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Newbie DarkRadiant Questions


demagogue

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No.

You meant a multi-material mesh is treated as separate meshes. But the same sentence can be taken to mean that the engine then combines these separate meshes between different objects based on material (like with worldspawn), which isn't true.

Some engines do this kind of batching automatically (treat multiple meshes as if it was one combined mesh) or offer manual tools. As far as I know, in TDM only SEED does something similar (and I have no experience with it).

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Rephrased that sentence to avoid confusion.

 

Not sure about batching, but Unreal uses instancing, so one mesh is stored once in the memory, and all its clones and rotation and scaling is treated as transformation of that one mesh.

 

TDM can use SEED and Watch brethren spawnarg to combine the clones of a model into one.

Edited by Judith
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Instancing is nothing natively supported by idTech4 iirc, but I barely remember discussions about adding that. Not sure about the progress, though.

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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Instancing is nothing natively supported by idTech4 iirc, but I barely remember discussions about adding that. Not sure about the progress, though.

 

Wow. So if you place multiple entities or models (even static ones) with the same mesh, the engine doesn't know how to create only one copy in the GPU? That's an essential performance improvement, wouldn't have expected an engine made after 2005 not to have it... really hope the next TDM version will offer support for this. I assume at least stuff like VBO is supported natively.

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As mentioned, the SEED system has instancing, at least as I recall the way Tels was explaining it (I didn't look at the code myself). There's the one entity that gets redrawn.

 

(This is an aside, but I had a dream not long ago where I saw a castle with like 5 or however many red flags waving in the wind, and I suddenly noticed all five of them were waving exactly the same way, and in my dream I literally said something like "Oh holy crap! Is that instancing? Is my brain copying the same waving red flag several times to save on processing power?" It was a weird and funny moment.)

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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SEED's "instancing" is a sort of software instancing. It's more efficient than the current render pipeline but not as efficient as "hardware instancing".

True "hardware instancing" has not yet been implemented but is on the wish list.

 

Demo that sorta demonstrates the difference (though there are even more shades of gray there with techniques that gradually go from all software to all hardware):

 

http://www.humus.name/index.php?page=3D&ID=52

 

Edit:

 

I should qualify that the demo about is for D3D. OpenGL does a much better job of addressing model loading and rendering

and doesn't need as many workarounds to reduce API overhead so most of those techniques at the bottom of the list next

to software instancing would not be necessary in OpenGL.

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

 

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Instancing is only really beneficial when the same models are used several times in a scene, which is especially the case when building modular (like its done in many modern games). As many mission authors tend to build missions the "traditional" way, so mainly out of brushes and patches, it wouldn't make a big difference here. Even turning stuff into func_static wouldn't help here, as each func_static created from brushes and patches has its own model, even if it is a copy of another func_static.

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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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Instancing is only really beneficial when the same models are used several times in a scene, which is especially the case when building modular (like its done in many modern games). As many mission authors tend to build missions the "traditional" way, so mainly out of brushes and patches, it wouldn't make a big difference here.

There seems to be a trend towards heavy use of modules in TDM too. There are still recent missions that seem to not use multiple instances of the same geometric object in the same scene, but a lot do.

There also is a lot of geometry duplication coming from furniture and other decorations in the old-school brusch- and patch-based missions. I don't know, whether duplication is done using prefabs, func statics or models. But i would expect most furniture and decorations to be models and future authors might explicitly use models for duplicated world geometry too - if they know it to be beneficial for performance.

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if they know it to be beneficial for performance.

That's exactly the point :)

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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That's exactly the point :)

Well, there is no point in stating, that something, that currently is not true, is not known by mappers.

It could get stated in the wiki and tutorials as soon as it would work though.

 

A lot of the stock decorations are probably models already - so mappers use a lot of models anyway. And stock decorations get repeated a lot. I often see tables and shelves full of stuff that is the same as seen in other missions. So even without mapper knowledge there would be a benefit. With mapper knowledge the benefit would just be higher.

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True.

 

Hardware instancing is mostly good for particles and vegetation.

 

Given how well Arcturus's animated grass demo works, I wonder how crazy we could go if we had more oomph in that department.

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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Given how well Arcturus's animated grass demo works, I wonder how crazy we could go if we had more oomph in that department.

 

While some people are going crazy, have we any assurance that the 2.07 bug list is being addressed?

 

Players would probably want to see more stable gameplay than the latest graphics bells and whistles that we might not even need.

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This is more of a long term idea, yes.

 

I had broached in the internal forums as a possible way to fix flickering particles but it seems that was a red herring anyway

since I conflated the particle effects with what the fog was doing.

 

We should have support for hardware instancing "eventually" for better performance with particles (at least) but it's not on the immediate roadmap.

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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Connect your upper path_corner to your lower path_corner and delete everything else.

 

The code automatically takes care of the stuff youre deleting

 

Hello grayman,

 

Sorry for bothering you once again. In the meantime I arranged the parts as per you recommendation:

post-37993-0-69358100-1528997104_thumb.jpg

 

...but still it is not working.

 

Do I have to place the AAS entity (in red square) "floating" in the basement or does it have to be in contact with the brushes forming the basement plate or is there something else do consider?

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It appears that moss (from a moss arrow) has some height? I have a "tunnel" that is 40 units tall. The player can crouch down and go through it. But if I shoot a moss arrow into it, I'm blocked. It looks like I have to raise the roof to about 48 units in order to crawl through, if there's moss. Is this intentional? If so, that's pretty cool.

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It appears that moss (from a moss arrow) has some height? I have a "tunnel" that is 40 units tall. The player can crouch down and go through it. But if I shoot a moss arrow into it, I'm blocked. It looks like I have to raise the roof to about 48 units in order to crawl through, if there's moss. Is this intentional? If so, that's pretty cool.

 

I guess it's intentional.

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I have an office slave who is sitting at a table and writing in a book.

 

I added this as - path anim (s_writing1) -->path anim (s_writing1)--> etc...

 

 

Question #1:

 

It looks rather peculiar because he obviously writes with his fingers.

 

Can I attach a feather to the animation or does that not work?

post-37993-0-42799300-1529164274_thumb.jpg

 

Question #2:

 

The writing animations lasts ca. 2 or 3 seconds, then there is a short interruption, then the writing anim starts again. Is it possible to increase the "writing" time?

 

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When I made the animation I created a premade quill that you can def attach to the AI's right hand which triggers writing behaviour.

 

It's atdm:moveable_quill_prop

 

It replaces regular sitting animations with writing ones, and unbinds the quill if the AI is alerted. This page doesn't list that prop, but goes over how to do it in general: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Attaching_Props_to_AI#List_of_Attachable_Objects

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So, I'm currently unable to clone or create new particles in DR; every time I try to do so I get an unhandled exception error. Does anyone know what's going on? It used to work just fine in DR 2.2.1, I've still got custom particles saved.

 

[Edit] The console readout I'm getting is:

Unhandled Exception: create_directories(p): invalid argument: operation not permitted

Is this an issue with the folder hierarchy? I can still see the old custom particles just fine in DR.

Edited by Aosys
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Maybe the read/write protection on that folder is enabled.

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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