Newbie DarkRadiant Questions

[Baddcog]

I'd probably have to second Aluminum on that.

 

While it might suck to think about redoing everything it'll probably be alot faster than trying to fix all unsnapped brushes. Believe me, you wouldn't be the first one to learn that mistake the hard way (or the second one for that matter, lol).

I've spent days chasing leak errors trying to fix something, then only hours just redoing it anyway.

 

And with this engine you HAVE to be sealed properly or performance will tank. Sounds like you're using a 'box around your map too' (leak preventer). While that works it won't stop internal leaks so it's a bad practice to get in the habit of. Much better to learn propper sealing techniques right off the bat.

 

But be sure to make sure the grid snap is TURNED ON. Most likely it was off, so while you thought you were getting close to the grid you weren't snapped. And there's really no way to be on the grid without snap.

Same goes for clipping, if the grid is on the tool will ONLY cut on grid marks.

[KaiserJohan]

How do you turn n "snap to grid by default"? Seriously, not having this on caused tons and tooonnns of errors for me in the past, would love to have it always on. (why isn't it default???)

[Serpentine]

Snap to grid is always the default really(tho a few tools dont use the grid due to their operation, i.e subtract), just people often set low grid size then zoom out and assume its set to something manageable (>1)

 

Press 1 and don't go lower unless you ~need~ to... and avoid subtracting, as that will never conform to the grid.

 

Worst comes to worst you can snap your entire map and every vertex to grid if you want to (may cause a few leaks, but easy to fix)

[KaiserJohan]

By the way, I googled this and check it out:

 

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=21374&view=next

 

It explains many of the AI spawnargs, something I couldn't find before, might be usefull to someone

 

(made by springheel!)

[aidakeeley]

Might I ask someone with the gift of the gab (or rather the capacity of the clear & concise) to fill out the [url="http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Glossary"]Glossary[/url] a bit further for those of us in the Neophytic Order Of Beginners?

Terms especially confusing/confused at the mo':

Entity
Model
Prefab

..there are others (all of these shader/texture/map things) of course, but right now I'd like to know which of these I'm supposed to use to drop into a blueroom soes I kin giv my frickin playa a frickin telescope.

[Dragofer]

As you can use the telescope and have it in your inventory I believe it is an entity, which can be found under create entity > darkmod > playertools > atdm:playertools_spyglass.

 

I'd have been surprised if there was no z-fighting. Anyway, I uniformly thickened all the walls to at least 8 units, sometimes more. Now is still a good time to do this kind of work.

 

I've had a look at my map to check if what has been said is true. To begin with, my grid lock was never turned off, so everything is on at least 0.25 grid (unless there are some exceptions, i.e. door/windowframes or the glass area which I can easily modify or infact do without as I'm just trying new ideas at the moment). To double-check, my clipper tool and every other form of manipulation stuck to the grid like superglue. I think what was meant with the "unsnapped" stuff was the roof and other slanted brushes, which have a gradient that isn't equal to 1. Ironically, the roof has no problems as it is.

 

I think I'd be more willing to accept Fidcal's explanation. His suggestion of resizing and slightly rebuilding areas (for example covering up troublesome brushes with other, new ones) almost completely removed these rendering errors to the point of maximally 3-4 pixels remaining, if any. Tinkering with the lights also diminished errors. I'm confident that the moment I start visportalling, it will be gone completely. Besides, I am confused that I am advised to restart, considering that it is just a matter of trial and error and finetuning, as well as the fact that editing it is just a matter of resizing current brushes rather than drawing and positioning them all over again. I'd probably go insane or something if I had to do it again because I probably lack the machine-like speed of someone who has several maps under their belt. And I'd be doing it for something that to me is hardly a step above an unanti-aliased edge in terms of annoyance. It appears that the cause of the problem is something else.

 

In any case, in 2, 3 or maybe more years TDM will have advanced far enough to support finer alignments the first way round.

 

Almost all of the backward triangle messages started appearing after I began working on that portico at the front. It was said that they were unimportant, so I guess it can be left aside for now.

 

Internal leaks causing performance drops, I never heard of that before. I will inevitably have a box around the house to work as a skybox (white fog, light snow and a concrete/snow texture for the sky as stated in the A-Z tutorial give an effect that is in line with what I would like) and probably another box connected to it via a tunnel. It also makes testing the map easier. But internal leaks? I suppose I could work on that, but I'm surprised to hear it. I've been getting exactly the same framerate (63 fps) since I started.

