Newbie DarkRadiant Questions

[AluminumHaste]

Maybe the file is screwed up. Try deleting it and re-dmap. 45MB shouldn't be a limit, as the cm is normally the largest file of a FM.

 

Yeah I did that several times.

Busy with other stuff atm.

[DeusXIncognita]

[...]The glass-only version will have the words "blend add" in its material file, which means it doesn't need light to hit it to be seen, it'll always have its full brightness. The stone version won't have that in its shader, so it'll need light to hit it.

[...]

 

You'll see the difference in DR if you enable lighting preview mode. Without that, everything is drawn at full brightness with or without lights present.

Ah, now that explains it, thanks a lot.

 

I tried using preview mode, at least that way I see the not self brigtht textures in the right color, sadly the self lit textures are full black in that mode. But it helps to work with it, and not have to enter the map via game - I just forgot that mode was there, thanks.

 

Since I have to light some windows by a light, which sort of light would be the best one to use? (the one that uses the least resources and entities.).

Just a simple small light near the window? Or is there a form of a special light for such occasions? (I read about blend lights for example, but have no idea regarding resources used, and if it is any better than a normal light in any case, or if it is even useful in that circumstances)

And combined with that - is it somehow possible to bind lights to a func static? Or have they always added individually?

 

Thanks for the help

[SteveL]

Ah, now that explains it, thanks a lot.

 

I tried using preview mode, at least that way I see the not self brigtht textures in the right color, sadly the self lit textures are full black in that mode. But it helps to work with it, and not have to enter the map via game - I just forgot that mode was there, thanks.

 

Since I have to light some windows by a light, which sort of light would be the best one to use? (the one that uses the least resources and entities.).

Just a simple small light near the window? Or is there a form of a special light for such occasions? (I read about blend lights for example, but have no idea regarding resources used, and if it is any better than a normal light in any case, or if it is even useful in that circumstances)

And combined with that - is it somehow possible to bind lights to a func static? Or have they always added individually?

 

Thanks for the help

 

Sorry I think I gave you some misinfo. What I said was true, but it doesn't apply to those textures. I've checked now, and both are lit by the environment, neither is self-lit.

 

When I look at them in game, the frame one is indeed brighter. This is a test map with each applied to a simple patch and lit by one light which is over the player's head. Is this not what you see?

 

NB I'm using the latest pre-release assets so if you do see something different, it could be down to a fix since the last release.

 

Re how to light them nicely, I hope an experienced mapper will step in to give advice because I don't know much about that art. And there might be a better way to do it than using a separate light.

 

Any non-shadowcasting light will do for your purpose I think. You don't need shadows to make a window look lit, and shadows cost performance.

 

Don't use blend lights for this. They are not really a light, they are just a way to add an extra layer of colour to surfaces. They are sometimes more convenient than a decal, for example on a wobbly surface. They don't actually light the existing surface, or magnify or enhance its existing color.

 

You can't merge a light and an FS that you've created yourself in DR, but you can (if you wish) take a light and give it a "model" spawnarg that points to an existing model. Then you have a combined light and model entity. But I wouldn't worry about using too many entities in a first map, if that's what you are working on. You need a really big map to hit the entity limit, and even then there are less fiddly ways around it.

[DeusXIncognita]

Sorry I think I gave you some misinfo. What I said was true, but it doesn't apply to those textures. I've checked now, and both are lit by the environment, neither is self-lit.

 

When I look at them in game, the frame one is indeed brighter. This is a test map with each applied to a simple patch and lit by one light which is over the player's head. Is this not what you see?

 

[...]

No, interesting enough it isn't. Although, I looked at them while there is no light shining at them [apart from a bit of ambient lightning, with 0.06 0.06 0.12, if the location worked right] (as that is the environment I want to use them in).

The left window is made with "frame_ornate_wallsection_lit", the middle one with "diamond_pattern02_softlit" and the right one with "diamond_pattern02_barelylit"

(disregard the flying windows)

The windows are not on a patch in that map, it is part of a func static, and was a worldspawn before.

