Huckeye's Beta Mapper Application

[New Horizon]

Welcome Huckeye. Here you can have a little chat with the team in private.

 

Here is a link to Huckeye's unfinished Thief FM

 

http://www.hucklebarry.com/Thief/thief.html

[Huckeye]

Thanks for the opportunity. I remember reading a while back that you were looking for Beta Mappers on all ends of the scale to get their hands on the toolset so you could get feedback from Newbs and pros alike. I fit in to the newb category. I thought I might be changing careers at the time so I didn't want to get started then and potentially not be able to finish something. Now that I realize I am stuck where I am at I would like to get started!

 

You can see my Thief 2 and Oblivion attempts with the tool sets. I also attempted UT2004 but I didnt get very far with it. My empty rooms started to bog the framerate so I knew I was doing something wrong. With my passion being Thief, I didnt spend too much time trying to learn it as I had planned on modding Thief3. With the apparent difficulty of Thief 3 modding and The Dark Mod on the horrizon I thought I would try and wait for it to cut my teeth on.

[Dram]

Hi

 

Well looking at your screenies they are off to a good start, and at least you have the style right (excluding lighting for the T1/2 shots ). It's not super-great but I'm guessing you'll improve, just the main thing is that you'll have to overcome the barriers of learning D3ED or DarkRadiant, whichever suits you more. We've had several Beta Mappers sign up with full excitement, only to disappear a month later, which is obviously something we want to avoid. Basically, if you are planning to take up Beta Mapping for TDM, then please don't disappear . Also you'll notice that D3 is an additive mapping style - that is, you "add" to a "void" instead of "subtracting" from a "filled void". I'm guessing you already know this anyway, so yeah that'll take a little getting used to, though in the long run it's much better imo because you can easily open the map up and change this brush or that without crossing your fingers hoping to stop that damned bsp hole appearing.

 

But yeah, if you're willing to learn and give feedback for the tools etc then I don't see a problem and you have my vote

[Huckeye]

Hi

 

Well looking at your screenies they are off to a good start, and at least you have the style right (excluding lighting for the T1/2 shots ). It's not super-great but I'm guessing you'll improve, just the main thing is that you'll have to overcome the barriers of learning D3ED or DarkRadiant, whichever suits you more. We've had several Beta Mappers sign up with full excitement, only to disappear a month later, which is obviously something we want to avoid. Basically, if you are planning to take up Beta Mapping for TDM, then please don't disappear . Also you'll notice that D3 is an additive mapping style - that is, you "add" to a "void" instead of "subtracting" from a "filled void". I'm guessing you already know this anyway, so yeah that'll take a little getting used to, though in the long run it's much better imo because you can easily open the map up and change this brush or that without crossing your fingers hoping to stop that damned bsp hole appearing.

 

But yeah, if you're willing to learn and give feedback for the tools etc then I don't see a problem and you have my vote

 

Thanks, Dram. Yeah, I saved the lighting, furniture, NPC, etc for last (which I didnt get to), so obivously those screens are with light_bright enabled so you can see. I understand your concern about people dissapearing. I can't say anything that you probably haven't heard before (and then been ditched shortly thereafter) but I'll say it anyway the 2 reasons I want to do this are: 1.) to help you guys in making a great Thief playing experience by providing feedback about the tool set. and 2.) to learn to use the toolset and make a contribution of my own to the Thief community. So if you can believe that, then it sounds like I am what you are looking for (minus the artistic talent, of course )

[Dram]

I can't say anything that you probably haven't heard before (and then been ditched shortly thereafter) but I'll say it anyway the 2 reasons I want to do this are: 1.) to help you guys in making a great Thief playing experience by providing feedback about the tool set. and 2.) to learn to use the toolset and make a contribution of my own to the Thief community. So if you can believe that, then it sounds like I am what you are looking for (minus the artistic talent, of course )

 

That's already different hehe, the reason we started asking recently is because they were disappearing.

 

So basically, you have my vote

[Huckeye]

Well, I made a square room with the Doom3 toolset (then I made it into a rectangle) . I kept getting the compile error and it took me a while to figure out how to save properly (seems like they should have fixed that problem by now). Its definitely different to fill in the space rather than carve it but it felt easier to use overall than Dromed. I assume that I need to check back in here and answer any questions that come up?

 

Let me know if I can be of any help.

[Dram]

Cool, well it's a start and step on the right track

 

Get used to the editor and just play around with it. Just ask if you need any help - I'll gladly help you out

 

There's not much else we pretty much need to ask, it's more or less letting you get used to the editor etc. Oh, and gettitng you set up with the tools hehe.

 

I guess we should make him a Bet Mappers NH unless there are any objections? That way he can get help from other beta mappers also, since I doubt they can see this thread.

[Huckeye]

I apologize as this is likely something extremely easy, but I am stumped and am not sure this is supposed to be acting like this (none of the tutorials seem to address it at least.