 

To stick with the spirit of the thread, I'd like to know if there is a way I can resolve these missing slivers of which there are currently 2. They extend across many different brushes, always in straight lines and they change their shapes even when I don't recall having worked on that area. Standing on them removes all sound, and looking at them from behind makes them look normal again. As if someone caulked one face of the brush. The strange thing though is that there is nothing visible to me in DR that shows them. That difficulty might warrant a complete rebuild of the affected area. Is there anything I can do to try and avoid it?

 

Also, is there a way I can make the compass rotate i.e. 1.5 times as fast as normal so it becomes out of line with the real directions?

[Tels]

Might I ask someone with the gift of the gab (or rather the capacity of the clear & concise) to fill out the Glossary a bit further for those of us in the Neophytic Order Of Beginners?

 

Terms especially confusing/confused at the mo':

 

Entity

Model

Prefab

 

..there are others (all of these shader/texture/map things) of course, but right now I'd like to know which of these I'm supposed to use to drop into a blueroom soes I kin giv my frickin playa a frickin telescope.

 

Have you tried using the startpack?

 

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Startpack_Mappers'_Guide

 

If not, you really should.

[Tels]

... I'm confident that the moment I start visportalling,...

 

I am confident, too. Because your first mistake is not vizportaling. Anything else follows from that.

 

If you have no vizportals, then everything is visible everytime, which not only stresses the system resources (even if it works on your system), but can also cause a host of other errors, like missing stripes, and so on. Even the AI will have difficuluties, because the floor area (AAS) is restricted, and you will likely hit it (maybe not with guards, but definitely with rats which use a smaller grid).

 

Also, without vizportals you cannot have "per-area" ambient light, and you have no proper sound propagation (e.g. from sound sources to the player and back from the player to the AI - sound will travel straigh through walls).

 

(See here http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Location_Settings)

 

The "internal leaks" refer to the fact that you can have two closed-off areas, but there is a small tiny crack linking them, causing the leak between the areas, rendering the vizportaling void. Since you have no vizportals yet, this is not a problem for you (yet).

 

However, I cannot stress this point hard enough: Start vizportaling you map NOW! You will only regret it more the longer you carry on without it. (A side effect of early vizportaling is that you generate a "good" floorplan where the portals seal each area against all others - without this (either specifically created, or "followed-by-trial-and-error") plan you might well create a mission that becomes impossible to portal later on - which will only to the scraping of the entire thing.

[Fidcal]

To be fair I don't think his not visportalling is a 'mistake' but he just hadn't got to it yet. Now's a good time though because once you start adding entities and AI it will slow right down. I usually visportal various sections once I have the basic terrain.

 

Regarding the rendering errors Dragofer, did you do what AH said about the lights @ http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/9082-newbie-darkradiant-questions/page__view__findpost__p__223621 he said that fixed it.

 

It is essential to have one big ambient light named ambient_world covering all of your map otherwise players with the fast ambient setting will see only black in areas where there is only ambient light. So it makes sense to put that in at the start, perhaps make it a little brighter and use it as a development light. Once you have reached the stage where you want to start lighting the map properly then that can be reduced to the standard shown in the trainer map gamma room so everyone sees your map the same as you. This also saves having to remove lots of development lights.

[Fidcal]

Might I ask someone with the gift of the gab (or rather the capacity of the clear & concise) to fill out the Glossary a bit further for those of us in the Neophytic Order Of Beginners?

 

Terms especially confusing/confused at the mo':

 

Entity

Model

Prefab

 

 

Done

[aidakeeley]

As you can use the telescope and have it in your inventory I believe it is an entity, which can be found under create entity > darkmod > playertools > atdm:playertools_spyglass.

 

Have you tried using the startpack?

 

Done

 

Great! Thanks Dragofer, Tels & Fidcal, all! I'm off to do some reading, downloading and general messing about

[Melan]

One of us! One of us! One of us!

[AluminumHaste]

Okay I see what you mean about stuff snapped to grid at 0.025, but that's too low, and really really really unnecessary.

You should use grid size 8 as your minimum and as Fidcal said use lower grid size if you need to.

 

I'm not sure if the Doom 3 compiler can optimize correctly with stuff at such a low grid setting. It's definitely one of the reasons you are seeing the "stars" in your geometry.

