Newbie DarkRadiant Questions

[demagogue]

But you don't even have to remove the invisible weapon or attach a new one. Just make it visible and it pops up in his sheath and is useable. That's what I was saying. The effect looks the same to the player, but much easier for you to do.

 

I'll shut up about it now & let you play around with it though.

[Destined]

I tried your suggestion, but there are two problems: The team does not determine, if the AI flees. As long as it is armed, it will attack the player. I tried to work around this as well by setting the health to a critical value and restore it as soon as the AI has fled, but strangely healing does not stop the AI from fleeing. The second problem is: I don't know how to target the def_attached sword to turn it visible (a problem I also have, when I want to remove it), as it has no entity name to begin with, but is created when the map loads.

[MirceaKitsune]

Well this is technically a newbie question. I do feel a little shy to post it, as I'm quite familiar with gtkRadiant in general (early Nexuiz / Xonotic days)... this is a technique question though.

 

Does anyone have any good tutorials on how to create good looking towns and interiors in DarkRadiant (ideally a video)? Not to be confused with instructions on how to make brushes or place entities, which again I already know: I'm trying to understand what the most efficient way to design a city in DR is, and which brushwork techniques and design approaches and assets are best. There are so many features and aspects to be aware of that I'd rather not start mapping more before someone more experienced offers a few tips and tricks.

[demagogue]

That's a pretty personal question of style.

I learned some tricks opening people's maps in DR though.

 

Generally I say mappers should think in terms of "rooms" or "scenes" (not always literal rooms). For streets, remember you're making them like brush tunnels with skybox on the top and sides. I'd make a street scene like that, maybe 2-4 buildings across, then connect other scenes to it at VisPortal'd kiss points that immediately cut off the line of sight (with a curve inside a tunnel or the like).

 

Don't make street scenes rectangular, or not all of them. You can make X-sided "rooms" by either having walls connect at weird angles inside pillars, etc, or pushing ctrl-N with a tall selected brush, where N is the number of sides. Then push "make room". Then drag it out to a big size. Then you cover the sidrs with building facades, with the skybrush behind them.

 

As for interiors, hallways connecting rooms with periodic big open living room spaces has always done the job. It's even easier to copy someone's style for interiors.

 

Good luck!

[MirceaKitsune]

That's helpful, thanks! I must indeed keep in mind to isolate certain areas in the city via tunnels, so that I may use vis portals to keep performance acceptable. Otherwise I will be working mostly with square brushes, and it will be up to me to figure out how to add each detail and special effect.

[Dragofer]

Does anyone have any good tutorials on how to create good looking towns and interiors in DarkRadiant (ideally a video)?

 

I thought Melan's documentation of how he made Fiasco at Fauchard Street was excellent: Thread.

Edited October 19, 2016 by Dragofer

[MirceaKitsune]

I will keep that in mind as well. For now I have a problem that has been pestering me for some time: Whenever I cap a cylinder, the texture stretches around two ends of the circular surface. No settings I can find in the Surface menu offer any solution! I need to fix this in order to have circular islands for roads and the like. Any thoughts?

 

[Dragofer]

Whenever I cap a cylinder, the texture stretches around two ends of the circular surface.

 

You need to make a brush with the same texture and copy-paste the texture from one of the brush's horizontal surfaces onto the patch

[MirceaKitsune]

You need to make a brush with the same texture and copy-paste the texture from one of the brush's horizontal surfaces onto the patch

 

Aha... found it! The Copy Shader / Paste Shader options solve it just fine. Thank you

[MirceaKitsune]

I had a question for some time: We already have a horse AI, which mappers typically place in stables. Is it possible to have guards riding on horses as well? Even by using less official methods and tricks, like say attaching a guard NPC to a horse and having the horse patrol an area... though I imagine the guard would have issues attacking the player if he's spotted.

[demagogue]

IIRC somebody attached a guard and he was just standing with his legs embedded in the horse, and of course can't move. It looks very wrong.

 

To do it right would require new guard animations and AI code. It'd be a big task, although worth it IMO if someone is really committed.

[NeonsStyle]

What is IIRC?

[Obsttorte]

If I remember correctly.

[MirceaKitsune]

Yeah... that's what I was thinking: You can probably attach a guard to a horse with the sit animation, but it's going to look quite wrong and destroy any realism

 

For now my next question is on a more technical aspect: I noticed that on occasion, dmap screws up portal creation. What seems to happen is that if you align a bunch of portals in a way the engine doesn't like, even if they're properly defined and close off all areas... dmap will sometimes not compute them correctly, and you get the sky rendering over invisible surfaces which block off areas you're looking at. Can I understand what causes this rare occurrence better, and what the best way is to avoid vis portal errors?