I just downloaded the newest version of Dark Radiant (I think, just downloaded it, its 2.01 from the 15 Nov 2014), and of The Dark Mod (2.02)

 

Thanks for the lightning tips, that helps not needing to find out (for now) how to use blend lights exactly, and I guess a no shadowcasting light will be resource economic enough for now (I like to always work optimizing from the beginning).

 

I think I am helped enough for now, many thanks.

I will light the windows that are too dark with a no shadow casting light, the other windows should be fine as they are.

[DeusXIncognita]

Back for another question:

 

I am building a house and try to texture the roof. Its not exact, but most things are no problem.

The sides of the low angled roof though, are killng me.

The sides of the roof are thin, and low angled, and I want it to use the texture of the roof tiles, lined up a bit like the upper roof (not the most realistic, but works.

 

Now I battle with surface inspector and texture tool to get it any way I need it, but I just can't get it right.

Is there a way I can texture the side of a worldspawn like I can texture a patch? With the patch it seemed so easy to get it right. I am not yet at the point where I just put a patch over it to be easy textured, So I wanted to ask if there is a way to do it without that, just texturing the world spawn.

 

In the texture inspector, I always have a thin rhombus, steeply angled, and when I try to line it up by drawing one Vertex after another, Darkradiant always moves the whole sides, so I can never set it up right.

[Springheel]

I'm sure there must be an easy way to do this that I'm just overlooking. I want to trigger a conversation when the player opens a door, but I only want it to trigger the _first_ time the player opens the door, not every time. What's the best way to accomplish that?

[Bikerdude]

Setup a "trigger_once" thats targeted by the door and that targets an "atdm:target_startconversation"

 

If you need to see hows its done, drop me a Pm as I have set some very similar to this up in the 1st Crucible campaign mission.

[Moonbo]

In case you need to have it so the player is the one opening the door (as opposed to just the first time the door is opened), you could set up a 'frob' stim/response on the door that triggers a trigger_relay with the "wait" spawnarg set to -1. The trigger_relay would target the convo entity.

[Melan]

I am returning to DarkRadiant after a long pause, and the light inspector seems to have changed radically. The saturation/luminosity values are all different (much higher) than I can remember. What gives?

[Melan]

Ahem.

[SteveL]

I haven't noticed, but that doesn't mean anything! A new version was released yesterday with a bunch of bug fixes so you could try that, and if it's not fixed then I'd ask in greebo's DR testing and feedback thread.

[lincore]

Hey guys, I have two questions.

 

I built a cellar with a groin vault ceiling made of patches (four per arch) but the textures are stretched and misaligned (see attachment). When I try to fix it (i.e. randomly click buttons) it only gets worse. Is it simply impossible to have good uv mapping with (curved) patches or am I doing something wrong?

 

Not related to that is it possible to insert/remove vertices from a brush / subdivide faces/edges? I think I did this accidentally but I could not find the key that did it.

 

Thanks!

 

 

PS:

 

I am returning to DarkRadiant after a long pause, and the light inspector seems to have changed radically. The saturation/luminosity values are all different (much higher) than I can remember. What gives?

 

I'm new to DR but could it be related to the GUI framework transition from Gtk to wxWidgets? I think Gtk has it's own color dialog while wxWidgets' is known for using native resources whenever possible. On windows I get the os' standard color dialog with byte ranges (0 - 255) for hue/saturation/value. All Gtk applications I use range from 0-360 for hue and 0-100 for everything else. I'm sure dark mod uses it's own color format internally.

Edited January 14, 2015 by lincore

[Moonbo]

Hey Lincore, try using the paste-shader natural command instead of just pasting the shader. That should stop that stretching you're seeing.

[SteveL]

Not related to that is it possible to insert/remove vertices from a brush / subdivide faces/edges? I think I did this accidentally but I could not find the key that did it.

No you can't do that to a brush except by clipping off part of a face. You can do it to a patch (shift S) but not a brush. Brushes are collections of planes and the edges and verts are defined by where the planes intersect, so there's no way to subdivide a flat face. Brushes are set up that way because it matches the way most game engines including tdm represent the 3d world internally, as a big structure of intersecting planes (technically, a bsp tree, in case you feel the urge to read up on it (not necessary)).

[demagogue]

Use the cut tool to cut a brush to get interval vertices. Hardly ideal but the best I can think of. To drop them, hmm, I don't know.

