Please ask your basic (newbie) questions in here. - by scumble
Beleg Cúthalion on 23/10/2007 at 09:09
Sorry for dp, but I feel a little unregarded. :p
While we're still working on that sounds issue, I'd like to hear your opinions about both the MP changes like Garrett's movement (since everyone criticises it...and I have to admit the MP made it much better) and on the other hand the textures. Left alone the John-P issue, I tried to copy str8g8's textures and smeshes into the right directories, but while the smeshes show up, neither their textures nor the "real" textures are found (just white squares), although I checked the directories twice and even used the paths from the zip files. Str8g8 already told me that T3Ed was a little tricky with things like these, but maybe you have an idea. 3D Studio Max 5 is also missing, of course...:erg:
And one more thing that I underestimated in my post before the last: I cannot try the map in the real game. I changed the entry.unr and made all the other things that Komag instructed, but it still won't work – it's the Blue Heron Inn starting. But I DO know that it changed something, since I'm able to change the difficulty level. Again, I checked everything twice, Teleport maps and all the things, and even deleted the old gmp-files to do it again – still no success. Is anyone smarter than I am? :weird:
str8g8 on 23/10/2007 at 11:39
As always start simple. Can you export and play a simple map from the tutorial, ie just a room with a light etc? Can you export and play one of the OM missions? If not there is something wrong with your setup and you should uninstall and reinstall. I recommend the dual install method outlined on the wiki. It becomes especially useful when you need to test your distro.
Once you get that sorted you can think about modding T3. You might be better off looking at T3Enhanced which does all the MP tweaks plus some other things as well to make editing easier.
Adding textures should be relatively easy, music more tricky, but get your export working first :)
Beleg Cúthalion on 23/10/2007 at 13:14
Mea culpa! I did not expand the Non-Local Props where the real EnterMission things were. After that it worked fine. I'm a little angry about myself...too much flippancy. :erm:
Now I've browsed the whole MP & T3EnhancEd thread but there is no link working and it appears to me that there is (still) no real/finished T3EnhancEd. Do you have something for me, since it actually appears to be a better version...?
PS: Before asking too many questions I will turn to the Wiki now, double-check the BSP tutorials and try to start building something on my own. :)
PPS: Even before turning to the Wiki I'd like to ask what became of the Thief3SoundAddOn.zip (no link working either) I just read about which could help me with my custom ambient music issue...?
str8g8 on 23/10/2007 at 14:53
I see New Horizon has taken down Enhanced, not sure why ...
Not sure about the sound add on - if the link is dead, well ... possibly someone out there may have have downloaded it and could make it available again ... or you can pm the creators if they're still active.
My advise is to keep it simple for the first map at least. Adding sound effects\music is at the trickier end of the scale.
Are you still having problems with my resource pack? Have you set up the editor to use PCTextures rather than Textures (I suggest you do so - then you don't have to maintain both texture folders - the source of many problems). I can't remember how to do it but it's probably in the wiki or in these forums. Failing that, copy the contents of the new "custom" textures path in the Textures folder.
Beleg Cúthalion on 23/10/2007 at 17:03
The problem with a first simple mission is that I feel myself under pressure...after all you had the big time of exploration about two years ago (I feel like I'd have to start off where ascottk and all the others ended up, if I wish to gain profit from the rope arrow experiments and other things), the Dark Mod is coming etc... We'll see. I guess I can start building a map just with BSPs and all that, which should be simple but time-consuming, and care for the technical matters afterwards...in fact, the reason why I'm asking so many questions now is that I don't want to notice at a later date that I should have done something differently right from the start and now have to do all the work again.
Concerning the textures, I put them into both directories, as your readme told me, but I'll have to search for the one-texture-folder-thing since the Wiki is not the most user friendly thing in the world....or at least I didn't find anything right now, plus I am waiting for the train...:p
But anyway, thanks very much for your assistance. :)
Ziemanskye on 23/10/2007 at 17:44
With regards to the white textures: did you dl the *correct* texture pack? Sounds dumb I know, but a while back str8g8 made an "empty" texturepack/matlib for people who didn't have Max5.1 to use, with placeholder white squares for textures.
This is in contrast to any textures for The Bridge, which look pretty and all but were designed to be used as is, rather than having to swap out the white textures for the actual diffuce & normal maps that you wanted.
As for learning to build properly, there's only a few things I'd recommend you get "right" from the off.
1. Get the scale right - the gap for a door is 128UU high and 4 wide, but a normal sized room is 192UU high. Horizontal scale is a bit more variable, but in general a corridor 128UU wide is the narrow style I tend to use, and 256 for a room. Walls 16 thick (so door frames show on both sides), and the gap between the ceiling of one level and the floor of the next is easiest to work with when it's 64 - that way you can put stairs in easy, and you can poke smeshes partly into the gap without causing problems above/below.
