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Alternative DarkRadiant Setups?


mkultra333

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I'm setting up DarkRadiant for use on a non-TDM project. Previously I was using GtkRadiant. So far it's going well, I have the textures showing in the editor and I've added a new .game file.

 

A couple of quick questions though (I'll probably have more later on.)

 

1. Is there an equivalent of the qer_trans material keyword to make things show up in the editor partially transparent?

 

2. Is there a way to set brushes as structural or detail? It looks as if this option has been removed, it doesn't show up in the brush menu. The wiki article on keyboard shortcuts, http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?..._Keys_%26_Mouse, mentions these functions ("Make Detail" as Ctrl+M, "Make Structural" as Ctrl+Shift+S) but the shortcuts don't work. I notice that when I load maps made in GtkRadiant with the detail flag set, DarkRadiant preserves those flags on future saves, it just doesn't seem to allow you to change them.

Edited by mkultra333
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1. Is there an equivalent of the qer_trans material keyword to make things show up in the editor partially transparent?

I think this keyword has been stripped from the parsers, as D3 doesn't support this keyword anymore, at least I'm not aware of it.

 

In principle, DarkRadiant should be capable of rendering transparent surfaces like decals, but this functionality is broken right now. The renderer code is being worked on, so it's likely that this will be working again in the future.

 

2. Is there a way to set brushes as structural or detail? It looks as if this option has been removed

This has been removed, as the D3 maps don't define any brushes as structural/detail anymore. GtkRadiant was able to do this, but for D3 editing it doesn't make sense to keep such an option in the menus.

 

In an ideal setup, the Brush handling in DarkRadiant would be fully modular, such that it's possible to create a separate brush plugin for other games, replacing the vanilla one designed for D3. But as non-ideal as it is now, the Brush code is woven into the core code, and not replacable by a module. I've been thinking of defining the brush interface more clearly and separate the code out, but it's a lot of work, and there's always been more important stuff to work on.

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I think this keyword has been stripped from the parsers, as D3 doesn't support this keyword anymore, at least I'm not aware of it.

 

In principle, DarkRadiant should be capable of rendering transparent surfaces like decals, but this functionality is broken right now. The renderer code is being worked on, so it's likely that this will be working again in the future.

 

 

This has been removed, as the D3 maps don't define any brushes as structural/detail anymore. GtkRadiant was able to do this, but for D3 editing it doesn't make sense to keep such an option in the menus.

 

In an ideal setup, the Brush handling in DarkRadiant would be fully modular, such that it's possible to create a separate brush plugin for other games, replacing the vanilla one designed for D3. But as non-ideal as it is now, the Brush code is woven into the core code, and not replacable by a module. I've been thinking of defining the brush interface more clearly and separate the code out, but it's a lot of work, and there's always been more important stuff to work on.

 

 

Ok, thanks.

 

The lack of qer_trans is no biggie, especially since I have set the filters to hide the materials I wanted transparent.

 

No detail/structural brush settings is a bit of a problem for me though, since I compile the bsp on a modified Q3Map2, and a simpler structural brush hull is preferred... I may have to try cludging something into the source code after all.

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Checked XrealRadiant out, unfortunately it is just DarkRadiant with a different startup picture, and no "DetailBrush" option. :)

 

Although I checked in their forum and they mentioned something about making the detail geometry a func_static. http://xreal-project.net/?page_id=3/level-.../detail-brushes

 

I don't know about that, I'll have to check.

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No, the structural/detail thingy was a "surface flag", some kind of meta-property for brush faces. D3 ignores them.

 

From MapFile.cpp in the D3 SDK:

// Q2 allowed override of default flags and values, but we don't any more

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I think the similarity is that func_statics don't break up the bsp space, and neither do brushes flagged as detail (in Q3A based engines). Although the big difference is that func_statics are treated as entities, whereas detail brushes are not. At least that's my understand from what I've read today.

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I've added the ability to set the detail flag back. [Edit: To my own version only.] I basically copied the "MakeVisportal" code, except that it goes through the brush faces setting them as detail. Seems to work except I haven't got undo functioning for it, but I haven't tested it very hard yet.

 

Obviously not much use to TDM mappers, but I mention it just in case it comes up for someone else. DarkRadiant is a really cool editor, it'd be neat if it became the defacto map editor for the various Id related open source projects, though I realise this isn't the goal.

Edited by mkultra333
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No, it is not really our goal to support every id game out there. That was GtkRadiant's job, and it failed.

 

To be honest, I don't know too much about old-school Q2/Q3 mapping and the differences to D3, but generally trying to support everything will lead to an ugly and in the end unmaintainable codebase, unless the design is perfect, which is not true yet for DarkRadiant, and less true for GtkRadiant.

 

GtkRadiant is pretty much dead and this is not because there are no mappers wanting to use it, it's just too tiresome for programmers to work with that, it was coded to death. Too much spaghetti and too little comments.

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It is pretty scary. I'm not the greatest programmer in the world, but it is nice to hear that someone else with better skills still thought it was a hard case.

I'm not the greatest programmer either, you live and learn - but I certainly know when I encounter "bad" code which is hard to comprehend and to maintain. I started C++ coding soon after DarkRadiant branched off the GtkRadiant 1.5 codebase, and at first I thought it were my lacking C++ skills which make the code so hard to understand. Now I know better, it is in fact an incomprehensible and fragile construct of cross-class callbacks, spider-web style, everything is homegrown and non-standard, mostly uncommented. The fact that GtkRadiant 1.5 has been maintained and pushed by one single coder (who loved templates) didn't help. I experience it myself - the better you understand your code, the less comments you write, because you figure what you're doing is easy to understand anyway, but that's not true for newcomers.

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The XreaLRadiant is almost the same code as the DarkRadiant with smaller changes all over the place like missing PK3 support, .PNG image file support and other stuff not supported by id Tech 4.

 

We go the same route as Doom 3 concerning the detail brushes issue. The detail flags are ignored and instead we merge func_static entities as detail brushes into the worldspawn entity in the XMap2 map compiler. Quake 4 goes even further and removes the unused detail flags completely from the .map format.

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The XreaLRadiant is almost the same code as the DarkRadiant with smaller changes all over the place like missing PK3 support, .PNG image file support and other stuff not supported by id Tech 4.

 

We go the same route as Doom 3 concerning the detail brushes issue. The detail flags are ignored and instead we merge func_static entities as detail brushes into the worldspawn entity in the XMap2 map compiler. Quake 4 goes even further and removes the unused detail flags completely from the .map format.

 

That is very interesting. XreaLRadiant plus XMap2 could be close to what I need afterall. I'm already using a modified Q3Map2, so it might not be that hard to get XMap2 functioning in my project.

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