New Feature: Map Position Saving

[greebo]

I added another feature that might be convenient when navigating in large maps. It's now possible to save the current camera position using the shortcuts Ctrl-Alt-1 through Ctrl-Alt-0 into 10 separate slots. Recalling those can be done by hitting Alt-1 to Alt-0. These positions are saved with the map and are kept between map loads.

 

Internally, the map positions are stored as spawnargs of the worldspawn entity, although you shouldn't see it in the Entity Inspector as the key/values are removed after map load.

 

The shortcuts are accessible through the Shortcut Editor as always, so these can be customised as well. The new build on FTP already contains these changes.

[SneaksieDave]

Wow, that's useful, and sounds a lot like a feature on the software at my job. Are you secretly one of my co-workers?

[greebo]

Damn. Busted!

[Domarius]

LOL - that's the same feature in an in-house software at MY job! Same keys and everything

 

Must just be a good idea, dont you think?

[sparhawk]

Which shows how great software patents are for innovations. For many problems there exists only a limited set of solutions, or at least a good solution is pretty likely to come up independently.

[Fidcal]

Sounds good. Is there already a shortcut 'camera to cursor'? Or even on the right click menu 'camera here' and 'player start here' (see next)

 

Maybe something like this already exists and I've not yet found it...

 

How do map makers currently test play from a new position, ie, not the normal map start? Drag the player start where needed? How about a 'master player start' marker that will always store where ultimately player_start will be when the map is released, plus labelled markers that can be positioned anywhere to start at different locations. I did this in Thief 2. From a menu one can then select, eg:

 

Player Start:

Main start

cellblock

dining room

old tower

 

Selecting would move the player start. If that were integrated into the 'maybe' launch game from DR then the menu could be 'Play Game' or similar and one click runs the game from the selected start point. But even if that is not implemented, being able to quickly move player start to regular test points would be useful.

[greebo]

Sounds good. Is there already a shortcut 'camera to cursor'? Or even on the right click menu 'camera here' and 'player start here' (see next)

There are several ways to quickly reposition the camera:

• You can Ctrl-MMB anywhere in the orthoview, the camera gets positioned there
  
• You can define what the camera should point to by a single MMB click at the target (orthoview).
  
• You can drag the camera around with Ctrl-MMB (orthoview).
  
• You can store and recall these map positions 1-10 (Ctrl-Alt-1 through Ctrl-Alt-0)
  
• You can position the camera to the center of objects by clicking them with Alt-RMB in the camview.
  
• Doesn't exactly fit here, but I'll mention it anyway: You can select objects in the orthoview and hit Ctrl-Tab to switch viewtypes. The orthoviews will get recentered to the selection. If nothing is selected when switching views, the camera is used as new orthoview center.
  

I like the idea of quickly setting the player_start at certain points. "Move starting point here", which removes the current info_player_start from the map and recreates a new one at the desired position. If you like, you can add this to the Bugtracker: http://bugs.angua.at/ It will certainly be useful when you register there, because it's likely that you'll find more bugs/suggestions when testing this thing out.

 

Regarding the player starting point list: This would only make sense if DarkRadiant could be used to launch maps. The meta-information about where the player start should be saved could easily be stored in the worldspawn entity, although only one info_player_start can be saved to the map (only one is accepted by Doom3, the rest is ignored if there are more in the map). We should talk about such a feature again when DarkRadiant is that far.

[Fidcal]

Thanks greebo - very comprehensive list.