Newbie DarkRadiant Questions

[SteveL]

I guess you cracked it when you moved the origin of the fs. As long as that's sealed off it'll work. I still haven't figured out the rules for when a light in another visleaf gets rendered or not.

[Lux]

Well, in this case at least, the lights are in the same visleaf so its a non-issue. There are only certain areas where certain lights would be visible so connecting them to that visleaf alleviates any issue associated with not being in the same visleaf.

[Goldwell]

I don't even know if this is possible but is there a way to make an object say a func_static or model or whatever not reflect on things like water?

 

I have some running water and an object I have reflects in the water and it looks horrible and I was wondering if there was a way to tell the engine to maybe ignore that one object when it comes to reflection. Is this possible?

[RJFerret]

I simulated the effect by using non-reflective water with portalsky underneath it (depends what the bottom of your skybox has).

[buck28]

I am a Newbie here. I am currently learning the Dark Radiant. I did one mission for Dromed in 2006, and it was received pretty well. (8of10) Freedo Finds One.

My question is: I have the skybox figured out, but how do you add a city atmosphere skybox? Like on the side of a wall or two? Or can you?? I can't find it in the Wiki.

Any help is appreciated. If I put this in the wrong spot, I apologize.

Buck28

[Goldwell]

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Edited February 22, 2014 by Goldwell

[RJFerret]

Buck, you can put scaled down buildings in your skybox (1/12th size iirc, 1/16th, ty Grayman) or you can put building façades around your perimeter.

 

Gold, yes, use Objectives for that. You can have an objective complete upon opening a readable, or reaching a certain page, or closing it, and trigger something by that.

Edited February 23, 2014 by RJFerret

[Springheel]

You could copy and paste my portal sky from the training mission...it has a city skyline.

[grayman]

(1/12th size iirc)

 

1/16th

[SteveL]

Evening guys. Can anyone tell me why this is happening, or how to work round it?

 

I need some decal trees, buildings, and other whatnots to cover the join between the 3d and 2d parts of my backdrop. I found Sotha's decal textures/darkmod/decals/vegetation/forest_trees01 and it's ideal but I'm having trouble using it in DR. The source image is fine, looks like this in GIMP:

 

But when applied to a patch in in DR (fit 1:1) it looks like this:

 

The image is duplicated and the resulting trees overlap. So I can't figure out how to adjust the texture atlas so it applies 1 tree to each patch. What am I doing wrong?

 

EDIT: It looks ok in DR in true lighting mode. I guess this is down to fullbright mode not correctly handling the separate alpha/diffuse stages of the same diffusemap, though I don't understand why the image is partly duplicated, partly triplicated, Anyway my workaround is to adjust it in true lighting mode. Apols for the premature post.

Edited February 24, 2014 by SteveL

[AluminumHaste]

np, very weird render issue there.

[Sotha]

Maybe the texture does not have an editor preview?

[SteveL]

That's right, it doesn't have a qer_editorimage specified so DR is using the full tga image.

[SteveL]

What gets turned off in a visleaf when it closes off and is no longer rendered? Is it just drawing that's affected? AI continue to move and think, and speakers continue to play and lights sometimes continue to shine (observed because of non-shadowcasting lights bleeding into the next visleaf).

 

 

I have location scripts that turn off those ns lights when the player leaves a location, and now I'm wondering whether it's a good thing to turn off func forcefields and splinemovers and even func rotators too, but I'm not sure whether (a) any of that gets done automatically, and (b ) whether there's any point in doing it. Since the objects won't be drawn, will any of the above have a significant effect on performance? 

Edited February 25, 2014 by SteveL

[Sotha]

AI thinking is automatically toned down by the interleaved thinking system: the farther the AI is from the player, the less it thinks.

 

So.. Just map! If non-shadowcasting light bleeds to the next visportal area, you can

i) tune (move/resize) the light so that it doesn't

i) put it to cast shadows, but make stuff non-shadow casting in its area. Should achieve similar benefits.

 

I wouldn't bother to do all that micromanagement. It would be silly to do all that work to cause something nobody will see.

[SteveL]

Thanks, I was hoping that'd be the answer, and it's good to have confirmation from an expert mapper who's known for being performance conscious :-) I'll leave my micromanagement and get on with mapping as you advise.

[SteveL]

Hmmm. Applying light texture lights/nofalloff to a light results in that light being turned off completely. I checked the material definition which looks ok and the texture file (darkmod/tdm_textures_base01/lights/nofalloff.tga) which turns out to be missing. Is this something I've done to muck up my installation, or a general problem?

 

EDIT: added full path I checked for the tga

Edited February 27, 2014 by SteveL

[Obsttorte]

Some of the light textures are not working, try a different one.

[Goldwell]

.

Edited March 2, 2014 by Goldwell

[kyyrma]

What is the best, simplest way for triggering audio that plays once?

 

Lets say I want to play a sudden spooky door shutting sound when the player crosses a certain point. How do I do this?

 

The wiki doesn't really have anything on triggers, so I'm pretty lost with them.

[RJFerret]

Drag out a brush covering the area that defines, "player crosses a certain point". Right-click, create entity, in Triggers folder, trigger_once.

 

Target it at the sound entity.

[RJFerret]

The wiki doesn't really have anything on triggers...

 

This has always bugged me, and I'd been mulling over ideas for one since my latest release heavily involved them, so here we go, now there is one: http://wiki.thedarkm...?title=Triggers

 

Please, whomever has used trigger_touch, hurt and/or presize, edit/elaborate details of their use (or provide to me if you don't have wiki editing access).

 

PS: It could use wikilinks pointing to it as well of course.

Edited March 3, 2014 by RJFerret

[kyyrma]

Glad you double posted, otherwise I couldn't have liked that twice

 

Thanks!

[Goldwell]

I am trying to access the image file for "distant_cityscape_01" and I looked into the shader definition which states that the file is in "textures/darkmod/decals/building_facades/" and when trying to track down the file in the dark mod directory the closet I could come to that was inside the file "tdm_textures_decals01" but when I looked through that file I could not find the distant_cityscape_01 file.

 

Does anyone know where the file is stored?

 

Thanks!

[grayman]

dds/textures/darkmod/decals/building_facades/distant_cityscape_01.dds