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Newbie DarkRadiant Questions


demagogue

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Hi I followed the tutorial video by @SpringheelLesson 3, but when I do the dmap step, I get the following error:

ERROR: Entity 19 has surfaces, but no name key

What am I doing wrong?

 

Edit: So I gave Entity 19 name World (which I thought it already had..)

image.png.79b783d5fb43e1727cb09e28a164b8d7.png

But now I get an error stating that the map file is empty.😕

Edited by datiswous
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The name "world" is reserved for worldspawn! You don't have to and shouldn't name worldspawn. Delete the name spawnarg you have added.

Note furthermore that spawnargs applied on one worldspawn brush or patch applies to all of them, as all of them are handled as one entity (with the name world).

Why do you want to give it a name, btw.? 🤔

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10 hours ago, Obsttorte said:

Why do you want to give it a name, btw.?

ERROR: Entity 19 has surfaces, but no name key

So I gave it a name since this is Entity 19.

I just try to get through these unhelpful errors and do a successful dmap. From there I can continue building.

Edited by datiswous
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@datiswous The weird thing is that worldspawn should always be entity 0, I can only guess how you got entity 19 to be worldspawn as well. I would try to delete&recreate entity 19 or convert it to func_static - the aim is to have only a single worldspawn entity in your map: entity 0.

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4 hours ago, Dragofer said:

@datiswous The weird thing is that worldspawn should always be entity 0, I can only guess how you got entity 19 to be worldspawn as well. I would try to delete&recreate entity 19 or convert it to func_static - the aim is to have only a single worldspawn entity in your map: entity 0.

So remade worldspawn and now it is entity 0.

So I got it working now. Right before that though I had forgotten something and got a leak. Then in the video it is advised  to do go to menu File and click on Pointfile. If I do that I get this error:

Error!

Could not open pointfile: ~/darkmod/fms/newmiss/maps/man1.lin

Do I have to add this file manually from some place?

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Do you have any .lin file in that directory? If so, rename it to man1.lin and load it. If not, try dmapping again in Darkmod.

(You'll need the renaming trick later anyway when you get up to portals and they start dropping, so it's probably a good idea to become familiar with the process.)

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4 hours ago, thebigh said:

Do you have any .lin file in that directory? If so, rename it to man1.lin and load it. If not, try dmapping again in Darkmod.

No I don't have a lin file in that folder.

Edit: I made a copy of the map, made a leak and done a dmap on that map. Then I got a .lin file. So I learned at least how to do that.

Thanks!

Edited by datiswous
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But why did you artificially create a leak in a copy of the map? If this was a problem in your current map, you should simply have dmapped it and would have gotten a pointfile for your actual problem. FYI the pointfile only shows one leak, not all, so will likely not have seen your initial leak. This is also why good and sealing building practice really improtant. Leak hunting can be very time consuming...

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I don't think there's anything wrong with breaking something on purpose when you're still learning. It's a good way of familiarising yourself with the things that can go wrong.

Seeing what happens when you leave the roof off your house makes it easier, later when you're actually making a real map, to understand a leak that's poking out through the tiniest little sliver because you resized a brush.

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3 hours ago, Destined said:

But why did you artificially create a leak in a copy of the map? If this was a problem in your current map, you should simply have dmapped it and would have gotten a pointfile for your actual problem.

In the tutorial it tells you to draw a box around the room and "hollow" it. But I forgot to do this the second time. This is why I got the leak. But then I didn't get a .lin file with the dmodding. I have seen more people complain about not getting this file.

Maybe if the leak is too big, it doesn't create the file?

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Sometimes the project has changed, particularly if you're making a copy of a project. Then DR is looking one place for the .lin, but TDM is putting it in another place. So in DR, make sure you've selected the correct project under File > Game/Project Setting...

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7 hours ago, datiswous said:

In the tutorial it tells you to draw a box around the room and "hollow" it.

If the tutorial teaches that then, it is teaching a bad behavior, you should never solve leaks, by just making a "room" around your map, leaks are VERY important to catch, if a map has a leak, the engine portal system will fail to properly occlude geometry, sound and light and the map will run like garbage, have sound going through walls and light leak into rooms it shouldn't, causing visual and auditory glitch's.

