Newbie DarkRadiant Questions

[Springheel]

Thanks. I have no way to make the visportal square, as it would be way to large

 

 

I shouldn't have said square...rectangular is also fine.

[Springheel]

Now this next bit is interesting... split portals do work independently after all, with or without a func portal.

 

 

Shouldn't this mean that visportals will become even more powerful in performance terms? Splitting big visportals into halves seems like it would greatly increase the ability to close portals behind them. Or am I missing something?

[grayman]

Thanks. I have no way to make the visportal square, ...

 

 

He probably meant rectangular, which works fine.

[demagogue]

Yeah, I was thinking this might be good in thieves highway cases. I imagine you can use split and bend portals to cut roads vertically and roof areas horizontally together, but they could still work independently, either opening the street or the roof area without the other, if you designed it properly. It's just an intuition I had. I haven't drawn it out on paper yet or anything to work it out or confirm it.

[DeusXIncognita]

 

He probably meant rectangular, which works fine.

 

I shouldn't have said square...rectangular is also fine.

I am not native english speaking, so just to have the same understanding:

Square is all sides the same length right?

But I understood rectangular the first time (which is 4 90° angles, right?), but that has the problem.

But all my other visportals so far are rectangular, and the ones in there are not so necessary performance wise I hope, and mainly help for approximate sound propagation, instead of the sounds going straight through the roof on each floor. (I now made the shape a simple as possible.)

Next time I try to build better so rectangular is possible easy.

[demagogue]

Re: visportal shapes, I had a triangle shaped visportal, and I never had any trouble with it. It turned off and on fine for me. It's useful when you want a street visportal to cover a slanted roof, and still be able to walk around inside the roof space.

 

Granted, if it were trouble, I'd redo the shape and if it were really not cooperating then I'd think about using a rectangular shape. But I don't think it's written in stone you have to.

[Sotha]

@DeusX,

I did an octagnal tower in Glenham Tower mission. It uses rectangular visportals just fine.

 

You could examine my .map file how it was put together. Also pay attention to the wall thickness. I had to use thicker walls for the slanted parts or sound would leak through.

 

@dema,

Sure, it is not written in stone, but it is usually wise to use the simplest of ways in mapping. The end result looks the same, but simple implementation is less likely to break and easier to fix.

 

Build boxy worldspawn sealing geometry with boxy visportals and fill it with func_static detail pieces to form a space of any shape. Remeber to monsterclip, because AI does not "see" func_statics.

 

The above paragraph is how I would distill my years of mapping experience into a single piece of technical advice.

[Springheel]

Build boxy worldspawn sealing geometry with boxy visportals and fill it with func_static detail pieces to form a space of any shape. Remeber to monsterclip, because AI does not "see" func_statics.

 

 

I'm now building so that about 90% of the map is func_statics and models. None of the sealing worldspawn is actually visible to players. It's either caulk brushes or brushes hidden behind func_static facades. It's very freeing, and makes finding internal leaks a breeze.

[DeusXIncognita]

@DeusX,

I did an octagnal tower in Glenham Tower mission. It uses rectangular visportals just fine.

 

You could examine my .map file how it was put together. Also pay attention to the wall thickness. I had to use thicker walls for the slanted parts or sound would leak through.

Thanks, I did look into it.

Good way for a larger tower, mine is probably a bit too small to seal the stairs away from the rest of the tower, with a way up and doors sealing that, although I might do that if problem comes up.

 

Saw the walls too, but since my standard walls for this tower are 4 times the ones of the glenham tower (32 vs 8) I don't think the slanted parts will be a problem. Good to know though.

Build boxy worldspawn sealing geometry with boxy visportals and fill it with func_static detail pieces to form a space of any shape. Remeber to monsterclip, because AI does not "see" func_statics.

 

The above paragraph is how I would distill my years of mapping experience into a single piece of technical advice.

I noticed that you used octagonal shapes (or better half ocatagonal) of worldspawns (floors) in the glenham tower, did any problems come with that? (Because I haven't noticed any when playing it)

[Sotha]

 

I noticed that you used octagonal shapes (or better half ocatagonal) of worldspawns (floors) in the glenham tower, did any problems come with that? (Because I haven't noticed any when playing it)

 

Yeah. Glenham was made before I learned the simple way to build. Complex sealing geometry DOES work and it has its places. But usually it is much easier, faster, efficient and more fun to just make boxy stuff and make the irregularities with func_statics.

 

See below:

I've highlighted the sealing worldspawn geometry. They are just boxes which contain func_static module models that I've mashed around to make the room. Note that the sealing geometry is boxy, but I'm not using all space in there, I just made the real room smaller and irregular. In the left smaller room the model even penetrates into the worldspawn but all is well as long as the origin is withing the geometry. In the right hand side room, I've added circular 'glue' modules so that the slanted wall module is not surrounded by ugly gaps.

 

The actual workflow works like this:

Mash model modules into the void. Arrange them so that they form the floorplan. Here you can experiment and move the pieces around. They are just models you can move easily. Once you are satisfied how the floorplan looks, select the model. Unselect the model. Drawn a brush around one room. Click "create room" button in DR. The room gets surrounded by worldspawn brushes to form a room. Cut doorways with the clipper. Repeat with each room. Add door + visportal into one doorway. Clone the door + visportal into all the doorways. Monsterclip after furnishing and detailing.

