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My Feedback And Suggestions On Darkradiant


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Blender (and most other 3D apps) have much better scrolling, then dragging. The dragging is really annoying. IMO the best one is in Blender, because I'm used to it. *hehe* :)

 

That's my opinion also - Blender has an extremely fast and efficient interface once you get used to it. If we can implement a customisable key system for DarkRadiant, the first thing I will do is map everything to the Blender equivalent.

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Just getting a chance to take a look at the new DR now. What I've seen so far is slick! I wanna jot down my feedback while it's in my head:

 

1. I just found out that it's possible to pan textures by doing the following:

-Create a brush, select the brush, select one face (so, a double selection?)

-Then, in the isometric view, on the side where the selected face is, click and drag parallel to the side.

 

However, it is quite hard to do this with any precision, because the brush is very easily resized if you move in any other direction. Am I doing this wrong, is there an easy way to lock the size and/or move the texture only? If not, one would definitely be welcome, this is cool.

 

2. I think the mouselook mode has been proven obsolete with your new movement functionality (ctrl-mouse, and ctrl-shift-mouse). Huge improvement. :) It feels perfectly natural to use RMB as a held button only for movement mode, instead of a mode toggle. I keep finding myself doing that by default, and it works great (until you release RMB of course).

 

In other words, ctrl-RMB-mousemove would pan and turn the view.

Ctrl-shift-RMB-mousemove would zoom the view.

 

3. This is probably just personal preference, but I believe the ctrl-shift cam zooming is backwards. The reason I say this:

 

Ctrl-mousemove Right moves your eye to the right.

Ctrl-mousemove Up moves your eye up.

However, Ctrl-Shift-mousemove forward moves your eye back, and vice versa.

 

It doesn't agree with the first two. If this is preferred, perhaps it could be an option (like one of those "invert mouse" settings games have)?

 

4. Select touching might have a problem - it leaves the selection brush behind. (I'm not sure if it's supposed to do that, I never use that one). At this point there's no select complete tall (my beloved - perfect for selecting items or items within a room but not the floor and ceiling), as far as I can see (I think I probably mentioned that somewhere in this thread though). Select partial tall (shift drag) and select inside seem to work well.

 

More later, wanna get back to it. :)

 

Edit: Oh! One suggestion I forgot to mention. This might be difficult, I don't know, but it would be neat if, as with Blender, pressing ESC before releasing the mouse (for example in a move) cancels/undoes the action. Just a thought.

 

Edit2: Is there a way to lock rotation to the grid?

 

Edit3: See attached image. I might suggest some spacing changes on the current entity inspector (unless of course it's needed for something I'm not seeing). I've made a variety of entities and it seems none of them require all of the space that's below the field list. In the attached image, I'd lean toward removing the empty space above the X Y Z boxes, and even shrinking the Apply button vertically. That space could instead display more of the properties list. Just a suggestion; again I don't know if that sizing has a specific reason.

 

Edit4: Any idea why the bell I made still doesn't show in the model browser? It's in the props/misc folder. I don't believe it's just being an ASE that's the problem, because other ASE's show fine. It has no vertices or info either. Hm. The dice I made doesn't show either, but the long banner does, so it's not just my models that DR doesn't like. ;)

post-58-1162875129_thumb.jpg

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1. I just found out that it's possible to pan textures by doing the following:

-Create a brush, select the brush, select one face (so, a double selection?)

-Then, in the isometric view, on the side where the selected face is, click and drag parallel to the side.

However, it is quite hard to do this with any precision, because the brush is very easily resized if you move in any other direction. Am I doing this wrong, is there an easy way to lock the size and/or move the texture only? If not, one would definitely be welcome, this is cool.

 

I wasn't aware of that functionality, it is goodthat the code is there though. It would be better to have dedicated Texture Pan and Texture Rotate tools like in T3Ed.

 

2. I think the mouselook mode has been proven obsolete with your new movement functionality (ctrl-mouse, and ctrl-shift-mouse). Huge improvement. :) It feels perfectly natural to use RMB as a held button only for movement mode, instead of a mode toggle. I keep finding myself doing that by default, and it works great (until you release RMB of course).

In other words, ctrl-RMB-mousemove would pan and turn the view.

 

OK, I am quite happy to have RMB as a held modifier rather than a toggle, as I dislike modal interfaces in general.

 

3. This is probably just personal preference, but I believe the ctrl-shift cam zooming is backwards. The reason I say this:

Ctrl-mousemove Right moves your eye to the right.

Ctrl-mousemove Up moves your eye up.