Another thing that causes leaks is the origin of models being in the vacum, the origin IS NOT where the model is visually, the origin is a invisible point, used by the engine to know where they are and place models around, even though a model may be visually inside a room, its origin may be not. When you select a model, its origin shows up as a gizmo shown as Red, Green, Blue lines (x, y, z) coordinates, if you select a entity and don't see the gizmo, then it means the origin is far away from it.

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16 minutes ago, HMart said:

If the tutorial teaches that then, it is teaching a bad behavior, you should never solve leaks, by just making a "room" around your map

This is from a video from Springheel:

Spoiler

 

If you make a box very tight around every room and not just the whole map, is that so bad? Also, maybe it's teached that way so you don't run into problems right away (it didn't help much in my case). Personally I was also skeptical about this, but maybe in further video's you learn how to do it properly. I really can't say from seeing the third video.

How did you learn mapping?

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You have to make a box of worldspawn around each room because models are entities, and entities do not seal against the void.  What you don't want to do is make a giant box around your entire map.

From your description, it's difficult to tell why there is no .lin file.  Changing the map after generating it is one reason why you wouldn't be able to load it.  If that doesn't apply I'd need more information.

 

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2 hours ago, datiswous said:

This is from a video from Springheel:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

If you make a box very tight around every room and not just the whole map, is that so bad? Also, maybe it's teached that way so you don't run into problems right away (it didn't help much in my case). Personally I was also skeptical about this, but maybe in further video's you learn how to do it properly. I really can't say from seeing the third video.

How did you learn mapping?

I didn't realized you were talking about a single room, in my mind I though you were talking about your entire map so my bad. But even so be carefull, If your room is relatively small and square shaped, I don't think theres any problem. 

I learned to map by doing it, even thou I never released a TDM mission or anything of importance yet, I did spent many hours, just messing around with DR not going anywhere but it did permitted me to learn but you don't really have to map to know what I said, I'm following the Doom 3/idtech 4 mapping scene for decades now, I learned many things along the way. 

1 hour ago, Springheel said:

You have to make a box of worldspawn around each room because models are entities, and entities do not seal against the void.  What you don't want to do is make a giant box around your entire map.

...

 

Springheel far from me to try giving you a lesson, you certainly know your craft well more than me.  

But just to clear some stuff to me, what you said is totally true, entities don't seal the void and you need worldspawn geometry to seal against it but IMO even thou it works fine in most instances, I'm I wrong in assuming that if, for example, you create a cross shaped corridor + and you just make a sealing room around all that, it will cause problems with AAS, sound pathing and cause light leaks, all because you will not be able to portalize (is that the word?) the corridors?

Edited by HMart
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The way Springheel describes the process in his videos (if I remember correctly, it has been some time), you create a room (by drawing a worldspawn block and hollowing it out) and connect rooms by creating holes in this sealing geometry that you fill with visportals. This is particularly easy, if you use the clipping tool to cut out a square and turn the resulting brush into a visportal with "Right Click -> Make Visportal" instead of deleting it. That way each end of the cross has a visportal and portalling should work without problems.

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8 hours ago, HMart said:

I'm I wrong in assuming that if, for example, you create a cross shaped corridor + and you just make a sealing room around all that, it will cause problems with AAS, sound pathing and cause light leaks, all because you will not be able to portalize (is that the word?) the corridors

The problems might not be as hard as you described them, but at least pathfinding and sound propagation would suffer. However, you don't seal a cross-shaped corridor by creating a brush hollowed room around all of it. The brushes form the walls of the corridor. So if that is made out of models, you basically place caulk brushes right behind the walls.

Also, using hollowed out rooms is only one way of building levels. I haven't build like that for years now. If you use world geometry mainly for sealing and culling purposes, you can create the walls as well as the ceilings and floors seperately once you need them, as they can be very rough (in terms of grid size) and therefore are unlikely to cause issues.

Most of the time when I helped other mappers fixing their maps the root source of leaks (also internal ones) was, that they either created their sealing geometry on small grid sizes (the smaller the grid size, the smaller the gaps can be, and the more likely you'll going to overlook them) or that they used the hollowed out way of building and later on changed something, shifting a brush or resizing it in a way that cause a leak. This is especially bad if the leak created is internal, because it will take ages to even find out that there is an issue, not to mention the time it takes to find it.

