Newbie DarkRadiant Questions

[demagogue]

Quick question, is there a way to convert textures (with normal maps, specular or whatever else Hammer uses, etc) from HL2 to id4?
They're awesome for my needs & CC licensed, but I'm looking at .vmt and .vtf files and want to know if I can still use them, and what I need to do to convert them. Google isn't easily answering my question.

Edit: Found this application: http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?p=40 so I'll test it tonight. It converts jpgs and tgas to vtfs, but I'll have to find out how well it goes in the other direction. And I'll still have to translate the material file probably myself. But I'm curious if anyone already knows what's what & can explain a simple pipeline to getting them in TDM.

Edit2. For the record this application does convert them to tgas, and the TDM wiki tells me the rest, so we're in business.

 

Edit3. I remember a decade ago seeing if there were any good free texture packs out there for different purposes, and there just weren't that many, and what there was wasn't very good. It's a different story now! There are tons of CC texture packs out there, and a lot of them are really quality stuff. I'm now more worried about new textures aesthetically fitting together than finding them at all.

[teh_saccade]

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Edited July 17, 2016 by teh_saccade

[Goldwell]

Does anyone know why when selecting a brush in the 3d preview in darkradiant it has a slight offset shadow sort of to it.. it looks like a transparent version of the brush just faintly visible and about half a doom unit away from the actual brush itself.

 

I tried looking through all of the settings and keyboard preferences as I assume I must have accidentally turned it on but couldn't find it anywhere.

 

edit: you can see it here to the right of the white line, you may have to zoom in to notice it but i've spotted it a lot recently

 

Edited February 14, 2016 by Goldwell

[SteveL]

Does anyone know why when selecting a brush in the 3d preview in darkradiant it has a slight offset shadow sort of to it.. it looks like a transparent version of the brush just faintly visible and about half a doom unit away from the actual brush itself.

I can't see in in the picture, not even zoomed in. Are you seeing a line parallel to the white line?

[Goldwell]

I can't see in in the picture, not even zoomed in. Are you seeing a line parallel to the white line?

 

I am yes, but if you're not seeing it then maybe my monitor is dying as it is quite old. I thought maybe I accidentally turned on a selection feature in DR that highlighted the brush thicker or something similar. I swear there was an option for that regardless to shadow the brush slightly but perhaps I am just truly going insane

Edited February 15, 2016 by Goldwell

[Nico A.]

I have z-fighting with normal decal textures... is this normal? All I do is create a decal patch from the menu, then select it and choose a texture from darkmod --> decals.

The z-fighting is ingame, in Dark Radiant it looks fine.

 

edit: It makes a difference what texture I use. dirt_001_crumb_vthin doesn't work (I didn't test the other dirt_001's)

Edited February 24, 2016 by Nico A.

[VanishedOne]

Try moving the patch 0.125 units away from the surface.

 

You could try making a version of the material with DECAL_MACRO - dirt_001_crumb_vthin doesn't have it or any of the keywords it implies - but moving the patch in DR usually looks okay in the game.

 

Edit: it looks as though there may be a reason why DECAL_MACRO isn't used already. I don't know whether these problems still exist:

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/7577-decals-and-blending-problems/?p=148984

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/11825-decal-issue/?p=234662

Edited February 25, 2016 by VanishedOne

[Nico A.]

Try moving the patch 0.125 units away from the surface.

Okay, I guess I will keep doing it that way then. Thanks!

[SteveL]

Moving the patch forward is good, if a pain.

 

DECAL_MACRO is used in some decals but not all. It's a bit of gpu magic that is supposed to move the decal slightly towards the player when it gets drawn, just enough to stop z-fighting. But it's problematic due to a bug (or a badly implemented feature or something) in Doom3 that got carried forward into TDM. The engine default settings move the decal 600 times the minimum distance. So when you back off from a decal_macro-ed surface you see window grime gradually crawl over the frame and wall dirt move forward to cover notices on the wall.

 

We're deploying new defaults in 2.04 but it's impossible to find a set of numbers that works for everyone in every spot in every map. We'll probably tweak them again during the beta.

 

If you're just doing a few decals of a particular type, it's probably easier to move them forward manually. If you're going to use a non-macro decal a lot, you can make your own material def using DECAL_MACRO like VanishedOne said.