However, Ctrl-Shift-mousemove forward moves your eye back, and vice versa.

It doesn't agree with the first two. If this is preferred, perhaps it could be an option (like one of those "invert mouse" settings games have)?

 

Sounds reasonable.

 

4. Select touching might have a problem - it leaves the selection brush behind. (I'm not sure if it's supposed to do that, I never use that one). At this point there's no select complete tall (my beloved - perfect for selecting items or items within a room but not the floor and ceiling), as far as I can see (I think I probably mentioned that somewhere in this thread though). Select partial tall (shift drag) and select inside seem to work well.

 

I noticed that Select Touching leaves the selection brush, but I think this is intentional because normally you would use Select Touching on an already-existing map brush, rather than a new "selection brush".

 

Select Complete Tall should be possible, I also think that Select Partial Tall should be available as a toolbar button in the DoomEdit style for consistency (as well as the shift-drag).

 

Edit: Oh! One suggestion I forgot to mention. This might be difficult, I don't know, but it would be neat if, as with Blender, pressing ESC before releasing the mouse (for example in a move) cancels/undoes the action. Just a thought.

 

I agree, it should always be possible to cancel a mouse operation. I will add this to the list.

 

Edit2: Is there a way to lock rotation to the grid?

 

I don't think this is a well-defined operation. Rotation is specified as an angle, how would you lock this to the grid? Do you mean having a separate rotation "grid", i.e. in 15 degree increments?

 

Edit3: See attached image. I might suggest some spacing changes on the current entity inspector (unless of course it's needed for something I'm not seeing). I've made a variety of entities and it seems none of them require all of the space that's below the field list. In the attached image, I'd lean toward removing the empty space above the X Y Z boxes, and even shrinking the Apply button vertically. That space could instead display more of the properties list. Just a suggestion; again I don't know if that sizing has a specific reason.

 

I think the PropertyEditor pane (the bit at the bottom) can certainly be made a bit smaller, there are no Property Editors which use more than a single line of widgets. I guess there could also be a preference option to turn off the Property Editors for users who only wanted to use the text entry boxes.

 

Edit4: Any idea why the bell I made still doesn't show in the model browser? It's in the props/misc folder. I don't believe it's just being an ASE that's the problem, because other ASE's show fine. It has no vertices or info either. Hm. The dice I made doesn't show either, but the long banner does, so it's not just my models that DR doesn't like. ;)

 

No idea, all my models show up fine. If the model is on CVS I can have a look when I get home.

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I noticed that Select Touching leaves the selection brush, but I think this is intentional because normally you would use Select Touching on an already-existing map brush, rather than a new "selection brush".

Good point, that's probably the intent.

 

I don't think this is a well-defined operation. Rotation is specified as an angle, how would you lock this to the grid? Do you mean having a separate rotation "grid", i.e. in 15 degree increments?

Right, that's the wording I was looking for - increments.

 

I'll double check the model thing after I get sync'd up. Maybe it's on my end.

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Hm, I looked at the ASEs, the materials, and the skins, and I haven't been able to figure out why the bells don't display in DR. They work in D3Ed, and I'm fully sync'd up. Any idea? Incidentally the dice does work; I think I was wrong before.

 

Also, a bit of weird behavior I just came across:

Open the model browser, then minimize DR. The model browser stays up, separate from DR (I assume it's not modal? or is that parenting? I'm not sure; either way it acts different than say, the isometric view). Now, rightclick the DR toolbar item and choose Restore. Now DR pops back up, but the model browser is beneath all of the other component windows. Makes it easy to lose or at least confuse the user.

 

Edit: Tiny suggestion/request (sorry! I do this for a living and it's hard to unplug I guess :blush:). In the media tab of the entity inspectors window, the up and down arrow work to go up and down along the tree, home and end jump to the beginning and end, but missing is the ability to open and close branches with left and right.

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Hm, I looked at the ASEs, the materials, and the skins, and I haven't been able to figure out why the bells don't display in DR. They work in D3Ed, and I'm fully sync'd up. Any idea? Incidentally the dice does work; I think I was wrong before.

 

Are the models on CVS? I will have to try and recreate this error.

 

Also, a bit of weird behavior I just came across:

Open the model browser, then minimize DR. The model browser stays up, separate from DR (I assume it's not modal? or is that parenting? I'm not sure; either way it acts different than say, the isometric view). Now, rightclick the DR toolbar item and choose Restore. Now DR pops back up, but the model browser is beneath all of the other component windows. Makes it easy to lose or at least confuse the user.

