Newbie DarkRadiant Questions

[Bikerdude]

I can't help but think some one here is not sharing their knowledge with the forum.

Did you get an answer to your question and did it fix your problem.?

[Goldwell]

Is there a way to stop rain in certain areas or do I have to carve the rain patches around my geometry?

 

For example if you're standing in a open street and its raining thats fine of course but if I move under a canopy the rain goes through it, previously (in the accountant 1) I remedied this by just raising the patches higher in the area where the canopy was but on my current WIP this would be incredibly tedious work and I was wondering if anyone had a better solution for this?

 

A no-rain brush would be pretty handy

[Bikerdude]

Is there a way to stop rain in certain areas or do I have to carve the rain patches around my geometry?

There was a tutorial on how to do this, you'll need to search for forum.

 

What we need is a way for the game to to stop rain inside or under something, maybe Steve can work his magic like he did for rain perf..

[Goldwell]

There was a tutorial on how to do this, you'll need to search for forum.

 

What we need is a way for the game to to stop rain inside or under something, maybe Steve can work his magic like he did for rain perf..

 

I think you misunderstand my post, I know how to create patches carved around map geometry, the problem though is my map has quite a few different elevations & canopies and it would be far too tedious to go around doing this so what my original question was if there is another way to do this such as a brush that blocks rain that I can place in the areas that need it or another solution.

 

Judging from your second sentence though I assume it is not currently possible.

[grayman]

See if this thread helps you.

[Nico A.]

How can I retain the faces of the two resulting brushes at the clipped plane? When I use the clipper tool, and even with Shift+LMB, the faces are lost, like this:

 

 

Is there a way to create them anew?

[Goldwell]

See if this thread helps you.

 

Thanks grayman, thats a good solution for windows and doors but I think for what i'm dealing with its pretty much the same as say raising the elevation of the rain patch to match that of the roof

 

Heres the scene i'm talking about for reference

 

 

So when the player is standing there the rain should fall but if they move closer to the wall the roof of the building should block off the rain.

 

It would be nice if there was some way to tell the engine not to produce particles from the area under the roof to the floor but I dont think there is, I think I will have to just manually carve everything

[grayman]

It would be nice if there was some way to tell the engine not to produce particles from the area under the roof to the floor but I dont think there is, I think I will have to just manually carve everything

 

Until someone creates a particle-absorbing entity (and I don't know if that's possible), you'll have to carve. Carving is the standard method for getting around architectural changes.

[grayman]

How can I retain the faces of the two resulting brushes at the clipped plane? When I use the clipper tool, and even with Shift+LMB, the faces are lost, like this:

 

problem1.png problem2.png

 

Is there a way to create them anew?

 

Caulk is the standard texture painted on new surfaces when clipping.

 

It appears that you have the caulk filter turned on.

 

Turn that off, and you should see caulk surfaces. Then you can paint them what you will.

[Dragofer]

How can I retain the faces of the two resulting brushes at the clipped plane? When I use the clipper tool, and even with Shift+LMB, the faces are lost, like this:

 

problem1.png problem2.png

 

Is there a way to create them anew?

 

You might need to change your settings under "clipper" to uncheck the option "Clipper tool uses caulk texture". It looks to me like your clipper uses caulk for cut surfaces and your editor is set to hide (filter) anything textured with caulk.

[Nico A.]

Ah! This makes sense. Many thanks!

[SteveL]

It would be nice if there was some way to tell the engine not to produce particles from the area under the roof to the floor but I dont think there is, I think I will have to just manually carve everything

Hmm this is a good puzzle. I'll try to work out whether a particle-absorbing entity is possible. I was hoping to move particle generation code to the gpu too, which would make it even harder to do something like this.

 

In the meantime, you could use the patch splitter script to make the carving easy.

[Goldwell]

Hmm this is a good puzzle. I'll try to work out whether a particle-absorbing entity is possible. I was hoping to move particle generation code to the gpu too, which would make it even harder to do something like this.

 

In the meantime, you could use the patch splitter script to make the carving easy.

 

Well what I was thinking was a brush texture similar to the clip texture which absorbs all missiles that hit it but instead of missiles obviously it absorbs the rain/effects instead

 

Unrelated to all of this but do you know if TDM is going 64 bit? I remember reading somewhere that its planned in the near future and if thats the case what does that mean for the game? I assume increased performance?

[SteveL]

Particles aren't game entities, so they can't use the existing collision detection system. And it would probably be horrible on performance to get them to detect collisions.

 

We'd need another idea. I'm wondering if some automatic tweak to the particle parameters is possible, but that would mean dmap carving up the particle patch to save you doing it in DR. It might be possible.

 

I don't know anything about the advantages of going 64-bit, but I know greebo has been working on it.

[demagogue]

I was thinking edit it to make a custom particle that's shorter is the way to go. Then make various sizes available in DR for all of us to use.

[grayman]

I was thinking edit it to make a custom particle that's shorter is the way to go. Then make various sizes available in DR for all of us to use.

 

That doesn't prevent having to carve up the weather patch, which is what's trying to be avoided here, because you want some of the patches to push rain all the way to the ground, and others to push it only partway.