 

Also never use csg_subtract unless you have too, because the resulting brushes generated are horribly inefficient. It's always better to try and build a piece of geometry without subtracting, plus it's good experience to figure out clever ways of building.

 

I like the house btw, I'm not saying it's terrible or anything. I made the exact same mistakes not once, not twice, but at least on three different maps. People kept telling me, don't subtract don't subtract, snap to at least 8 grid units etc. I have to say after listening to them I was able to create things that also 1) compiled fast and 2) ran better in game. Such as my Cathedral map for example.

It's huge, has AI and lights and stuff, but still was able to run at over 25 fps with everything maxed.

 

Here is an example: http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/8217/shot00017lj.jpg

[rich_is_bored]

I think the reason working primarily on a large grid size and avoiding CSG subtract are considered good practice is because of the way brushes are stored in a map file.

 

The vertex positions of a brush face are not stored. Instead the faces are stored as infinite planes defined by a surface normal that's offset from the origin of the map. Vertex positions are derived by figuring out where these infinite planes intersect.

 

Then you have the level of precision issues inherent to computing where values occasionally need to be rounded to fit into allocated memory. It's a bit like trying to get from point A to point B with nothing but a compass and a heading. If the heading is off, the farther you travel the larger the margin of error.

[stumpy]

i only use the smallest grid size for sticking decal patches near walls and aligning door handles, and getting the lock handle in the rght place for the froblock to jiggle it.

[Manwe]

Hello all, I'd like to use the female model present in the heart of lone salvation mission, but I have no idea how to get it into my map. I can't find it when I open up the map with the editor. Is there a simple way to get that model into my mission ? I just need a female character even if the voices don't work.

 

Thank you.

[Dragofer]

I think you have to select the female model in DR in the Lone Salvation mission, then go to file and click on "save selected as prefab". Then you go to your mission and right-click somewhere on your map in orthoview and select "insert prefab" and find wherever you saved the female.

 

I took a look into this grid business. To begin with, my (outside) walls are now 16 units thick. Reworking the glass dome into something simpler as well as the walls also got rid of all the missing slivers. And starry stuff at the doorframes is now a thing of the past . So I decided to commence visportalling which worked yesterday in terms of appearing at r_showportals... but when I loaded the save I'm sure I made this morning all of them were gone, they didn't show up. Could this be because of internal leaks?

 

Anyway, I decided to go into the texturing business as well. I think I followed all the steps of creating a texture successfully, yet it doesn't show up in the editor. Now, in my Doom3/textures/darkmod/wood/boards folder I have the following files:

 

woodfineorig.jpg (backup)

woodfine.jpg

woodfinegrey.jpg

woodfine_ed.jpg

woodfine.dds

woodfine_s.dds

woodfine.tga

woodfine_local.tga

tdm_woodfine.mtr

 

And this is the content of the .mtr file (which was renamed from a .txt file)

 

 

textures/darkmod/wood/boards/woodfine

{

description "wood"

qer_editorimage textures/darkmod/wood/boards/woodfine_ed

bumpmap textures/darkmod/wood/boards/woodfine_local

diffusemap textures/darkmod/wood/boards/woodfine

specularmap textures/darkmod/wood/boards/woodfine_s

{

if ( parm11 > 0 )

blend gl_dst_color, gl_one

map _white.tga

rgb 0.40 * parm11

}

{

if ( parm11 > 0 )

blend add

map textures/darkmod/wood/boards/woodfine

rgb 0.15 * parm11

}

}

 

I was told to make a textures and materials folder. I have the same .mtr file in both, under the same folder structure (darkmod/wood/boards), as I'm extremely unsure where it goes. I definitely think that DR is a whole lot user-friendlier and tons easier to find help on than other editors like Blender (do they even have any support for new users, i.e. how to pan the camera? /rhetorical question). But this is still quite mind-boggling :/.

[Baddcog]

@Dragofer,

 

I didn't look at your map. Just suggested a rebuild due to the fact that when you start chasing around this fix and that fix you can end up running in circles and making things worse, which takes longer in some cases then just starting over.

So it's really up to you and how bad the issues are/ etc...

 

Deffinately stay at a larger grid though. I try to build all my walls at 16 or so. Basically this keeps all the major details tight on the grid and makes portalling alot easier (as the leaks will be big enough to actually see in editor).

