Texture Organization

[Gildoran]

Hi, I'm really happy to be the new texture lead. I look forward to maintaining the textures and ensuring they have useful features for mappers.

 

I'd like to start a discussion about reorganizing texture categories; I think our current organization based on map themes may not be preferable, because many textures could work for a wide variety of styles. For example, I figure many castle/city textures are interchangable. The pagan wood beams look nice on the outsides of city buildings or in basements. Because of this, I've found our current categories haven't been very useful in finding the textures I'm looking for - I usually end up just loading and browsing all textures in darkmod/.

 

My tentative (and so far undetailed) proposal is to organize materials primarily based on their surface-type. For example, we might have categories like masonry/, wood/, metal/ and earth/. The difference between rotting pagan wood and a mansion's polished floors could either be handled as subcategories, or by texture names. I figure we'd likely have subcategories for walls, floors, ceilings and trim. I'm also thinking windows and doors might fall in their own category outside of material type.

 

Admittedly, there may be some problems with this organization - namely textures that have more than one surface-type; although a wooden beam supported by bands of metal would clearly fall in the wood category, other cases may not be so clear-cut. On the plus side, in a game where surfaces have such a huge effect on gameplay, categorizing textures based on surface-type makes a lot of sense.

 

Does anybody else have any other proposals? Are there issues I'm not thinking of, that could make this organization inconvenient for mappers? Do other people disagree about needing a new texture organization? Anyway, I welcome other peoples' input.

[Dram]

That sounds reasonable. If I might add, it may be a good idea to add the useful D3 textures to the list (writing a new material file for them but point them to the d3 textures). Such as lava - excellent looking but it was annoying to find at first. Also things like grates - D3 has a few which could fit us well and they are impossible to find imo.

 

What do you think?

[Gildoran]

If I do that, I'd want to somehow make it clear to the mapper that it was a Doom 3 asset (maybe by prepending d3_ to the material name?) so they could avoid it if they wanted.

 

One nice thing about TDM, is that artistically it doesn't have a lot in common with D3, which means it's relatively easy to create maps without using D3 assets. I'm under the impression that when the D3 sourcecode is released, it'll only be the sourcecode and not the assets, which means that people who want to play TDM without purchasing D3 will only be able to play maps that only use TDM assets.

 

Because of this, I'd be tempted to only use D3's textures as placeholders and eventually replace them with similar textures created specifically for TDM.

[Dram]

Ahh, I never thought through it that far.

 

I guess if we have similar textures it'll be good enough - though that lava is bloody nice in D3...anyways lol.

 

Welcome to Leadership role

[sparhawk]

So we have yet another texture reorg?

 

Not sure if I like this. Though it would make sense to group the assets together based on their usage instead of their theme. Currently we have castle, mansion, nature, etc., which is not very usefull.

Also, don't make to many subcategories. That is just annoying because it requires a lot of clicking.

[Gildoran]

I figure at least right now we don't have an impossibly large number of textures, and it's early enough that it's not the end of the world. Also, it'd give me a chance to look over each texture individually.

 

When you say that it's bad to have a lot of subcategories, I'm assuming you primarily mean in terms of depth rather than breadth? Would you be ok with having two levels, in the format of surfacetype/usage/? (eg. wood/trim/)

[sparhawk]

I think two levels are ok, but more thatn that just makes it annoying. I'm not even sure if two leves are a good idea. If the names of the textures are ordered it would be sufficient to make one level per usage.

 

door
  pagan_wood_01
  pagan_wood_02
  Pagan_iron_01
  mansion_wood_01
window
  pagan_wood_01
  pagan_wood_02
  Pagan_iron_01
  mansion_wood_01
etc.

 

This way you can easily scroll up and down through the list and get a good view and they are easily accessible.

[Dram]

Yeah it does get annoying to search for a window which is in mansion and the next is in city.

 

I think what spar suggests is best - It'll be the mappers which get most affected by this so yeah, it's better to have it organized in a way that makes it easy to find things.

 

But for the love of god, if we do this reorganization then never again pleaaaaaaase!!!!

[Gildoran]

Heh, that's why I started this discussion... Hopefully if enough people chime in, it'll help us forsee most pitfalls and we'll get an organization that most people find very convenient and there won't be any incentive to do another reorg. (but maybe I'm just being overly optimistic ) BTW, I'm thinking of also posting this to the beta-mapper forum to get their opinions on different organizations.

[Springheel]

Yeah it does get annoying to search for a window which is in mansion and the next is in city.