[Spooks]

What are lights that skip Specular/Diffuse supposed to look like, compared to regular ones? I'm only asking this dumb question because, on my end, ticking those check boxes appears to do nothing in-game. With or without lighting textures, shadows on/off, dmapping, reloading the engine, it looks exactly the same. Can someone enlighten me, pun very much intended?

Edited February 29, 2016 by Spooks

[demagogue]

Specular means the way light shines off shiny bits like polished metal, wood, or glass. You're only going to really notice it for those few kinds of textures. So only lights around them really need it turned on. But it looks really realistic and great for those few textures.

 

Diffuse is kind of the opposite, the way light scatters and softens. In daylight it can make a scene more realistic, but it's hard to even notice in dark lighting like TDM has, so you're not losing much there nixing it unless you have daylight amounts of light.

[Springheel]

Isn't diffuse the actual colour of the texture? If you turn that off you'll have black textures with bumps and shine.

[Spooks]

Well here is what I'm seeing and why I feel confused. Just to be certain, I cloned a texture/material I know has a specular (boards/worn_01) and inverted the spec then drew on it, so it's really obvious. There's two slim light volumes in this screenshot, left is "nospecular 1" and right is "nospecular 0"

 

 

Both look exactly the same and as you can clearly see, the spec is just as shiny on both. I'm puzzled.

[teh_saccade]

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Edited July 17, 2016 by teh_saccade

[teh_saccade]

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Edited July 17, 2016 by teh_saccade

[teh_saccade]

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Edited July 17, 2016 by teh_saccade

[VanishedOne]

That might be possible with a custom script, similar to the bow zoom.

[stumpy]

you could do a bank of monitors but you would have to fake some of the pictures being shown. you can use guis pictures and loop through a bunch of near identical pictures causing them to loop like an animation. you could have one camera sending its video to one guis as the main view and the other screens faked but looking like a current view if the player can't see them at the same time as viewing the bank of monitors.

[Spooks]

Even though the wood is very reflective, its specular map doesn't appear to contain any information - it's probably a blank, light-grey square that hasn't been touched since default generation.

I would open it up and look at it in a graphics editor.

You missed the part where I said I specifically edited the specular texture to make it appear brighter for purposes of illustration. The issue isn't the textures but the fact that the light's "skip specular" argument does nothing and that's either to blame on the light or how the materials are defined.

 

Frankly, if anyone has the time to reproduce this I'd be glad because on my end it looks like a bug. If you want, you can have my setup and remake the lights and recompile if you want - here's a link.

 

As I understand it something like "skip specular" means not bothering to draw the spec map, equivalent to a pitch black texture. See attachment, this is how it should look (I've made the texture black) and that's what I want to get by checking "skip specular" but as you can see by my previous picture it doesn't work.

Edited March 1, 2016 by Spooks

[VanishedOne]

Does the problem persist if 'enhanced ambient' is off? http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Light_Properties#Ambient_Light implies it adds only bumpmapping, not specularity, but http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Virtual_Ambient_Light_Textures does show a specular map being passed to ambientEnvironment.vfp, so I just wondered...

[Spooks]

Well I made sure not to have any other lights (incl the ambient_world) shining on the boards just so no extra lights can affect them. Turning Ambient Rendering off doesn't seem to change it though, and while toggling the Interaction Shader makes the specular render in a simpler way it still doesn't change the end result.

 

e: I don't know if this bears any significance but for what it's worth, this is on DR 2.0.3 x64. I have no recollection whether this is how it was on the old version of DR.

Edited March 1, 2016 by Spooks

[Obsttorte]

On a different note, is it possible to change a player's FOV using the stim-response thing?

 

eg, drinks potion, FOV is set to 140-160, player wobbles over there, FOV set to previous value.

 

That might be possible with a custom script, similar to the bow zoom.

It is. Look at the script for the spyglass to see how it is done.

[teh_saccade]

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Edited July 17, 2016 by teh_saccade

[Aosys]

Evenin' folks, having a bit of an issue with the "door_128x64x2_withhandles_oak.pfb". It works fine as a door, but I visportal and it a) doesn't register as a double door and doesn't close the visportal when the doors are closed. Looking at all the entity properties, I see nothing wrong, and I know the visportal is set up correctly. Anyone know what might be causing this?

 

[Obsttorte]

From what I see in the picture I would say the visportal isn't touching the door. It looks like it's a bit too much in the front.