[demagogue]

Sky rendering in a portal means it's being rendered as closed. It happens, eg, when part of a closed portal is in another leaf.

 

Then there is the black walls of death problem, about which I started this thread almost 8 years ago now. If it's a big area rendering sky or black, not only the portal, it means messy brushwork which would cause rounding errors nearby, like a sliver brush, tiny gap, tiny overlap, brushes meeting at a weird angle, etc.

[MirceaKitsune]

Sky rendering in a portal means it's being rendered as closed. It happens, eg, when part of a closed portal is in another leaf.

 

Then there is the black walls of death problem, about which I started this thread almost 8 years ago now. If it's a big area rendering sky or black, not only the portal, it means messy brushwork which would cause rounding errors nearby, like a sliver brush, tiny gap, tiny overlap, brushes meeting at a weird angle, etc.

 

Everything I do is perfectly aligned to the grid, and portal brushes are always nodraw + 1 portal surface. Apparently dmap simply doesn't like certain portal alignments, even if the areas are perfectly legit. I do get both problems: Sometimes portals refuse to show (in r_showportals 1), whereas at other times the sky simply renders on top of other surfaces in places where there aren't any portals to begin with! Seems the solution is simply messing around with the map geometry and trying different patterns, until I get a combination that dmap is okay with.

[demagogue]

If a portal refuses to show, the most common reason is an internal leak, that is, an unportaled gap into the space of another leaf, killing any portals between them. You can find them with pointfile if you isolate the area, turn portals into walls & surround the area with void.

If there is messy brushwork where black walls are, it's usually near where the blackness starts.

[Obsttorte]

Portals can also cause issues if they are all in plane. Try moving some of them a bit and see if that fixes it.

[MirceaKitsune]

I actually found a gap I wasn't aware of when I designed my architecture, though closing it didn't solve the problem. What did was simply rethinking a few of the walls and re-arranging some buildings... now I have no more portal issues. All of my brushwork is very clean, and all areas are closed off... it's simply some portal alignments that dmap doesn't like apparently.

 

For now I'm trying to find a few assets, which I saw on other maps but can't find in DR myself. They would be:

• The god rays texture or model, which some people place in front of windows in mansions to have moonlight shine through them. Ideally with the fireflies effect.
• In one mission I saw an electric lamp that had volumetric fog... as in the area the light shined through was foggy and dense. I believe it was square and the light slightly orange?
• I once experimented with a town skybox, which had a lot of tall and visibly lit buildings. I can no longer find it anywhere now! It is not tdm_springheel.pfb, which I'm using until I find it.
• I noticed that certain missions have double barn doors, used to enter basements from outside. However I couldn't find a prefab anywhere! Is there one?
• There was once a mission where the action took place on a galleon. The exterior model of that galleon is available in the assets. But can I also find the interior and reuse it?

[Destined]

Regarding your first request, I can help:

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/10764-moon-ray/

 

For the rest, I have no idea. However, the use of double doors is also described in the Wiki:

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

 

I am quite certain, that if there are no prefabs, the doors were made out of brushes.

[VanishedOne]

On rays see also http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/9082-newbie-darkradiant-questions/page-245?do=findComment&comment=375979 (but I now know func_beam entities can save the need to modify a material def.).

 

By the 'fireflies effect' I imagine you're referring to the dust particles, though there are missions with fireflies made as either particles or spline movers.

 

Fog has nothing particuarly to do with lanterns; presumably a separate fog light was placed in the map.

[MirceaKitsune]

Thanks... will look at these when I get back. One more question till then: Do I need any special entities or parameters to teach AI's how to relight toggled lights? I have electrical lights in a mansion which are operated by switches on walls... when I turn them off however, the AI doesn't know to go to the switch and light it back on, and just complains about the lights going out. Many missions do that so I figure it's just some property.

[grayman]

Relighting Lights in the Wiki

[MirceaKitsune]

Relighting Lights in the Wiki

 

Silly me: I was using "canLightTorches 1" and expecting that to work for switches as well Thanks.

[Obsttorte]

There are also particle effects you can use for moon rays etc. Use a func_emitter.

 

The interior of that ship mission was mapped, so you have to ask the author whether you can reuse it.

 

Doors can be found in the prefabs (under, uhm, doors ). If you setup two of them so they touch the same visportal they will automatically work as double doors. The code handles this behaviour. Doors that look like barn doors can be found under models/architecture/door and entities/darkmod/movers/doors respectively. If there is nothing that meets your ideas you have to create them yourself.

 

There are a couple of missions which are using skyboxes with buildings inside. I think the second part of the William Steele series by grayman does it as well as Sothas mission Mandrasola. But you can also create one yourself.