A good advice imho is to keep the detailing geometry and the one used for sealing as seperate from each other as possible. Make the detailing stuff out of models or stuff converted to func_static. Note that you can export func_statics as models which will help performance if reused (a copy of a func_static is handled as a seperate model, two instances of a model are not). And use caulk and portal_sky brushes, created on large grid sizes (8+) and axis-aligned if possible, for the sealing. This will spare you most of the headaches.

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15 hours ago, HMart said:

But just to clear some stuff to me, what you said is totally true, entities don't seal the void and you need worldspawn geometry to seal against it but IMO even thou it works fine in most instances, I'm I wrong in assuming that if, for example, you create a cross shaped corridor + and you just make a sealing room around all that, it will cause problems with AAS, sound pathing and cause light leaks, all because you will not be able to portalize (is that the word?) the corridors?

 

Yes, if you were making a cross-shaped corridor, you'd want cross-shaped worldspawn in order to visportal it properly.  AAS isn't much of a problem because you'd have to monsterclip the model walls anyway, but the other things could be issues.

 

 

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On 3/25/2021 at 11:06 AM, Dragofer said:

@datiswous The weird thing is that worldspawn should always be entity 0, I can only guess how you got entity 19 to be worldspawn as well. I would try to delete&recreate entity 19 or convert it to func_static - the aim is to have only a single worldspawn entity in your map: entity 0.

Doesn't this happen if the first thing you create in the map isn't worldspawn?  I've done this a couple of times (being a n00b myself).  I can't remember the reason why I kept doing it, but it might have been the idea that one of the first things you need to create is the ambient_world light (which is obviously an entity).  I can't remember if one of the tutorials suggests this or not.

Also, there is no troubleshooting entry for that exact error in the dmap section on the Wiki, which would be helpful to have.

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You are right, there's a slight flaw in the system but even thou the light maybe entity zero the c++ code only considers the entity, the world entity, if it has this particular spawnarg, that lights don't have.

So even if you create a light first and a worldspawn brush second everything should work fine. 

else if (!idStr::Icmp(key, "classname") && !idStr::Icmp(value, "worldspawn")) {
				worldent = true;
}

I bet idSoftware never cared to have a test for that error because all their level designers, first create a room than create all the other entities and that is how they have been doing since quake or even the first doom. Plus this kind of problem seems to be so rare that in decades following idtech 4 scene this is the first time I saw someone cause such a error. 

ps. Btw nothing gained from creating a light first, because lights only work if they have some surface to interact with, if no surface will just be a black void no matter how many lights you spawn. 

Edited by HMart
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9 hours ago, Springheel said:

AAS isn't much of a problem because you'd have to monsterclip the model walls anyway

This depends on the size of the wall segments, or more precisely their thickness. If the walls don't reach into the room too far (less that 8 doom units) you don't neccessarely have to mc them. It is often sufficient to clip the support beams, if any, although in that case a long mc brush might even be the easier choice.

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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18 hours ago, Obsttorte said:

Also, using hollowed out rooms is only one way of building levels. I haven't build like that for years now. If you use world geometry mainly for sealing and culling purposes, you can create the walls as well as the ceilings and floors seperately once you need them, as they can be very rough (in terms of grid size) and therefore are unlikely to cause issues.

@Obsttorte(and anyone else) may I ask, when you use this approach what grid sizes (thickness) do you use for the detailing walls?  Do you use 8 for the sealing brushes, and then something thinner for the walls?  I'm kind of trying this approach for my second map, but the problem I keep having is if you use 8 + 8 the sealing + wall is too thick (especially if using the modules, which I love but am starting to find them too restrictive so using them less now).  If you use a smaller one for walls, you end up with weird grid sizes all over the place.  What do people find works best?

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I strongly recommend that someone new to DarkRadiant and TDM mapping follow Sotha's video tutorials

https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=DarkRadiant_Video_Tutorials#Sotha

These tutorials don't require previous understanding and they cover the essentials of creating a small FM from start to finish, clearly and systematically.  

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