Then trim can be done at 0.25 for fine detail if you want, that stuff will all be func_static so it won't leak.

Your level should be a very blocky simple construction, then you add details and patches, etc.. to make it look nice.

 

I 'Internal leaks' would be leaks from one room to the next when you have a visportal (in a doorway/hallway/etc..)between them. Basically after visportalling you will have a bunch of small areas. They all need to be leak free so the visportals work.

 

(as opposed to 'external leak' which would be an entity leaking into the void)

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

I have a 're-newb' question.

 

I can't get my tex alignments, I thought there was a tool to 'rotate 90', etc... but I can't find it in editor or wiki.

 

Ha, now I find the 'surface' editor, nevermind.

[Baddcog]

I think you have to select the female model in DR in the Lone Salvation mission, then go to file and click on "save selected as prefab". Then you go to your mission and right-click somewhere on your map in orthoview and select "insert prefab" and find wherever you saved the female.

 

I took a look into this grid business. To begin with, my (outside) walls are now 16 units thick. Reworking the glass dome into something simpler as well as the walls also got rid of all the missing slivers. And starry stuff at the doorframes is now a thing of the past . So I decided to commence visportalling which worked yesterday in terms of appearing at r_showportals... but when I loaded the save I'm sure I made this morning all of them were gone, they didn't show up. Could this be because of internal leaks?

 

Anyway, I decided to go into the texturing business as well. I think I followed all the steps of creating a texture successfully, yet it doesn't show up in the editor. Now, in my Doom3/textures/darkmod/wood/boards folder I have the following files:

 

woodfineorig.jpg (backup)

woodfine.jpg

woodfinegrey.jpg

woodfine_ed.jpg

woodfine.dds

woodfine_s.dds

woodfine.tga

woodfine_local.tga

tdm_woodfine.mtr

 

And this is the content of the .mtr file (which was renamed from a .txt file)

 

 

textures/darkmod/wood/boards/woodfine

{

description "wood"

qer_editorimage textures/darkmod/wood/boards/woodfine_ed

bumpmap textures/darkmod/wood/boards/woodfine_local

diffusemap textures/darkmod/wood/boards/woodfine

specularmap textures/darkmod/wood/boards/woodfine_s

{

if ( parm11 > 0 )

blend gl_dst_color, gl_one

map _white.tga

rgb 0.40 * parm11

}

{

if ( parm11 > 0 )

blend add

map textures/darkmod/wood/boards/woodfine

rgb 0.15 * parm11

}

}

 

I was told to make a textures and materials folder. I have the same .mtr file in both, under the same folder structure (darkmod/wood/boards), as I'm extremely unsure where it goes. I definitely think that DR is a whole lot user-friendlier and tons easier to find help on than other editors like Blender (do they even have any support for new users, i.e. how to pan the camera? /rhetorical question). But this is still quite mind-boggling :/.

 

 

You actually want the .mtr file inside the

materials folder.

 

The game will read that file and know where your textures that make up that shader are kept.

 

(and the dds file goes into darkmod/dds/textures... )

[AluminumHaste]

i only use the smallest grid size for sticking decal patches near walls and aligning door handles, and getting the lock handle in the rght place for the froblock to jiggle it.

 

That's different, patches (decals included) and entities (models included) aren't subject to the limitations of the map file, so you can use any grid size you want. Entities and patches aren't subject to optimization at compile time AFAIK, so they won't affect you that way.

[Melan]

I am having some trouble with moonbeams in my map. I was working from Mortem Desino's instructions from this thread, and added his prefab beams to my map. Trouble is, it only displays in the editor, and cannot be seen in the game. I have tried to retexture it to sfx/moon_light_rays, sfx/moon_light_rays_dim and sfx/yellow_light_rays, or rebuilding it using cylinder patches, but to to no effect. What could be the problem?

[DeTeEff]

I have discovered something unsettling i've not seen before. If I creep really near the walls and look where two brushes are flush agains each other, the seams between can be seen in the 3D-view...is this normal? I cannot remember I've seen it before? I've tried to use the clipper tool to be really sure there is no gap, but no luck...there is no leak...

[DeTeEff]

[Baddcog]

Could be you'r on too small a grid or the brushes aren't snaped. Select both and ctrl-G.

 

It also might be that the renderer in the editor is not as good as the one in game.

[AluminumHaste]

 

If that's in DarkRadiant but doesn't show up in game, then you are fine, just ignore it.