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Newbie DarkRadiant Questions


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1 hour ago, thebigh said:

I want to rotate the building a bit once I've finished it.

By "rotate the building", do you mean adjusting the brushes and patches so that they lie at an angle while still being snapped to grid, or do you literally mean selecting the whole building and rotating it some number of degrees using the rotation tools?

Because you almost certainly don't want to do the second one. Geometry which isn't snapped to the grid will cause all sorts of problems with map compilation and optimisation.

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I'm more or less doing the second one, rotating it off the NS grid by 15 degrees, but once that's done I snap it all to a grid size of 1. A few brushes need to be fiddled with afterwards but not as many as you'd think. I did a similar thing in my previous level for the underground structure but I didn't try to put any moving objects down there.

My missions:           Stand-alone                                                      Duncan Lynch series                              

                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

                                                                                                  A House Call

                                                                                                  The House of deLisle                                                                                                  

                              

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When I do this, I find the rotate spawnarg doesn't update right and the hatch flips down at a skewy angle. Is there a way to bind it to something, or to calculate what the new rotate spwanarg has to be?

I've always had to do tweaking of that spawnarg by trial and error. And you can only expect the beginning and end locations of the hatch to be good, with the movement in-between continuing to be funky.

As to OrbWeaver's point, for non-func-statics like individual brushes, I think it's better to not to use the free-hand rotate tool, but instead DR "rotate and scale" of the Z axis with a known numeric value, like 45, 30, 60 degrees.

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16 hours ago, thebigh said:

When I do this, I find the rotate spawnarg doesn't update right and the hatch flips down at a skewy angle. Is there a way to bind it to something, or to calculate what the new rotate spwanarg has to be?

This sounds like the hatch is made from brushes. If it were exported as a model, then it would automatically rotate in the correct direction relative to its orientation. IIRC you could also bind it to i.e. an invisible, nonsolid and rotated spoon, but it wouldn't be preferred.

@Geep
Regarding trial and error: DR now shows the axes of rotation when using the 'R'otate function, so it should be possible to briefly rotate the object in the desired direction by hand to see how much and on which axes it needs to rotate.

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Just got the latest ver of DR and I'm messing around with the Stim/Response system for the first time while following along with the wiki, but I do not see my desired effect present in the dropdown for Responses. I'd like to Remove the target. Am I missing something?

Thanks, Taffers.

 

stim_response.png

To clarify: I have a Triggeronce set up to play a VO. My goal is to have it only play if entering a specific way, and wish to disable it upon entering the alternate two routes.

Edited by Jedi_Wannabe
typos

As my father used to say, "A grenade a day, keeps the enemy at bay!"

My one FM so far: Paying the Bills: 0 - Moving Day

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@Jedi_Wannabe
Easiest would be to let all the trigger brushes target a func_remove entity, which in turn targets all the trigger brushes. When the func_remove is triggered it deletes all targets.

Regarding your screenshot:

- The left side should reference the type of stim you want to respond to. Right now you have "Frob", but you'd want "Trigger".

- The bottom right box contains all the effects that should happen. To add something new, right-click in it. (Btw, instead of directly naming an entity, you can type in _SELF)

- You don't need the "Stims" tab at all in most cases, only if you want to create a new stim emitter (i.e. water arrow) to which other entities (i.e. torch flames) can respond. You should delete anything you added under that tab.

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I made a new texture that I want to use as a decal. It contains some transparent sections (padding on one side because the poster is rectangular but the image file needs to be square, and torn off corners). I saved the texture as a 32 bit tga, bottom left orientation, RLE off, and it looks fine GIMP and other image viewers-- the alpha channel seems to be working right. Unfortunately, in-game the transparent sections show up as solid black. What am I doing wrong, and how do I fix it?

 

And another simple question: how do I enable fleeing AIs to unlock doors that are in their way?

Edited by thebigh
another dumb question

My missions:           Stand-alone                                                      Duncan Lynch series                              

                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

                                                                                                  A House Call

                                                                                                  The House of deLisle                                                                                                  

                              

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On 10/9/2021 at 11:46 AM, thebigh said:

padding on one side because the poster is rectangular but the image file needs to be square

Actually it doesn't — you can use rectangular images if needed, although it's best to keep to sensible (preferably powers of two, but at least multiples of four) dimensions: 128x64, 1024x256, 1024x768 if you must, but not 357x299.

On 10/9/2021 at 11:46 AM, thebigh said:

Unfortunately, in-game the transparent sections show up as solid black. What am I doing wrong, and how do I fix it?

Alpha doesn't "just work" by default in the engine, you need to set up the material to use it. Probably the alphaTest keyword is what you want (e.g. "alphaTest 0.5" to show transparency anywhere the alpha value is less than 50%.)

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19 minutes ago, OrbWeaver said:

Actually it doesn't — you can use rectangular images if needed, although it's best to keep to sensible (preferably powers of two, but at least multiples of four) dimensions: 128x64, 1024x256, 1024x768 if you must, but not 357x299.

Alpha doesn't "just work" by default in the engine, you need to set up the material to use it. Probably the alphaTest keyword is what you want (e.g. "alphaTest 0.5" to show transparency anywhere the alpha value is less than 50%.)

Yeah, I got it working now. I'd copied the material specifications from the Cholera Morbus decal poster, so AFAIK the alpha should have worked. I ended up asking about it on discord and nobody had any idea what was going wrong either, so in the end I just re-made my image from scratch and on the third attempt at exporting from GIMP it finally worked. Maybe the phase of the moon was right this time.

