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Doomedit Woes


Mr Mike

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Guys,

 

Been playing more and more with doomedit and finding myself frustrated by the seemingly buggy nature of the program. Now, i know how it is with a lot of crashes are actually user created but i'm not too sure this is the case here...

 

So far Im getting regular crashes when in edge editing mode, quite often the brush im working on will completely disappear as well. Vertex editing is causing similar problems and trying to fathom the logic in the shift-selection of these tools is a little hit n miss as well. In my last map I even created an enemy to try out some lighting and now i cant select the damned thing!

 

What do you guys think, am i being unlucky here? or just a poor user? are you finding the program stable and have you guys managed to "fix" any problems?

 

Ho-hum

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Well, I noticed shift clicking's a problem when using the layout window. I have to shift click in the cam view when it's not in render mode (then clicking the tiny red dot on the thing I want to select). An easier way to select is bringing up the entity info window ("i").

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Try shift-alt-clicking to jump through selection of stacked things (in other words, if you have a roof, and a light, and a speaker, and AI, and a floor, all stacked, and you just want the AI, just hold down shift-alt and then click a couple of times).

 

Also, you'll find that as you get more familiar with DoomEd it crashes less. Probably because you start to learn what you can do, and easily, and what you shouldn't do. I still get crashes, but far, far fewer than when I just started.

 

Also, though I certainly don't know what you're building, you probably shouldn't need vertex editing too much, unless you're doing some pretty advanced patch manipulation? For everything else, you can just size and cut, size and cut - no problems.

 

Feel free to ask anything; if we know, someone'll probably speak up. I myself went from hating this editor to loving it. Well, almost. :wub:

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Yeah, I noticed the shift-alt selection pretty early on and found it pretty flawless (i usually hide my skybox straight away for even more simplicity) but sometimes it refuses to select certain things... objects or AI.

 

My current job i use very temperamental bespoke software, will crash if you do any number of procedure even slightly wrong but I find i get along with it fine... with Dromed a crash was exceptionally rare but doomEd... hmm.

 

I guess i should look into the clipper tool, really haven't tried too much with that yet. Here goes :)

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Been messing with some stained glass textures I did a quick n dirty job on recently and was hoping to have them semi transparent but reading up on the forums I can't seem to get the alpha channel to do anything. At the moment my shader files reads

 

textures/custom/sglass1

{

qer_editorimage textures/custom/sglass1_ed.tga // custom DOOMEdit material preview image

 

diffusemap textures/custom/sglass1_d.tga // color and value information for the material

specularmap textures/custom/sglass1_s.tga // specular highlights

bumpmap textures/custom/sglass1_local.tga // normalmap for bumpmapped appearance

{

blend diffuse

map textures/custom/sglass1_d.tga

alpha 0.5 // set this to whatever you want

}

}

 

 

I'm not too sure on the "blend diffuse" comment or indeed the "map" comment below it. Probably doing something completely stupid but any help guys would be appreciated!

 

 

After searching the forums it's also become apparent that doom3 is quite limited with transparencies - textures using them aren't effected by light etc... Now it seems best to me that low lit areas with windows just have opaque textured windows as little would be seen through them anyway. Windows with bright light pouring through them could be transparent as pretty much no shadow would be drawn on those areas. The problem is rooms where a major light source isn't consistant - it can be turned on and off for instance. Is there a workaround for this? Am i talking rubbish? :unsure:

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Yeah, a translucent window that reacts to light and where you can see shadow outlines from stuff on the other side of it can be done (I'll let the person who discovered that post how :) ), but I think it's more expensive to render.

 

Also, there are probably some tricks you can do with lights that can be turned on and off in terms of specifically scripting the transparent texture brightness to turn up/down based on the state of those lights. Not an elegant solution, and won't work if those lights are blocked by a moveable object instead of turned off, but works in some cases.

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You can't have more than one diffusemap in a material (actually you can, but it won't do what you want). You are correct, transparency is limited in Doom 3 for the technical reason that dealing correctly with arbitrary transparent surfaces in a 3D engine is a decidedly non-trivial problem.

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That grey vertical sections of the walls seems at odds with the rest as they seem I udnno low poly or low res, compared to the rest of it.