 

On a related note, what I'd like to see is a weld tool that merges 2 selected vertices, 1 to 2, so it'd make it easier to make brushes flush.

[lincore]

Thanks for your advice guys.

 

No you can't do that to a brush except by clipping off part of a face. You can do it to a patch (shift S) but not a brush. Brushes are collections of planes and the edges and verts are defined by where the planes intersect, so there's no way to subdivide a flat face. Brushes are set up that way because it matches the way most game engines including tdm represent the 3d world internally, as a big structure of intersecting planes (technically, a bsp tree, in case you feel the urge to read up on it (not necessary)).

I know about bsp trees but in my naivety I was hoping the editor/dmap could auto-magically handle this for me and just treat the two resulting brushes as one in the editor. But hey, I guess that's what the clipper is there for.

 

On a related note, what I'd like to see is a weld tool that merges 2 selected vertices, 1 to 2, so it'd make it easier to make brushes flush.

Yes, that'd be swell. Edited January 15, 2015 by lincore

[SteveL]

I didn't think of that. Yes you can just cut a brush in half to get an extra vert of course. If the resulting faces are still coplanar and have aligned textures and the verts and faces are within 0.1 units of one another, dmap will stitch them back together anyway.

[Morat]

Back for another question:

 

I am building a house and try to texture the roof. Its not exact, but most things are no problem.

The sides of the low angled roof though, are killng me.

The sides of the roof are thin, and low angled, and I want it to use the texture of the roof tiles, lined up a bit like the upper roof (not the most realistic, but works.

 

Now I battle with surface inspector and texture tool to get it any way I need it, but I just can't get it right.

Is there a way I can texture the side of a worldspawn like I can texture a patch? With the patch it seemed so easy to get it right. I am not yet at the point where I just put a patch over it to be easy textured, So I wanted to ask if there is a way to do it without that, just texturing the world spawn.

 

In the texture inspector, I always have a thin rhombus, steeply angled, and when I try to line it up by drawing one Vertex after another, Darkradiant always moves the whole sides, so I can never set it up right.

Moonbo started a very helpful tutorial thread for texturing slanted brushes. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/16730-tutorial-technique-to-texture-rotated-brushes/?hl=%2Btexture+%2Bdecal+%2Bpatch

 

In short, you simply can't texture a worldspawn brush the same way as a patch. Caulk the sides of your roof brush and add a decal patch to that surface. Then you can twist and shape the texture any which way you want, or even use the 'FIT' tool to make it perfect.

[VanishedOne]

Is there a way of getting stims to affect large entities without having a similarly large radius?

 

Let's say I've got a pool of water with its top surface about 400 x 400 units, and maybe twice that depth. It has a response to the Holy stim set on it.

 

Holy water arrows aren't affecting it. Some forum searching suggested that the stim needs to reach the water's origin in order to work; sure enough, if I give a holy hammer a Holy stim with a radius of 200 and drop it into the pool, the response triggers. But it would be nice if holy water arrows hitting the surface could work too.

 

 

Edit: for future reference: it turns out that part of the problem is that the Holy stim is on the result of a h.w.a. impact, which wasn't being generated because of this line in the arrow defs: "detonate_on_water" "0".

Edited January 26, 2015 by VanishedOne

[Obsttorte]

You could change the weapon scriptobject to let it apply the stim directly on the entity.

 

One another note, did you set up a response on the water entity?

[VanishedOne]

Yes. As I said, it responds to an object with a large enough stim radius.

 

I was hoping to avoid having to alter the way holy water arrows work, although in this map it might be okay (but then, I could just increase their stim radius).

[SteveL]

Can't you move the origin of your water brush to the top? Using the vertex editing mode in DR?

[VanishedOne]

The top surface of the water would still be 400 x 400, though.

[Moonbo]

This is probably a question for Springheel or Grayman, but is there a way for a def_head to hold a conversation (using the conversation system) without having a body? I'm basically looking for a head that I can have start and stop talking without a body attached to it. I tried using a func_animate but it doesn't really work well (the talk anim snaps back at each loop, and there's no way to sync the talking with the audio file).

[Springheel]

You could use a regular AI and just make all the body textures transparent, if you don't mind the head floating.