2. Learn to use Portals correctly. The UDN2 guide is misleading, but in general you want to keep them small, have (only) one covering each doorway (window/vent/whatever), and one capping both ends of any junction - so an L shaped corridor has 2 portals, forming a box on the corner, while a T shape would have 3 forming a box at the junction. Keep them rectangular, and, where possible, vertical, since the engine bizarrely doesn't like them as much when they're not. Finally on the subject (for now) try not to arrange things so the engine is looking straight through too many - there's not a lot of point having them every 256 units along a straight corridor for example, because there comes a point where they hurt performance more than they help it.
3. Learn to *not* use lights. The performance of the engine drops drastically when there are more than 6 lights visible to the engine, which does *not* mean visible to the player - this is a large part of why you need to get the Portals right. Learning to use the lights "properly" as a whole is time consuming and a bit awkward, but the easy version is just to plan to not use lights - unlit textures like the windows, particle effects, a Minimum Light setting, screen tint effects, and even just using the right skybox can drastically cut down the number of actual lights you need to make a scene appear brighter than it actually is.
As for T3EnEd, well, I think it was dead before it hit the ground because of being a rather larger dl for the editor, and then again for any FMs made with it to be playable on the users side, as far as I remember. I am however biased against it so I may be mis-remembering it. Eitherway though, not much ever came of/from it.
GlasWolf on 23/10/2007 at 18:10
Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion
Even before turning to the Wiki I'd like to ask what became of the
Thief3SoundAddOn.zip (no link working either) I just read about which could help me with my custom ambient music issue...?
I've mirrored it (
http://www.glaswolf.net/thief/Thief3SoundAddOn.zip) here.
Beleg Cúthalion on 23/10/2007 at 19:26
Thank you, GlasWolf, I'll check it out.
Quote Posted by Ziemanskye
With regards to the white textures: did you dl the *correct* texture pack? Sounds dumb I know, but a while back str8g8 made an "empty" texturepack/matlib for people who didn't have Max5.1 to use, with placeholder white squares for textures.
Well, at least I
think that I took the right one. :erm: Str8g8's description said that there were
additional placeholders (and by the way there were only two downloads on his page; textures and smeshes iirc), but even if I installed the wrong ones, the smeshes don't have their textures either which appeared to me as the same (kind of) problem.
PS: Heureka! We did it...now I can hear a little compilation of Ramirez/Assassins music as TDS soundtrack in my little kinky tutorial mission. Thanks again! :) I think either via Patchwise or a little instruction I could use this even for an FM.
CrackedGear on 26/11/2007 at 23:43
eyes bigger than stomach syndrome here. I'm trying to make what is essentially a forest level, and I'm having some trouble figuring out how to do the walls. what I mean is I want to have the player walking down a path in the woods, and be able to look to either side and see dense forest blocking movement and line of sight. But since t3ed wasn't designed for this sort of thing, it never quite looks right. A skybox looks too artificial, unless maybe its possible to have multiple skyboxes. So far my solution has been to cram in tons of tree static meshes, but there has to be a better way. any suggestions?
str8g8 on 27/11/2007 at 11:10
Yeah, that is possibly the hardest thing to do with this engine I think :) And not just from a visual perspective.
For instance, how are you going to make sure the player keeps to your path? You can try and block the player as you suggest, but policing it will be annoying - there will always be gaps that inventive players will slip through. You would have to resort to invisible walls or something - always an unsatisfactory thing in games.
As far as visuals go, it is possible (just difficult) to create the illusion of a forest, as long as you don't get too close. What you need to do is think of it like a stage set, and think in layers. Closest to the path, you have a line of big (reletively) expensive 3d smeshes. Behind that you have a line of cheap trees (you will have to make these yourself). These could be basically 2d cardboard cut outs, either using an alpha texture (expensive) or even a low-poly silhouette (cheaper). The final layer could be in the sky box, or the sides of your bsp with your forest texture on it. The layers will create the necessary parallax effect and using plenty of fog will give you some depth, and hopefully you should be able to pull it off.
Performance wise, you need to plan the level to make sure it will portalise, so make sure your path twists and turns. So even though you are creating a forest, you need to visualise the bsp as corridor > room > corridor > etc, ie. path > glade > path.
Another difficulty would be creating a natural terrain (a feature of unreal missing from T3ed) but some creative bsp and smesh placement might work, or else you could create pieces of terrain as smeshes.
Check out the screenshot threads for some stuff Judith (I think) did set in a forest. It looked good as I recall. :)