 

If we want to put a single weather patch across an entire area, and have sections of it not rain or snow through overhangs or ceilings, and we don't want to use the visportaling trick, then the only remaining solution is to either have each rain particle stop when it hits a patch or brush, or have each particle stop when it hits a new particle-killing entity. The former solution relies on detecting collision, which SteveL says particles don't do, and the latter solution requires that the particle-killing entity think every so often and kill any particles it finds w/in its bounds, which is a burden on performance.

[demagogue]

Well I was thinking it was less a burden to cut out a square in the sky and use a shorter particle, use the cut tool and it's done in 2 seconds, versus having to actually carve out a tunnel in the sky so the bottom of the longer patch touches the roof. I thought it was the tunnel carving that was the big pain, not cutting up the sky per se, unless I'm forgetting how patches work.

 

Edit: Speaking of a hack type of solution, is there some kind of cheap filter you could make to overlay the player's vision that simply doesn't draw certain particles inside its boundaries? Then it's a matter of having that filter overlap where you don't want to see the particle.

 

Edit2: I understand that wouldn't let you see rain you should be seeing in front of or behind rain you shouldn't, as in the roof-overhang case here, unless you could get some filter to recognize that too. Still, it might be a good enough hack for seeing rain hit a roof outside a building, but not seeing it rain inside.

[rich_is_bored]

Particle systems in games are a black box to me. Every particle has it's own properties that must be evaluated periodically and it all carries a performance cost. Yet there are games with countless particles whizzing around and bouncing off things as if the cost was trivial. And somehow this was possible prior to the trend of moving everything on to the GPU. Particle collision was a thing in the Doom 3 alpha leak ten years ago. I haven't the slightest clue how they marginalized the cost but they did.

 

Of course that's unnecessary for TDM. A bounds check would suffice. If nobody knows how to implement it with minimal overhead that's fine. But if someone does, you can use a collision model comprised of brushes to define the domain the particles operate in. There's no need to kill particles outside the domain either. Just skip them during render.

 

Alternately it might be possible to add rain in post. That's a possibility now that we have a proper depth buffer. Outside the droplets in immediate proximity to the player, rain is just 3D noise masked by level geometry.

[SteveL]

A bounds check would suffice. If nobody knows how to implement it with minimal overhead that's fine. But if someone does, you can use a collision model comprised of brushes to define the domain the particles operate in. There's no need to kill particles outside the domain either. Just skip them during render.

That could work. Every particle does a bounds check on map start anyway, to determine which visleafs it operates in, so they know their bounding boxes. We'd only have to detect intersections between particle bounding boxes and "swallower" bounding boxes once, during map load. Then each particle gets tagged with zero or more excluded regions that are tested during particle generation. Any quads with at least one vert inside an excluded region could be culled.

 

Axis-aligned boxes would make the best excluded regions for performance but might not be flexible enough for mappers.

 

It would have to be done during rendering. Individual particle quads have no existence between renderering cycles. Each particle effect just stores its origin, its random number seed, and its start time. The individual quads are generated afresh each frame using that info plus the parameters in the particle decl, then the quads are immediately discarded.

[Goldwell]

I finally got around to playing Shackys excellent endless rain mission last night and I noticed that the rain seems to stop when under roofs and indoors. I'm not familiar with dromed or how their rain works but it seems like if it hits a physical thing it stops as there was not one drop coming through any covered area, it was quite impressive actually for an engine so old.

[SteveL]

Knowing nothing about that engine, I can only guess that it does what rich suggested: detects collisions with static geometry only and decides what volume particles are allowed to exist in at map start. I'd be really surprised to find an engine doing particle collision detection on the cpu, unless particles are rare in the game.

[VanishedOne]

Having a way to cull particles would be great. I made a custom-length version of a lamp haze effect for an interior corridor, but it's awkward: what looks fine from inside the corridor can start subtly clipping through the roof when viewed from certain angles.

[Baal]

A question about path nodes and AI pathfinding for someone who knows the technical details about that:

 

I'm having a problem with AI that "circle around" after they have been alerted and gone back to their patrol (they seem to only do that in alerted_idle but I'm not a hundred percent sure on that). I suspect the problem to be the "idle_only" spawnargs on a path node. There is a node on the route, that has two successors (a branch that joins back later). Only one of them has the "idle_only" spawnarg. Could that be the problem? I thought that should work since the other node is still reachable in alerted_idle.

[demagogue]

Make sure your dmap is up to date.

 

There were some old bugs which caused circling, especially around doors or other things AI have to specially navigate around or through. Most of them have been fixed but some may still be around? I mean it might be a mod issue instead of a map one.

 

Edit. Or is the problem that their alert is too short before they go back to patrol? Sound may bump an Ai just over the threshold, then they ramp down fast maybe. No, I don't really know I guess.

[Deshtat]

Hey there, it's been a while!

I have a rather small problem right now : at one point in my level, the player can notice several characters fighting. He won't be able to join them, for they are in a enclosed area, but he can watch them.

 

During this fight, an important character (let's call it CharA) is struggling against several guards. My problem is that I need CharA to loose in the end, even though it can kill some of them. Thus, I want the guards to keep respawning (2 at the same time max) until CharA dies.

 

I don't really know how to do this. I guess I could just "revive" the dead guards and teleport them back at the entrance every time they die, but I don't want the corpses to disapear on the spot...

 

Any ideas? ^^