Ambitious suggestion

[jdude]

I was messing around with func_rotating and func_pendulum today and it's somewhat annoying having to figure out if the animations of things look proper, so I was thinking would it be possible to have a button which you could press to view everything in motion. For example, you press it and the brush connected to func_pendulum or rotation begins to move so you can see what it will do in-game. There could be a alpha'ed ghost brush in the original place to select, and it would be an option to view like lighting so it would be a quick way to test the map without dmaping it. Would this be too difficult to do?

[sparhawk]

Yes. But that was why I was proposing to create an interface between Doom 3 and DarkRadiant, so we can reuse existing code to some extent. This has already been started by Greebo, so maybe this is one of the benefits of this.

[greebo]

I was messing around with func_rotating and func_pendulum today and it's somewhat annoying having to figure out if the animations of things look proper, so I was thinking would it be possible to have a button which you could press to view everything in motion. For example, you press it and the brush connected to func_pendulum or rotation begins to move so you can see what it will do in-game. There could be a alpha'ed ghost brush in the original place to select, and it would be an option to view like lighting so it would be a quick way to test the map without dmaping it. Would this be too difficult to do?

It's fairly difficult. DarkRadiant is lacking the entire game logic: it has no physics, no collisions, no time. Also, DarkRadiant's renderer is potentially too slow if you attempt to simulate the movement (it could get choppy, but this might be acceptable).

 

While it's possible to hack in the time-dependent behaviour for a certain type, it's not very elegant to do so. The behaviour of each func_* entity must be re-coded in DarkRadiant to get it look right. All in all, I think it's a nice feature, but it's a fair amount of work just to replicate something that already exists and works in Doom 3.

 

edit: just saw sparhawk's new post. Making use of the RCF framework might be a possible approach, although the connection is quite slow. The main problem would be to get the entities Think() like they do during game runtime, which will most probably not work very easily if it worked at all.

 

Everything that requires the map to be actually running is probably out of reach for DarkRadiant. Stand-alone systems like the map compiler or collision model manager are easier to hijack.