 

This build style is incredibly fast as soon as you have the modules done. Also it lets you experiment with the layout to see what works and what doesn't. I love it!

[ERH+]

After large scale change in outer walls of my map, dmaping is ongoing now for over 1.5 hour. Dark mod is occupying 1,700 K bytes and rising 2 Mb/ minute. Large open areas are unwelcome or what?

Edited April 24, 2015 by ERH+

[SteveL]

Dmapping complexity and time taken grows exponentially with the amount of stuff you have in a single visleaf or single func static. If you have any fs with more than about 200 parts, or any huge outdoor visleafs containing loads of geometry, then try (1) splitting the monster fs into several, or (2) adding some big VPs cutting across your huge outdoor area. Even if they never close that doesn't matter, as long as they seal against worldspawn. They'll speed up dmapping.

[Springheel]

Dmapping for 1.5 hrs? Really? I've never had it take more than ten.

[SteveL]

Dmapping for 1.5 hrs? Really? I've never had it take more than ten.

 

I've exceeded that time twice, but not under normal conditions. Once was dmapping NHAT#1 when I accidentally used my debugging build instead of a release build (it runs slower), and the second time was when I was deliberately experimenting with inlining func static models into worldspawn geometry, which is where I discovered the advice I gave above. Sectioning the room with some visportals wall to wall so that I had no more than about 20k worldspawn tris per visportal cured the problem. It's one of those every-tri-in-a-visleaf-checks-itself-against-every-other-tri-in-the-visleaf problems, so splitting an area into smaller visleafs helps enormously, even if those VPs don't do anything in game.

[SteveL]

@ERH+: Did it help? If not I'll take a look if you PM me the map. We plan to speed up dmapping in 2.04 anyway by cutting out most of the tracking/console spam. That will stop it being affected by vsync, and even with vsync off it cuts dmapping times by 30% on my system. If you have a problem case, it could point to more fixes.

[ERH+]

No I had to cut out this area. I will experiment with this and will give you a sign if encounter problem again.

[Goldwell]

Is there a way to set which color the alphatest makes transparent in the materials file?

 

I find if the background of the custom texture is black or transparent it will work but if the background is white, the white stays visible ingame.

 

I have the following for my poster in the materials file

textures/posters/BearandBelcher
{
	noshadows
	qer_editorimage  textures/posters/BearAndBelcher
	diffusemap       textures/posters/BearAndBelcher
   	{
		blend diffusemap	
		map      textures/posters/BearAndBelcher
		alphatest 0.5
	}
}

Edited April 29, 2015 by Goldwell

[Springheel]

It shouldn't matter what colour the background is (except that black tends to look better around the edges if a bit of colour gets picked up). How are you making the transparency in the original image ?

[Goldwell]

It shouldn't matter what colour the background is (except that black tends to look better around the edges if a bit of colour gets picked up). How are you making the transparency in the original image ?

 

I find a lot of them have this weird white outline on them. A friend of mine made it for me and when he asked what background I just said white because I thought TDM would make that transparent just by adding in the alphatest but I was wrong and found out that the background needs to be purely transparent to work.

 

So I opened the picture up in gimp and added a transparent layer and then using a color picker removed the white background but there still seems to be a line around it in game

 

http://i.imgur.com/n2K2caK.jpg

Edited April 29, 2015 by Goldwell

[demagogue]

I picked pinkish-purple, which was a bad idea in retrospect.

[Springheel]

At the edges, the transparency blends with the pixels of the opaque object. If you have an alpha test of .5, then any pixel that is more than 50% transparent shows as transparent, and anything <50% is fully opaque. TDM then fills in the rest of the transparency (up to 49%) with whatever colour is in the background. So the edge pixels can be up to 49% white if you have a white background.

 

The solution is to either put black in the background, or bump up the alphatest value, or both.

[Goldwell]

At the edges, the transparency blends with the pixels of the opaque object. If you have an alpha test of .5, then any pixel that is more than 50% transparent shows as transparent, and anything <50% is fully opaque. TDM then fills in the rest of the transparency (up to 49%) with whatever colour is in the background. So the edge pixels can be up to 49% white if you have a white background.

 

The solution is to either put black in the background, or bump up the alphatest value, or both.

 

You're not just a pretty face are ya?

 

Thanks man that worked perfectly, now the poster is lookin great

 

[Goldwell]

There's one lute-playing animation built in but that's the only musician animation I've seen. If you find any others or a technique for importing some from a free source, that would be very cool. I have a tavern in my map and some nice medieval fiddle music but my visible musician is still a lute player, with a star next to him on my to-do list in case I ever find out how to get a fiddle animation into the map.

 

 

I think I just set it so you def attach the lute and the animations change automatically.

 

This was a question I asked about a year ago but have only now just gotten around to implementing the scene however attaching the lute using def_attach does nothing other than just hang on the person. I have tried all of the unarmed AIs with no luck and i've tried multiple def_attachs such as def_attach and def_attach1 and def_attach2 etc etc but also it seems to do nothing so does anyone have a working AI character in game that plays the lute?

[SteveL]

Must admit I've not tried it, but have you tried making your AI sit? The lute overrides the idle_sit anim.

[Goldwell]

Must admit I've not tried it, but have you tried making your AI sit? The lute overrides the idle_sit anim.

 

Problem solved, thank you very much!