 

The Model Selector is supposed to be modal, so it may well display strange behaviour if you minimise the main window. In fact all of the child windows are a bit strange, because of the way that the application uses top-level windows to mimic a MDI interface.

 

I guess we really need to standardise on an interface - either fully MDI where the child windows are contained within the main window, or SDI (like the GIMP) where everything is a top-level window including the toolbar/menubar.

 

Edit: Tiny suggestion/request (sorry! I do this for a living and it's hard to unplug I guess :blush:). In the media tab of the entity inspectors window, the up and down arrow work to go up and down along the tree, home and end jump to the beginning and end, but missing is the ability to open and close branches with left and right.

 

I have noticed that. I will have to see if this is possible using standard GTK functions, since I wouldn't want to implement a separate key handler callback just to process these keys.

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I guess we really need to standardise on an interface - either fully MDI where the child windows are contained within the main window, or SDI (like the GIMP) where everything is a top-level window including the toolbar/menubar.

The GIMP-like thing really doesn't work on Windows. It's bearable on Linux because you have virtual desktops, but on Windows you will invariably end up with another maximised window obscuring most of the interface, and you have to bring each of the GIMP's windows to the front individually, which is very annoying.

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The GIMP-like thing really doesn't work on Windows. It's bearable on Linux because you have virtual desktops, but on Windows you will invariably end up with another maximised window obscuring most of the interface, and you have to bring each of the GIMP's windows to the front individually, which is very annoying.

 

Please, no gimp'ish windows in Dark Radiant....Pleeeeese. :) Ha ha. Seriously, I can't stand it...even in Linux.

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While we're on the model display, is there already a way to enable speculars and normalmapping that I don't know of? It might already be there, actually, but it's hard to tell. The models are definitely not as shiny or shadowed in DR. If it's already there, is there maybe an ambient throwing it all off? Anyway, this isn't vital, just kinda nice. :)

 

Also just found a reproducable (on my system at least) crash: simply open DR and press 'i'. I guess it doesn't like inverting the selection when there's nothing to invert. :)

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While we're on the model display, is there already a way to enable speculars and normalmapping that I don't know of? It might already be there, actually, but it's hard to tell. The models are definitely not as shiny or shadowed in DR. If it's already there, is there maybe an ambient throwing it all off? Anyway, this isn't vital, just kinda nice. :)

 

The model preview widget uses standard OpenGL rendering, not the per-pixel lighting (which is why you can see the lighting at all on your non-DX9 card). The plan is for per pixel lighting to be added when the New Renderer is implemented (in fact the model preview will probably be the test bed for the new renderer, before it is implemented for the main camera view).

 

Also just found a reproducable (on my system at least) crash: simply open DR and press 'i'. I guess it doesn't like inverting the selection when there's nothing to invert. :)

 

I'll check it out.

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I have looked into why the bell models are not loading, and the reason seems to be the files contain an additional comment line above the first line, i.e.

 

*COMMENT "Author: SneaksieDave"
*3DSMAX_ASCIIEXPORT	200
*COMMENT "Exported from Blender 242 - Sun Sep 03 01:32:15 2006"

 

whereas the loading code is expecting the *3DSMAX_ASCIIEXPORT token to be the first one it encounters in the file.

 

Where did this additional comment line come from? Is it part of the Blender exporter?

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I actually tried removing that and it didn't help... maybe I screwed up. If it works I'll just move it down or leave it out I guess. Will check back shortly.

 

Edit: Duh. I removed the comment from the material, but not the model. Yes, that works. I guess as long as comments are placed after the header/identifier comment, it's not really a problem. I'll submit new versions. On the ironically positive side, DR's current lack of normalmapping and specularity in the model viewport helped show me a (pretty bad) texture seam I'd like to fix. ^_^

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I'm not sure if there might still be something weird with the model viewer stats. I was going back to doing counts, but wanted to verify everything was equal. However, if you open the lyre.lwo in blender and in DR, you get different numbers still.

 

Lyre, blender: 268 faces total

Lyre, blender: 244 faces after deleting the CM

 

Lyre, DarkRadiant: 272 with CM showing

 

The vertex counts don't seem to match up either (276 and 250, and 245 respectively).

 

So even if DR is taking the CM into the calculation, it doesn't seem to match up. Also (though I think it might have already been requested) - would it be easy enough to make DR ignore the CM not only for polycount but also not display it?

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I know it doesn't match up exactly, but at least it's not the order of magnitude error that it was before.

 

You can already hide the CM by selecting "Collision surfaces" from the new Filter menu before browsing the models.

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