t reset to zero.

Entity Inspector
Currently, when I have multiple entities selected and open the Entity Inspector window (N), the entity key fields are all empty. It’s a little difficult to view how entities differ, or to apply batch changes (i.e. the workflow is select one entity > decide which single key-value pair you want to change > change it for one entity > select all entities you want the change applied to > reapply the change).

It’d be great selecting multiple entities showed a union of all the properties belonging to the entities -- with common values showing the key/value, and with conflicting values showing the pseudo-value of “different”.

ReloadCurrentMap
When using the in-game editors (i.e. ragdoll editor, light editor), the game saves over the current .map file with the changes made.

It would be great it if there was a DarkRadiant keybind to reload the currently-loaded map, to more easily load in the changes made by the in-game editor. Right now I’m manually reloading the map via DarkRadiant’s File menu, but a keystroke shortcut would help streamline this.

Editor_usage text
It would be nice if the editor_usage help text appeared somewhere in the Entity Inspector (N) window when an entity was selected.

Arbitrary Reflection
It’d be great if reflection/mirroring was allowed around an arbitrary plane (i.e. if we need a symmetrical detail on a wall that runs at a 45 degree angle). This is currently possible with the existing tools, but it’s a bit tricky, and in the case of more exotic angles, oftentimes forces us to go off-grid.

Scripting
The scripting interface is very powerful and flexible, and has been hugely valuable. Something that would be great is some way to operate on selected components, i.e. a way to operate on specific faces, edges, or vertices.

Currently with SelectionVisitor, we can traverse a component selection with GlobalSelectionSystem.foreachSelectedComponent(). However, the nodes traversed with SelectionVisitor seem to be the brush the component belongs to. Ideally, it’d be great to be able to traverse selected components.

Also, there seems to currently not be a way to identify components (i.e. there’s an isBrush()/getBrush() method pair, but not an isFace()/getFace()) -- admittedly, not sure if I’m fully understanding how this system works, so apologies if I’m misunderstanding it!
 

[VanishedOne 546]

Scaling particles accurately (for precision work like matching water particles to a fountain model, not just relative to other particles) is something I still use the in-game editParticles editor for.

[thebigh 102]

Would it be possible to add a second "load pointfile" menu option that loads the first of the .lin files associated with dropped portals?

Currently to identify a dropped portal you have to manually rename one of those .lin files to mapname.lin and load it as though it's a geometry leak pointfile.

Speed mappers will thank you.

[PranQster 457]

Edit Menu > 'Paste to (0,0,0)' or similar.

Several times I have created something in a mission and then decided to export it as a prefab, but it's a long way from the map origin. Typically I select everything I want and either duplicate it and drag it manually to 0,0,0, or I copy it and move the camera to 0,0,0 and paste to camera. After export to prefab, I then delete what I exported at 0,0,0.

It would be handy to select/copy items for the prefab, and then choose to paste them to the map origin before export so they are sane to import into other maps.

Edited September 7, 2020 by PranQster

[peter_spy 1603]

@greebo @OrbWeaver I added a small feature proposal that IMO can be quite helpful for all mappers. It's about the look of light entities in the editor, especially when using the dark mode. With current setup, they tend to look almost indistinguishable from the grid. It would be great to do something to improve their legibility.

https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=5364

By the way, is there a reason 3d and ortho views use wireframe or models for entities? Typically that's done with sprites in other engines.

Edited October 23, 2020 by peter_spy

[IZaRTaX 29]

You can split patch but you cannot connect patch, honestly I would like a way to connect patches if it possible like that.

 

[greebo 61]

What Radiant variant is shown in the video? NetRadiant?

[IZaRTaX 29]

3 minutes ago, greebo said:

What Radiant variant is shown in the video? NetRadiant?

Call of Duty 4 radiant "2007"

Edited November 7, 2020 by IZaRTaX

[IZaRTaX 29]

Even the first Call of Duty "Radiant 2003" has this option to merge patches.

[greebo 61]

I take it there's no source code for that, is there?

[IZaRTaX 29]

Unfortunately no it's the propriety of Activision but based on id tech 3 engine I know that could not help you but OD Radiant has the similar tools and open source check here > https://overdose-game.com/sdk.html

Edited November 7, 2020 by IZaRTaX

[greebo 61]

I think I can see the algorithm, it's probably the Patch_Weld() function used here.

Sounds interesting and useful of course. As always, feature requests should really go to the tracker, so feel free to open one there. Please include a link to ODRadiant too.

[IZaRTaX 29]

6 minutes ago, greebo said:

I think I can see the algorithm, it's probably the Patch_Weld() function used here.

Sounds interesting and useful of course. As always, feature requests should really go to the tracker, so feel free to open one there. Please include a link to ODRadiant too.

Ok I'll do it

[Jedi_Wannabe 219]

I hope it gains traction, this would be life changing in outdoor areas with lots of sloping ground. Making caves would be so much easier.