DoubleOh's First FM

[DoubleOhZero]

Hi there,

 

After much consternation and picking apart other people's maps, here are the beginnings of my first FM!

 

I've been messing around with this editor for ages and I finally got down to business and drew some plans, plotted out a story etc and scratched a rough map together.

 

The level is very small, but the idea is to focus on a small area and give it tons of detail and secrets in a very small space. In the top-left you will find the main house, outside the workshop area, bottom right will be a small grove of trees with a children's treehouse in it, overhanging a spring and associated pool feeding a river flowing to the top right that also is used by the workshop when forging. Bottom left will be a natural rock formation with a small cave and the level's start. The fence is just a temporary boundary measure, and idea left behind from the level's draft stages. In reality, the house will be set on the edge of a large lake (which extends out to the north, past farmlands).

 

The general storyline is that the inventor of the fire arrow lives out here with his family. Shortly after the invention was complete, some tragedy befell the inventor's daughter and now he is stricken with grief. His son trains night and day to avenge the daughter's disappearance and the father has abandoned all hope of working again. The PC discovers riches in the house (owing to the invention of the fire arrow) but soon uncovers the truth behind the events and must decide whether to add to the family's troubles or to help alleviate them, all without them knowing, of course.

 

Most of my time in DR has been spend getting used to the specifics of the tool. Much of the geometry that exists is un-optimised and rough, but hopefully can be refined to work in the final version. The last editing session was spent tweaking the scale of objects, and importing masses of models to get an idea of how big the house should be for its purpose. That's the reason that all those models are lying around the place.

 

I have also been experimenting with water and using patches to intersect water brushes, to simulate a gradually descending shoreline under water which will be necessary for the stream, lake and pond. I have also been trying to simulate rocks using brushes but my methods so far have been reliant on the clipper tool and have left me with many thousands of tiny brush shards - not good for sanity or performance, and it will be better to learn to import models from an external application.

 

Some strange things are evident: patches have gaps in them for some reason, brushes are see-through (but only certain ones) and there are generally some odd graphics glitches. Not too sure what to attribute that to.

 

But I have uploaded screenies and the map file so if you want to have a look, go right ahead and enjoy my amateurish fumblings! And if you have any ideas please let me know!

 

Thanks!

 

Since I cannot attach files:

 

https://imgur.com/a/DTN4p - images

 

http://www.filehosting.org/file/details/573584/gh.zip - map file

 

 

[Dragofer]

I quite like your approach to mission-making, there's something special to those outlying wilderness locations and the stories that happen there.

 

Now, for a first map, and in general, I'd advise to put the mapping focus on the house and what goes on inside there. Landscaping - forests, rivers, caves - is more in the 'advanced & tricky' department and in my view it mostly serves decorative purposes. Try adding a second floor to your house and combining that with a manageable yard with a brook, let the player start at the fence. The house, that's really where the good stuff is at.

 

 

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

 

Now on to the technical side:

 

Invisible brushes are something I got a lot in my very first house, six years ago:

 

 

 

 

The culprit: overcomplicated fiddly brushwork. Brushes can be used for detailing, making things like beams, windows and doorframes, but it's best to use neat grid sizes to avoid pushing the engine. Minimum 8 units grid size for walls, for detailwork minimum 2 units, in my opinion.

 

Gaps between patches is something that happens when one patch has more subdivisions than the next - think of it as trying to connect an 8-sided tube to a 24-sided tube. You can use shift+s to manually adjust this.

 

TDM now has a great collection of rocks in its model database so you don't need patches - look for those which have between 750-1500 tris. You can put these together, rotate, shift them to create convincing rock formations with ease. Don't worry about the tri count: once you have one rock in the map, any copies of that cost next to no performance because they share.

Edited May 30, 2016 by Dragofer

[DoubleOhZero]

Thanks for the feedback, especially about the patches and rock model tips.

 

Most of the transparent brushes are much larger than 2 units on a side. For eg the one strip is 177*15*73 units. Then the 11*15*22 brush that sits directly against it is not invisible. So what is going on?

[Dragofer]

The glitch doesn't need to hit the offending brushes - in my screenshot, a sliver was missing out of a big solid floor brush, even though the fiddly brushwork in the doorframes and the front porch was to blame.

 

 

Grid size is about more than just the minimum dimensions, it's also about how easily the brushes fit together and your sanity. You can't see the difference between a brush of 11*15*22 and a brush of 12*16*24, but for the first brush you need to zoom in and get your magnifying glass every time to check if things are aligned properly, while the second brush just snaps neatly into place with any other brushes. Not to mention that the engine can easily handle tens of thousands of brushes like that second one without a hitch.

