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Newbie DarkRadiant Questions


demagogue

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As AH said, DR cannot modify the pointfile. You have to save the map and dmap it again before any updates can be made. This might be useful: https://youtu.be/sz5u398AgP4?t=28m1s

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Some of the textures in darkradiant are transparent and don't seal a map from the void, the textures don't look transparent, but they act like they are a hole into the void.

so if the line in the point file goes through a wall then there is a chance that that wall is using one of the transparent textures.

Edited by stumpy
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I have created a curved wall with patches and covered it with other curved patches with brushwood:

 

post-37993-0-51881800-1524775949_thumb.jpg

 

Ingame it looks like that (in the DR shot I just removed the highes brushwood to show the wall behind it):

 

post-37993-0-22622100-1524776022_thumb.jpg

 

 

If I recall correctly then I already had this a few weeks back and replaced the "defective" patches simply with new ones, but the effect as in the picture above seems to reappear.

 

What can I do about this?

Edited by JackFarmer
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  • 2 weeks later...

Have you tried "surface inspektor" (S)? "Modify texture" "natural".

Or do another one but before folding - rotate it (patches sometimes respond differently to warping if you choose different end).

Edited by ERH+

S2wtMNl.gif

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I'm not familiar with this particular problem. My first instinct would be to convert it to func_static and see if it still happens. If so, try exporting it as a model instead. If neither of those help, I can look at it if you want to send me a map file.

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The scaling of the textures is wrong. If have also encountered this problem while working with patches. I would first try to copy and paste shaders (select the face of the wall bordering on the patch with ctrl+shift+lmb and use Edit-> Copy Shader, then select yout patch and use Edit -> Paste Shader). If this does not work, try to divide the texture size by the number of segments of your patch; sometimes DR will use the size selected for your texture on each part of the patch instead of the whole patch. The foliage patches have the same problem: They are stretched along the z-axis, so you need to scale them down.

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Can someone tell me why this light looks wonky?

post-2153-0-65950500-1525612718_thumb.jpg

 

The objects below seem to be illuminated correctly, but why the strange shadow effect on the ceiling?

 

The light is a prefab: lights\hanging_oillamp_lightdown. The light has a texture which is just a soft disc, so I can't see why the shadow is wrong. Changing the texture doesn't eliminate the shadow. The default is "lights/biground_candleflicker_shadow", which looks like the explanation, but changing it to "lights/biground_candleflicker" makes no difference.

Edited by R Soul
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It's a typo in material definition:

8I75WGb.png

 

Its neighbour planks_worn_grey is unaffected.

For now, you can just make a separate material for yourself linking to the same textures, or just hope it can get patched before your FM release. Not sure if a bugtracker entry is required for this kind of stuff.

More generally, wrong shading like this tells you something is wrong either with the model/patch normals, or with the material's normal map.

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Two things. 1, Don't you think this thread should be stickied? I think so.

 

2. I was just playing through my mission, Briarwood Manor, and a guard went on full alert a floor below me. I wasn't seen, and there was

no way he could hear me, as I had a least 3 visportals between him and me. I was trying to ghost it, but this alert spoiled it, and it's clearly

a bug in the level. I can't see how to fix this aside from visportalling the ceiling of the 1st floor (2nd to Americans).

I have an eclectic YouTube channel making videos on a variety of games. Come and have look here:

https://www.youtube.com/c/NeonsStyleHD

 

Dark Mod Missions: Briarwood Manor - available here or in game

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18980-fan-mission-briarwood-manor-by-neonsstyle-first-mission-6082017-update-16/

 

 

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I was just playing through my mission, Briarwood Manor, and a guard went on full alert a floor below me. I wasn't seen, and there was no way he could hear me, as I had a least 3 visportals between him and me.

Sounds like a leak between rooms on the two floors. Check the brushes sealing the upper from the lower floor.

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Mappers should always test for internal leaks. They won't cause a dmap problem, but they can mess with the way sound travels in your mission.

 

I demonstrate how to do that in this video:

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A quick and dirty way of searching for internal leaks is to know where all your visportals are, and show them in the game using

 

> r_showportals 1

 

on the command line.

 

So if you're on the second floor, and you look down and see visportals on the lower floor that you don't expect to see, you have an internal leak.

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In the same way, it may kill a nearby portal also, as in the showportal function doesn't give it an outline.

 

The leak will make the spaces on both sides into one leaf, so if there are any inner portals i.e., directly between both spaces, those get killed and the outer ones become the live portals. But if there are multiple portals between the spaces, then it's just adding the new portals and will look like grayman says.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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Thanks guys, will check that out

I have an eclectic YouTube channel making videos on a variety of games. Come and have look here:

https://www.youtube.com/c/NeonsStyleHD

 

Dark Mod Missions: Briarwood Manor - available here or in game

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18980-fan-mission-briarwood-manor-by-neonsstyle-first-mission-6082017-update-16/

 

 

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Is it possible to preview AI heads inside your map in the editor? (I.e. as a complete model with head)

Good question.

 

I've noticed the headless AI and wondered this also but never really considered it much.

