Newbie DarkRadiant Questions

[Moonbo]

That did the trick , thanks Springheel! Just in case anyone else wants to try this, make sure to close both darkradiant and doom 3 after putting in the custom def and restarting, otherwise you'll get a "can't find animation" error.

[Moonbo]

Last issue and I'm calling it a night. When I load up my map all the "noblewoman" heads (both the heads linked to my func_animates and those on standard AI's) are showing up with a very messed up skin. They actually look this way in darkradiant too...

 

 

As far as I can tell, it's only the noblewoman who has this issue.

[Springheel]

That's a new one. I've never seen anything quite like it.

[Fidcal]

That is reminiscent of the mad woman in Heart. I think I based her on the pagan though. Maybe somehow the def is 'live' on your system and has same name. I think mine was called Martha so if your name is the same by coincidence...?

[Moonbo]

Huh, well now that you mention it I had Heart installed on my system and was rooting around looking at the defs (I wanted to see how you made the head of the sleeping woman). I didn't copy anything over though...let me try uninstalling the FM when I get back from work and see if that does anything.

[Moonbo]

Well uninstalling Heart didn't solve the problem. Hopefully it's just a corrupted file or something that only affects my computer. Random question: is there a way to speed up or slow down AI movement? I've seen the effect in a lot of Thief FM's and was wondering if there was something similar possible in TDM.

[Springheel]

Yep. The spawnarg is "anim_rate" or something similar, can't check atm.

[Obsttorte]

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Animation_playback_speed

[Moonbo]

Thanks Obsttorte and Springheel - another random question: do you know if it's possible to create a trigger_multiple out of more than one brush. Let's say I select two brushes and then turn them into a single trigger entity, do you know if that will cause any problems or should the two brushes work as a single trigger, even if separated by distance.

[Springheel]

Yes, you can have multiple brushes part of the same trigger. I've done that before, at least with trigger_once. I presume it's the same for other triggers.

[Moonbo]

I'm running into situations where I've resized a model to make it larger than its initial size, and the model will disappear from view if I move the camera in such a way that it's on the edge of the screen. I'm guessing that this is because the engine is culling the model as if it was it's smaller size (and thus wouldn't normally be visible on screen). Is there a way to stop this from happening?

[RPGista]

Ive never seen that happening, but you can give a model the "inline" "1" spawnarg and recompile the map, it will appearently turn a model into world brush triangles. It can have certain side effects (changing the smoothing groups, for example), but might be worth a shot.

Edited February 23, 2013 by RPGista

[grayman]

Using the rotation spawnarg to resize models can have this affect, as well as screwing up the shadows.

 

If the "inline" suggestion doesn't work, I don't know of any other way to deal with this.

[RPGista]

Yes, whenever a model is resized, it should have its shadow disabled, otherwise there will likely be artifacts.

[Moonbo]

Thanks RPGista, that spawnarg did the trick and I don't see any odd affects. I'll make sure to use it sparingly though.

[Obsttorte]

Beneath the shadows also the collision mesh gets corrupted by that. Never tested inline though. Guess I must give it a shot as I'm using rezised models quite often.

[RPGista]

Indeed, a solution for that would be to make the resized model non-solid and retrace it with a nodraw brush of the same material underneath. Im not sure if any of this is in the wiki article for resizing models...

[Baddcog]

you can also make a shadow mesh from worldspawn so...

[Fidcal]

I'd not heard of that inline spawnarg so I've added it quickly to:

 

http://wiki.thedarkm...Possible Fix

 

Probably that might need rewording but I thought I'd stick it up there quick before I forget - I might need it one day!

 

Seems to be also another article about resizing models (also by me!) shown by searching for resizing. Maybe that wants deleting or merging. I've got no time at the moment.

[Moonbo]

This probably a question for Badcog: what's the difference between r_showlightcount 1 and r_showlightcount 2. On the web it said that r_showlightcount 2 picks up lights coming through walls. I'm assuming then that r_showlightcount 2 is the more accurate way to see if tris are being hit by multiple lights? I just worry because I'm getting muuuuuuch worse colors if I use that...

[Baddcog]

@Moonbo,

 

I was never aware of 2 and 3 so I took a look.

 

2 shows through walls, but not lights hitting tris through walls. Those always show in lightcount 1.

 

I'm really not sure what the benefit of using that would be. It seems to show you the tris (through walls) that are being hit by the lights. And to do so it 'multiplies them on top of the tris you are seeing normally.

 

========

so lightcount 1:

 

Shows all rendered tris and how many lights are hitting them at once.

this is comparable to show_tris 1. it only renders the tris the player sees directly. But it gives an accurate count of actual lights on tris.

 

(white is BAD: 5+ lights on that tri) Even aqua (one light less than white) will hit perf. but white will kill it.

 

This doesn't mean a light in an unrendered zone isn't hitting the tris that are rendered because it could be, and it IS included in the light count. it also doesn't mean that lights in your zone aren't hitting tris in other areas, they very well could be also. But that doesn't matter anyway if none of them are being hit by enough lights to turn them white .

------------

count 2:

 

This is like show_tris 2, it is showing everything that is in cue (even stuff that is culled due to player not seeing it - overdraw/whatever)

 

What makes the light colors worse (but not accurate) is that it is showing all these tris to the player. With showtris-2 they can just draw more lines.

 

i guess since the colors make it hard to see anything (unlike lines on top of the rendering) their only choice was to do a sort of overlay of the tris. So if you have a wall (with window player can see through) and that wall is hit by 3 lights. The wall outside the window is being rendered and also being hit by 3 lights.

 

So to see the light count on both walls they are overlayed, so the wall in front (with window) appears to be hit by 6 lights (3 for front wall, 3 for back, 6 where they overlap). So in this view it looks bad, but that's not how the lightcount /rendering actually works.

 

Of course your FPS should drop more because the engine starts rendering more when it's turned on. Just like with showtris 2, you're forcing the engine to do more work and render stuff it would usually cull (plus all the extra lines).

 

So like i said, i'm not sure what's actually useful, or if it is at all. but it's not needed imo.

if you keep your lightcount down by using lightcount 1 you will have good perf.

[Jesps]

When I trigger a sound with a map script two times quickly after each other using 'sys.trigger(speaker_entity)' it starts the sound, then (when it is triggered the second time) turns it off again, before the sound is done playing.

Is there any way of playing the sound completely? Either play twice 'on top' of each other, or simply ignore the trigger if the speaker is playing?

[Fidcal]

One way might be create a global float at the top of your script file, eg,

 

float SoundPlaying ;

 

In your script even put the call to the sound within an if...

 

if (SoundPlaying == 0)

{

[trigger sound here]

SoundPlaying = 1;

sys.wait(N); // (where N is the length in seconds of the sound file)

SoundPlaying = 0; // reset global

}

[demagogue]

Yes Fidcal gave a simple way.

The way I'd do it (even simpler) would be:

 

float lastSoundTime;

 

if sys.time > ( lastSoundTime + [duration of sound in ms] )

{

[trigger sound here];

lastSoundTime = sys.time;

}

 

.......

 

This gets the system time the moment you play the sound. Then in the event of a 2nd call, it gets the system time of that next call, and if it happens *before* the (last time + duration) is over, it just skips the sound-trigger. If it's *after*, then the condition plays the sound again. Easy-peasy.

[Moonbo]

This may not be the right place to ask, but how do you use spoiler tags? I can't seem to figure it out.