 

I create a brush and click inside the brush to move it around once it is selected and then outside the brush to resize it. This works for about 5 minutes and then I can no longer resize the brush. No matter where I click on the screen the brush is physically being dragged, but the part that makes me think its not my fault is that the Console window actually says 'dragging' and 'stretching' appropriately (even though it is actually only dragging. So after about 5 minutes, all I can do is move brushes around or create new ones that I can't resize.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks abunch.

[sparhawk]

Which grid size do you have set? I noticved that Radiant starts acting weird if a gridsize lower then 1 is selected. Maybe that is the reason? I just had the same issue myself. It moves a little bit and then just stops. As default you should use a gridsize of 8. For finetuning I switch to 1 sometimes, but then switch back to 8 again. I read somewhere that this is the best gridsize because it also helps to avoid problems in the map.

[Huckeye]

Which grid size do you have set? I noticved that Radiant starts acting weird if a gridsize lower then 1 is selected. Maybe that is the reason? I just had the same issue myself. It moves a little bit and then just stops. As default you should use a gridsize of 8. For finetuning I switch to 1 sometimes, but then switch back to 8 again. I read somewhere that this is the best gridsize because it also helps to avoid problems in the map.

 

Thanks for the response. I didn't change the grid size. It is using the default of 8, (shortcut key 4) The problem is reocurring too. Its happened on 3 different attempts and Ive yet to get 2 rooms together. (so I'm not trying anything complex).

 

Thanks again.

[Huckeye]

The problem seems to go away if I simply close and reopen the editor. I was able to go about 20 minutes this last time before it happened again. I'm happy with the work around except for the error on saving. I read that the .bak 2 error is uncorrectable? No biggie, everything I am doing now is definitely throw away.

[Dram]

Wierdness, this is truly unique. Do you have it running in fullscreen? If yes then that may be a problem.

 

Here's what I have in my shortcut to the editor:

D:\Games\Doom3\Doom3.exe +disconnect +set r_gamma 1 +set r_brightness 1 +set r_mode 5 +set r_fullscreen 0 +set r_multiSamples 0 +set fs_game DarkMod +editor

 

Try using that as a shortcut and see what happens. Oh wait, are you using DarkRadiant or D3Ed?

[sparhawk]

Another thing that seems to cause problems is, if you have antialiasing activated. You should switch that off if you want to use the editor.

[Dram]

Also, one more p[ossibility is the autosave feature. Switch it off and see if it works. It's probably unrelated but still, just try everything i guess.

[Huckeye]

Thanks a bunch. I'll try when I get home today.

 

I am already running in windowed mode. I'm using D3edit (don't have darkradiant yet )

 

I'll check anti-aliasing and definitely turn off auto save (thats a pain with the .bak 2 errors)

 

I may be needing to format soon as entire brushes are randomly disappearing as well. I'll have several rooms connected, optimize, load the map, all is fine, exit, change a texture (or some small thing), optimize, LEAK! I'll turn around and an entire wall is gone.

[sparhawk]

Sounds pretty strange.

[Dram]

Hmm, do you have Cubic Clipping on?

[Huckeye]

I checked everything suggested. Thanks for the comments, but nothing worked.

 

I am running in windowed mode, Cubic clipping is not on (I turned it on and that did not help, so I turned it back off), I turned off autosave, anti aliasing was not on.

 

Not sure if I mentioned it, but this happens to ALL brushes on the map too. Not just new ones but existing ones as well. (but when I close and reopen, all is well for a little while). Since no one has heard of this, I don't doubt that something is screwy with my system. Its been a while since I wiped it clean. I may start backing things up to get ready for a reinstall.

 

One more question and then I'll leave you alone for a while. This .bak2 error that people are complaining about. Are you supposed to get it all the time? I read that if you keep saving, eventually it will go away. But it is not for me. the only way I can make it go away is to save under a different file name and even that wasn't successful on my last try. I finally had to close the map without saving.

 

thanks again for the help.

[sparhawk]

I wrote a small 'crack' to fix this issue. Don't where the link is though.

[New Horizon]

Here is a link to the thread that has my 'modified inspector window' patch. It gives you a minimise button on the entity inspector. It also incorporates Spars fix for the .bak file problem.

 

You're game must be patched to 1.3 for this to work.

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=3086

[Huckeye]

Thank you VERY much. I will play with it more tomorrow, but for now I was able to save successfully and without error 1 (ONE) time in a row!

 

I didn't realize it but I had already grown accustomed to cringing everytime I hit the save button. Thanks a bunch!

[Dram]

Woot! So it works now? Excellent

[Huckeye]

Yup, so far perfectly! I saved about 5 different times last night and before the patch I couldn't save once without the error.

 

The verdict is still out on the resize/dragging problem. I didn't experience it yesterday, but I mostly just tinkered yesterday.

[Dram]

Good. Well let's hope the drag/resize problem never occurs again

[Huckeye]

If I do a lot of work in the doom editor, what kind of transition, if any, will there be when the Dark Mod tools are available? Will I simply be able to open the map with the DM tools or will more work be involved (assuming I am only carving architecture at this point).

 

Thanks.