General texture material cleanup question and answer thread

[SneaksieDave]

The hierarchy looks mostly good, but of course some issues will exist here or there from time to time. I plan to go through and try to address issues (depending on the extent or ownership of the work in question) as I come across them. If the fix is obvious and simplistic, I'll go ahead and do it. If the solution is questionable or unclear, it's better to ask first. So in that spirit, I thought it a good idea if we establish an ongoing question/answer thread, where we can ask about particular items and issues in the texture repository. This could be considered separate from actual texture art cleanup/modification/pruning if we wish.

 

To get things rolling, in starting up today, the first things I noticed were:

 

1. There are a bunch of pillar_* materials listed in the textures/darkmod folder, outside of any subfolder. They are defined in architecture.mtr. These materials certainly appear to be useful for mapping, so they need not be treated as model-asset-only, but where should they reside? Not in the base folder, surely. /stone/natural maybe?

 

This is a pretty simple fix, but I didn't want to move them in case they break someone's models.

 

2. paint_paper/wallpaper_fancy_green and _red don't work, because they have no texture files to back them up. Should they be removed or fixed? The _gold one does work.

 

 

There's more, I just wanted to get this out there to get started.

[Baddcog]

No, I'd say pillars should be stone/sculpted. Never seen a natural pillar myself.

 

Those wallpapers are mine, at the time I made them I had forgot we were doing dds textures. So they don't need deleted, they need converted. I think the normal map needs to stay put though. I will try and convert them at some point if I don't get beat to the punch.

[greebo]

1. There are a bunch of pillar_* materials listed in the textures/darkmod folder, outside of any subfolder. They are defined in architecture.mtr. These materials certainly appear to be useful for mapping, so they need not be treated as model-asset-only, but where should they reside? Not in the base folder, surely. /stone/natural maybe?

 

This is a pretty simple fix, but I didn't want to move them in case they break someone's models.

Whoops, sorry, this seem to be mine, they are used in some ASE models. I indended to rename the shaders once I got the models finished, but I seem to have forgotten. Don't think they are useable for anything else.

 

I'll fix that right now.

 

edit: done.

[SneaksieDave]

Even better, thanks guys.

 

@Baddcog: I actually don't seem to have either DDS or TGA versions, so I think those might be missing altogether.

 

@greebo: About the pillar textures, hmm this actually brings up a good question for DR. If a person was in fact interested in using one of the pillar textures (or any other model-only texture not available in texture library), is there a way they could find it in DR? In DoomEd, the user simply goes to the Materials hierarchy on the Media tab; he/she can then choose the model texture like any other material. I might be missing it, but I think this is missing from DR (a vague itch in my head has me thinking it used to be there, so perhaps it was disabled?) A perfect example is a mapper that wants to use the banner textures as a symbol throughout a castle, or a sign of completely different design than those available, without having to learn modeling. Sure, they could make a new material, but that would be needlessly redundant. I assume this would be simple, since it is just more material definitions. Can we can we? My finger is poised to make a request entry...

 

@textures: we have /water_source outside of /darkmod. IIRC this was for a technical reason I can't recall (can anyone confirm?), but really, aren't we able to just rename the materials so they appear in /darkmod? If so, any reason we wouldn't want to? They work just fine, but outside of the hierarchy they're a bit troublesome to find. Water wasn't even used in Doom, so I think one would expect to look in /darkmod to find it.

[greebo]

DarkRadiant could open up another tree branch in the Media Browser showing all the textures NOT beginning with textures/. This should be easy to do, feel free to add such a feature request.

[Tels]

DarkRadiant could open up another tree branch in the Media Browser showing all the textures NOT beginning with textures/. This should be easy to do, feel free to add such a feature request.

 

I think it would also be a good idea to "hide" any doom textures in a different folder called "base" like so:

 

  + darkmod
  + stone
  + common
  + sfx
 + base

 

etc. E.g. anything from doom goes into base, anything from darkmod goes into "darkmod" (and no rendundant "textures"). A few critical things like common and sfx nee to be under darkmod, too,

 

This way you won't have to wade through 50 different folders with doom specific missions just to find darkmod/wood. Likewise, this way you don't have to remember if sfx/sky was under darkmod or outside.

 

It would also make the textures hirarchy consistent with the entity hierarchy and consistency is always good in UI design

[Tels]

DarkRadiant could open up another tree branch in the Media Browser showing all the textures NOT beginning with textures/. This should be easy to do, feel free to add such a feature request.

 

Speaking of that, some materials have:

 

 "description" "blah"

 

lines, but I can't see how or where DarkRadiant does display them.

 

Shouldn't these lines be called "editor_usage" or is "description" actually right. And is this a bug that DR doesn't display them?

[greebo]

"description" is right, I think TDM extended the material parser with that functionality, IIRC.

 

DarkRadiant is not yet using that description tag, so this might be a feature request.

[Tels]

"description" is right, I think TDM extended the material parser with that functionality, IIRC.

 

DarkRadiant is not yet using that description tag, so this might be a feature request.

 

If this is a TDM addition, couldn't we change it to "editor_usage" for consistency?

[greebo]

It's not just used by the editor, it's actually used by the game to determine the surface type ("tile", "straw" and such).

[Tels]

It's not just used by the editor, it's actually used by the game to determine the surface type ("tile", "straw" and such).

 

Ah - but only if you set surfacetype15, right?

[greebo]

Yes, when surfacetype15 is encountered, the description is used to check for the actual material type.

[Ishtvan]

Yeah, it's just the first word of description that's parsed, but we probably want to reserve other words for any other flags we might to add later down the line, since the material parser is outside the SDK and this is the only way we can get more flags into the material Decl.