 

Yeah, I know what you mean. I don't think it's a case of resolution as they're both standard doom3 textures displayed at the default resolution. I've actually created some sort of ornate archways for a mansion garden on another test map and i used the grey texture but in a much finer resolution. Worked great there but on these large pillars it just looks to repetitive. Anyway. this is all just tinkering at the moment. So it doesn't look at all polished

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You can't have more than one diffusemap in a material (actually you can, but it won't do what you want). You are correct, transparency is limited in Doom 3 for the technical reason that dealing correctly with arbitrary transparent surfaces in a 3D engine is a decidedly non-trivial problem.

 

Hmm Orb, so, for now, if i just wanna use my alpha channel and ignore the lighting problems... what's wrong with my code? I've followed the tuts but it isn't working for me :wacko:

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Another thing I found about DOOM3 stuff, not oyur work Mike, is that the fellows fingers are sort of banana shaped. It doesn't look right. WIll the actual DarkMod have different fingers etc?

ZylonBane's confession about himself:

"What can I say, I'm a jerk. A three times all American Jerk, from Jerksville, Kentucky. Yee Haw"

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Okay I changed the code to

 

{

qer_editorimage textures/custom/sglass1_ed.tga // custom DOOMEdit material preview image

 

diffusemap textures/custom/sglass1_d.tga // color and value information for the material

specularmap textures/custom/sglass1_s.tga // specular highlights

bumpmap textures/custom/sglass1_local.tga // normalmap for bumpmapped appearance

translucent

{

blend blend

map textures/custom/sglass1_d.tga

}

 

and now the texture has certainly changed. There's only a dark unlit room behind it though so it's hard to say if it's working as it should. Isn't the effect I need anyway.

 

 

Arumakani, I'd be very surprised if the player hands weren't completely remodelled in due time, so no need to worry about that.

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Another thing I found about DOOM3 stuff, not oyur work Mike, is that the fellows fingers are sort of banana shaped. It doesn't look right. WIll the actual DarkMod have different fingers etc?

 

They are completely different in TDM, so no need to worry there. We're using models made by oDD.

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Ahhhhh.

 

Yes. I came across this in my first map, with the little chapel out the back. I did what you did. Didn't really ever work properly. What I did in the end, dodging the problem, was hide a target light behind it, and project that onto the floor (no shadows were cast by the little window decal, it just was a dark blue square on the floor...), and then had a little light lighting up the window. Generally I found decal stuff like that a bit annoying, and since then I haven't bothered trying it, by using either opaque textures, or the D3 glass.

 

Can you post more of your stuff? It looks really interesting. And when I thought about doing churches I realised they are really difficult, so I'm impressed.

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Thanks for the compliments guys, really was only posting the screengrab to try and solve a problem but they're very welcome anyway :)

 

In terms of posting more up, maybe I'll post some up in a new thread but really I've only got little "scenes" of architecture going on in various maps so far - just something that I've seen as inspiration, or a texture I've found etc... I'm sure I could whip up some decent larger areas pretty quickly if I was given access to more resources ;) *hint*

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As Orbweaver said, it's complete pain to have correct windows, and especially with dynamic lighting it would take craploads of processing to do, so D3 doesn't bother. However, fortunately opaque windows can look pretty nice. I'm guessing most windows in TDM will be opaque, like in Thief. (if a map maker really wants, they can make a translucent window, but it may be prone to depth-sorting errors and such)

 

Contrary to what people at D3World have said, it is possible to to make an opaque surface where shadows cast on it can be seen from the other side (like shadows on a tent), and I've managed to get a testmap working that does it. However, it requires shadows to be calculated/rendered twice, so it won't be feasible for the early years of TDM. (but may be used later on)

 

The way it works is to have 2 lights for every lightsource: a normal light of spectrum 0, and a shadowcasting ambient of spectrum 1. Then for the window surface, you need to place two surfaces in the exact same spot (normally it would cause z-fighting, but in this case it's ok) One surface is a spectrum 0 opaque texture containing both the glass and frame, and the other is a spectrum 1 non-shadowcasting opaque texture that's only colored at the window (and black at the frame). Then you need to set up entities so that they cast both spectrum 0 and spectrum 1 shadows. The spectrum 0 lights and textures make the window look nice and shiny, and the spectrum 1 lights and textures handle the shadows going through the window.

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So as not to build false hopes, it's unclear what exactly is happening with hands right now. Models currently have high detail hands which look great. However, going with a mitten-hand approach (as in D3) would save hundreds and hundreds of polys per model. So do we want it to kill framerate and look great? Or maintain framerate and look fine?

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