 

 

Small grid sizes, like 2 units, are useful for things that actually need to be 2 units thick and if you want beams with 6 units thickness instead of 4 or 8 units. For model placement you can go all the way down to 0.125 units with no problems. Otherwise it's much faster and easier on yourself to get into the habit of using 8 or 16 unit grids.

[DoubleOhZero]

Thank you!

 

Okay I have a better understanding of the issue now. I'll just have to re-make the house and make sure the brushes are all a multiple of 4.

 

The problem arose when the angled members of the gable end needed to be approx 22 degrees from the horizontal - this needs the end of the brush to be cut into two because of the concave shape - else there would be z-fighting. You can see this in the brushwork that makes up the apex of the roofs.

[Dragofer]

Yeah, I ended up rebuilding my house as well. Interestingly the second time went very fast, after 30 minutes I had done almost as much as in the first few days. You get much faster with experience.

 

By the way, if you're looking to make another floor under the roof you'd need more height. The inhabitants need a minimum of 112 units from floor to ceiling.

[Destined]

I also had my fair share of problems with roofs. I found a pretty simple solution for roofs of all kinds: You can create a brush, then in the Brush menu select "prism" and choose 3 sides. The resulting prism can be easily modified with vertex points ("v" on the keyboard, when you have selected the brush) to get the structure of a roof (angles etc). Then you simply use the "make room" button and get five brushes that have the shape of the roof you want. The length of the roof can still be changed, only the thickness is difficult. You will again need to work with vertex points to fit the top of the roof together, but it is still much less work than to create a normal brush and to trying to fit it together by rotation.

 

I hope you understand, what I meant. I can also try to make some screenshots to make it clearer, if you want me to.

Edited May 31, 2016 by Destined

[DoubleOhZero]

I had such a perfect roof, then deleted it, lost the backup and I forgot how I did it again.

 

The 'make room' seems to mess things up: pieces don't align etc. SO what I ended up doing was use 'hollow' and the clipper to break off the overlapping pieces, which worked.

 

Now its time to work on re-placing all the models. Will post screenies later.

[Destined]

Too bad, it did not work for you. In order to circumvent the not-aligning problem, I used the snap-to-grid function. This worked well enough for me...

 

The clipping method you used sounds practical. Maybe I will try the next time if it is quicker than the "make room" method.

[DoubleOhZero]

Roof done, all angled correctly and textures aligned!

 

http://imgur.com/a/M6XsS

 

I've decided to stick with the original idea of a single story house for now - a large part of the level is planned to be outside and the house design is modular enough that I can add another floor with little effort.

[DoubleOhZero]

Been working on the house more, and on the exterior too.

 

Tried to get the road tutorial at http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Roads working on a small scale, but I can't seem to get the grass_edge to match the underlying grass texture. It has noshadows 1 and shaderparm3 0.5 but looks like as follows in the editor. I tried tweaking the colour parameter and realigning the textures and messing with the alpha layers, but it doesn't take on the color/texture.

 

Ideas?

 

 

http://imgur.com/a/d9tap

[Dragofer]

Been working on the house more, and on the exterior too.

 

Tried to get the road tutorial at http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Roads working on a small scale, but I can't seem to get the grass_edge to match the underlying grass texture. It has noshadows 1 and shaderparm3 0.5 but looks like as follows in the editor. I tried tweaking the colour parameter and realigning the textures and messing with the alpha layers, but it doesn't take on the color/texture.

 

Ideas?

 

 

http://imgur.com/a/d9tap

 

Just made my own road based on that tutorial - it does make a difference which edge texture exactly you choose, they look the same in the editor but ingame each of them specifies a different colour of grass.

 

There's no edge texture for grass4 yet so I've defined one here, see the attached .mtr file. This belongs into your .../darkmod/materials folder (create if necessary), just remove the .txt ending and remember to include it with your mission when you share or release it.

 

grass4_edge.mtr.txt

Edited June 6, 2016 by Dragofer

[DoubleOhZero]

Thank you so much!

 

I must have missed the bit about defining texture files - are there any article to explain what it is and how to do it?

 

Thanks again!

[Dragofer]

Sure - for textures there is Wiki - Basic Material File but to cut to the chase: a lot of things in TDM are set up via .txt files.

 

For example, for each texture - proper name: material shader - there's a paragraph in an .mtr (renamed .txt) file in one of TDM's .pk4 (renamed .zip) archives that tells the engine which images to use: which diffusemap, which specularmap, which specularmap etc. For other types of assets, like sounds, skins, entities it's the same story.

 

It's quite straightforward to make new shaders out of old ones, for example for that 'new' grass material shader I just copied an existing one and replaced the old grass name with the new name, grass4.

 

Much of the time you don't need to mess with shaders, it's mainly for when you bring new assets into the game, attach special properties to certain textures such as being invisible in normal spectrum light, or in this case for self-help when you see that a certain kind of shader is missing.

Edited June 7, 2016 by Dragofer