My missions:           Stand-alone                                                      Duncan Lynch series                              

                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

                                                                                                  A House Call

                                                                                                  The House of deLisle                                                                                                  

                              

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55 minutes ago, Garreth said:

I know a mirror needs to be between brushes, but nodraw solid or caulk on the other sides seems to give errors when dmapping

When I need a "dummy" texture and neither caulk nor nodraw are suitable I usually go with black_matt.

On 10/9/2021 at 12:46 PM, thebigh said:

how do I enable fleeing AIs to unlock doors that are in their way?

I got this sorted in the end. I gave him the can_unlock1 spawnarg and he was able to unlock the door if I gave him a path_corner on the other side, and he's supposed to be able to unlock it while fleeing as well but for some reason he'll only do it half the time. The rest of the time he just runs up against the door like a fly bapping its stupid head against a pane of glass. I fixed this by putting a trigger_once_entityname in front of the door- this isn't an area he patrols- and having that open the door for him. And if he does the right thing and unlocks the door himself this does not shut it behind him, which is just what I want.

My missions:           Stand-alone                                                      Duncan Lynch series                              

                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

                                                                                                  A House Call

                                                                                                  The House of deLisle                                                                                                  

                              

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To improve performance, I'm pondering the use of func_portals to manually open/close some of the outdoor-area visportals, controlled using scripting of a state machine. I'm at little concerned, though...

It appears that you can only use func_portal to toggle open/close its visportal, not to set it explicitly. That is, while a mover has function calls "openPortal" and "closePortal", func_portal does not (I think). Furthermore, I didn't see anyway to detect the open/close state of the associated visportal. I'm concerned that if a trigger toggle gets "out of sync" (code thinks portal is in opposite state from what portal really is), then it will all go to hell.

I imagine, instead of func_portal, I could use dummy movers that are either transparent or tiny or buried in the ground. Then I would have openPortal() and closePortal() available.

I assume, once you have a mover or func_portal on a visportal, the engine doesn't itself decide to open or close it, so you can rely on the state in the scripting code being persistent. But maybe that's not a valid assumption.

Thoughts?

EDIT: I started down this road, but then thought about it further. The potential for problems is high and benefits uncertain and modest. So forgetaboutit.

Edited by Geep
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On 10/19/2021 at 2:38 PM, Geep said:

EDIT: I started down this road, but then thought about it further. The potential for problems is high and benefits uncertain and modest. So forgetaboutit.

That would be my advice too. The engine does a good job of opening or closing portals according to well-defined rules; it is extremely unlikely that trying to override this manually with scripts is going to lead to any improvement. At best it would achieve nothing, at worst it would be slower and possibly result in portals being open when they should be closed or vice versa.

The case for adjusting portals manually would be if there was some condition that made a portal invisible to the player but which the engine could not detect, e.g. it is obscured by fog or a large moveable object.

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Been away for a long time, installed my older desktop got all my files off of it, now i see that i have 690 files with all different names, some are the same only a previous verson of another map, so i need to sort all my maps and rename them proper, can i delete the -ass  - bak - proc - cm - lin and darkradiant files, can i just keep the map files and work from those? for testing and renaming... 

I don't know what each file does and if it will be created when i dmap and such

Edited by Garreth

Taf you, you taffin taffer

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Technically, all you need for a DMAP is the .map file.

I would suggest keeping the darkradiant files, as those keep track of things like groups, layers and camera position and things like that.

BAK is a backup that DR makes of your .map file.
CM is collision (I think).
LIN file is for leaks which show a line in red in DR to where the leak occurred.
AAS files is for pathfinding for AI.
PROC file is from DMAP, you need that to play the map in game.

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I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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Yeah, I would definitely hang on to the .darkradiant files. I couldn't imagine doing without my carefully constructed haphazardly agglomerated layers.

  • Haha 2

My missions:           Stand-alone                                                      Duncan Lynch series                              

                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

                                                                                                  A House Call

                                                                                                  The House of deLisle                                                                                                  

                              

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It is kind of to late i checked every map named and grouped them i never used layers anyway i build in segments, spent hours on it and now i don't feel so good 😀 4 hours of flying trough maps pfff but they work and i can use them that is the most important now

Taf you, you taffin taffer

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Yup. Middle click to copy, Ctrl-middleclick to paste. Super quick and handy.

My missions:           Stand-alone                                                      Duncan Lynch series                              

                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

                                                                                                  A House Call

                                                                                                  The House of deLisle                                                                                                  

                              

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Brushes and patches, wich intersect eachother..

The shadows of the non door bars seem fine but the patch bars leak light trough them maybe pull it apart and not let them intersect with eachother?

Yeah it is fixed now but also more patches...

Edited by Garreth

Taf you, you taffin taffer

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It's interesting that the gaps do not extend all the way to the bottom of the bars. Are those separate patches? If so, why not just delete the gappy ones and extend the properly behaving lower bar segments all the way up? It won't matter at all that they clip through the brush making up the bottom part of the door.

My missions:           Stand-alone                                                      Duncan Lynch series                              

                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

                                                                                                  A House Call

                                                                                                  The House of deLisle                                                                                                  

                              

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Small, fiddly patches and brushes can get broken easily.
Ideally, you would snap all vertexes to the grid, even at Grid 1. Once you have your door the way you want it, export it as ASE model. Then replace the door with the model.

I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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