 

I wonder if the head materials are missing qer_editorimage data?

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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The heads, like many other things, are def_attached. AFAIK you cannot preview them in DR.

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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You could use the zombie for scale if you like...he's the same size as the other humanoids but his head is part of the model.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm getting the hang of DR and starting to think about how to go about making my map. It's going to be a city FM and one of my aims is to let players enter a lot of the buildings. I know that will take a lot of work but my plan is to do a number of missions in the same area and build it out piece by piece.

 

I've noticed that a lot of the modular building prefabs are either interior or exterior. I think it'd save me a lot of time to make a set that works both ways.

 

So a couple of questions:

 

Is there a reason this kinda set doesn't already exist? Some massive performance hit? If there is, is there a way I need to approach it to avoid that? Building visportals into my prefabs would help, right? I was thinking I could put one with every door so when I import it it's already there to resize, but I figure I could do more.

 

Second, I'm going to have a lot of timber frame buildings and I know there's great textures for them. I'll definitely use them for areas that players can see but can't go. Anything I'm going to make out of prefabs though I want to have more depth.

 

At first I was messing around just texturing brushes but those were really blocky. (Of course.) So then I did the beveled edges and that looked like what I was going for. Rotating beams I made like that didn't work out so well though. Now I've started using the square cylinder patches and those are working well.

 

I know patches don't seal the void and I'm guessing sound goes through them too. (I've seen that light does anyway.) I've read about exporting .lwo from DR and it sounds like that'd be a solution? The other option I was thinking was just making the brushes with plaster fully connect under the timber patches.

 

The thing I'm worried about with exporting .lwo is the sheer number of different sizes of beams I'll use. Also, I don't entirely understand the material definitions that would let me change between all the different wood textures. It sounds like I could use one across the board which would be nice. Otherwise it would be a lot of writing text files.

 

I've read discussions about exporting brushes and whatnot as models before packaging your mission. Is this how I should go about doing it?

 

Anyway, I have more questions but those are the main ones at the moment. I figure getting advice before I start diving in is going to save me time.

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Models do neither seal off light (but they cast shadows, of course) nor sound, same goes for patches and anything using transparent textures iirc. When building a mission mainly with models, you would use caulk brushes to seal the seperate areas of your map. Exporting stuff made from brushes/patches as models and using those instead makes sense if you are going to use it several times in your mission. This will reduce loading times and could potentially also improve performance. Additionaly this gives you the option to reuse them later on (instead of having to rebuild the same generic pieces over and over again).

 

 


Also, I don't entirely understand the material definitions that would let me change between all the different wood textures. It sounds like I could use one across the board which would be nice.

It is not clear to me what you mean exactly. If you are refering to exchanging one material with another, this is done via skin files. Here is a short info on how materials and skins are build up.

 

Materials:

textures/...      // the name of the material
{
    metal  // the type of surface, needed for the proper sound to be played upon impact and for tools/projectiles that behave differently depending on the surface type
    diffusemap  // the visible texture
    bumpmap  // the normalmap, used to give the surface more plasticity
    specularmap // used for reflections
    if (parm11 > 0) // anything that goes inhere is used for texture hilighting upon frob
    {
    ...
    }
}

Skins:

skin skinname // name of the skin
{
    model models/...  // optional: for those models specified here the skin will show up under "matching skins"
    textures/...    textures/...  // the first one will get replaced by the second one
}

Hope that helps.

 

One note: Starting with a city street type of mission is probably not the best choice for a first fm. It is pretty likely you will run into performance issues if you have no experience or knowledge on how the engine exactly works or how it responses to certain setups. If you want to do this anyway I would advice keeping an eye on performance during your build. In difference to what most people think performance is not something that is only worked on in the polishing face at the end of the mission build process, although this face is used to boost performance here and there, too. If something is causing major issues in that regard in your mission, you will have a much easier time fixing it if you are still in an early state of your mission build process.

  • Like 1

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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Is there a reason this kinda set doesn't already exist? Some massive performance hit? If there is, is there a way I need to approach it to avoid that? Building visportals into my prefabs would help, right? I was thinking I could put one with every door so when I import it it's already there to resize, but I figure I could do more.

The main reason I didn't combine them is for flexibility. There are lots of different ways to combine them, and locking them in to a single model removes those choices. It also doesn't really gain you much.

 

You can't add visportals to a model file--they have to be brushwork. But you can 'group' visportals into existing modules so that you can copy/paste them easily around your map.

 

 

I know patches don't seal the void and I'm guessing sound goes through them too. (I've seen that light does anyway.)

Yes, only brushwork seals against the void.

 

The thing I'm worried about with exporting .lwo is the sheer number of different sizes of beams I'll use. Also, I don't entirely understand the material definitions that would let me change between all the different wood textures. It sounds like I could use one across the board which would be nice. Otherwise it would be a lot of writing text files.

There's no real benefit to exporting them as .lwo files unless you have a modeling app you want to use on them. Otherwise leaving them as func_statics is fine. Then you don't have to worry about easily changing textures.

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