 

I brought this up the last time the textures were reorganized, but I was over-ruled.

[Gildoran]

Ok, to make sure I'm understanding correctly, it seems like you three would like a structure like usage/surfacetype/name (eg wall/wood/mansion_01) or usage/surfacetype_name (eg wall/wood_mansion_01)? (for the latter case, I've intentionally put the surface type at the start of the name so that when d3 sorts the names, it'll be easy to find materials of a specific surface type)

[Dram]

i think usage/surfacetpye/name - it's the best, otherwise you have a very looong list of textures.

[Gildoran]

That's my opinion too.

[Dram]

well so far there's no opposition and Spring wanted to do it this way in the first place, so I guess it's a go

[Gildoran]

Ok, I'll run this by the beta-mappers and see what they think.

[Dram]

cool

[sparhawk]

That looks fine to me.

[Gildoran]

Ok, since it looks like I may start on the reorg this Friday, I wanted to just run the rest of my planned changes for the reorg by everybody just in case anybody wants to object:

 

All TDM material files will be prefixed with tdm_. (eg. tdm_wall_wood.mtr) All TDM textures will be in the textures/darkmod/ directory. (this applies to both material names and image files) The purpose of this is so that if a mapper adds a material for their map, they can be sure its filename won't conflict with official TDM material files, so long as their filename doesn't start with tdm_. (and a similar idea holds for texture names) Also, having such naming conventions makes it easier for a mapper to look through all TDM-specific textures, and to know whether or not a texture is part of the official TDM release.

 

Any lights that are intended to be used in conjunction with a specific window texture should have a similar name to the window texture, and be defined below it in the same material file. For example, if you have something like: textures/darkmod/window/barred_01, and there's a light that's intended to be used in conjunction with it, the light should be called lights/darkmod/window/barred_01. TDM lights that aren't associated with a specific texture should be defined in tdm_lights.mtr. (however, this file would not contain (non-light) textures to be used on models that generate light, such as gaslamps, unlike our current dm_lights.mtr)

 

According to the standard mostly used by D3, diffusemaps filenames should end in _d and specular maps should end in _s, but normalmaps should end in _local. This strikes me as a little inconsistant and unintuitive. I propose that all TDM normalmaps end in _n. (eg. have brickwall_n.tga instead of brickwall_local.tga)

[Dram]

Excellent, sounds like a plan

[Dram]

Ok, I'm adding the material data and the frob data into all the textures now. Once I finish I'll upload it. That way you'll have less work to do Gild

[Dram]

uuuhhhhh....guys? WTF is renderbump doing in the chars.mtr? I mean, does'nt that render a bumpmap? If so then why the hell is that in there? I am not removing it yet, but I need to know if I should remove it or not.

[Dram]

New problem: Models such as the builder guard have armor and face on the same texture but not as a different material. I'll set this to flesh as the guys face is in it but later we should regroup things like this. What was oDD thinking...

[Dram]

Yet another problem. well, not exactly problem but anyways. There are material file which are outdated and still point to things like textures/city when it's meant to be textures/darkmod/city.

 

I won't delete them, but I won't bother adding material definitions for them as they're going to be deleted.

[Dram]

Ok, one other thing. Some textures (such as citywall_02) have wood and that hardened mud in roughly equal proportions. Should I set this to stone (for the hardened mud) or wood?

 

According to this page there are twigs under the hardened mud. Does this mean our arrow could penetrate it and get stuck in the side? I would be inclined to say yes as the mud is pretty thin. I'll put it to wood for now unless you want me to change it to stone. It might look strange to have an arrow stuck in the side of hardened mud, but it would be realistic in the most case, as the mud layer is pretty thin (3cm?)

[Dram]

Ok, one other thing. Some textures (such as citywall_02) have wood and that hardened mud in roughly equal proportions. Should I set this to stone (for the hardened mud) or wood?

 

According to this page there are twigs under the hardened mud. Does this mean our arrow could penetrate it and get stuck in the side? I would be inclined to say yes as the mud is pretty thin. I'll put it to wood for now unless you want me to change it to stone. It might look strange to have an arrow stuck in the side of hardened mud, but it would be realistic in the most case, as the mud layer is pretty thin (3cm?)

 

So noone's got a problem with this then?

 

If not I'll just do the mansion one this way too.

 

EDIT: I thought about it further and actually I'll put it as stone. It would probably look strange, even though it's realistic. But I'll leave the one with half wood half hardened mud as wood. I can imagine it would'nt be hard to hit the wood on it.