Please ask your basic (newbie) questions in here.

nomad of the pacific on 29/4/2011 at 02:08

I was able to climb all five ladders with no problem. I had experienced the problem you've described while making "Knife to the Heart", but have not gotten any bug reports for it. It appears to be a bug within the engine that only appears for the person making the map. Unless someone else reports having experienced the problem while testing your map, I don't think you should worry about it.

When I make my ladders, I never leave the gaps between them. They aren't necessary and they look bad. I suspect the makers of the OMs used them for spacing, but I'm not at all sure of that. In any case, I don't think they are necessary.

Headspin on 29/4/2011 at 13:22

Great, thanks. Now this is worked out I can start making FMs :cheeky:.

GlasWolf on 29/4/2011 at 13:41

I'm playing through Cabal at the moment (great job people!) and have been turning vsync on when using ladders or lockpicking, then off again to improve loading times. Pain in the backside!

Beleg Cúthalion on 30/4/2011 at 08:53

I have a problem setting up my old T3Ed directory. Since ModernLoader cannot handle an already used T3Ed setup, I have to do it the old way and so copied my Thief3Edit back-up into the games folder where TDS is already installed as/in Thief3. I fixed CPU cores for all used executables and told ThiefLauncher where the corresponding directories were. All changes that have to be made according to Komag's tutorial should be done (basically it's just about copying and fixing certain inis/exes – which should all be included when I use my old setup). Still, when I start T3Ed with ThiefLauncher, it freezes/crashes during the splash screen, even before the usual T3Ed setup gets up.

Vanilla T3Ed set up by ModernLoader works (except for the xBox batch file thing), my old T3Ed folder set up by ML loads up T3Ed but doesn't allow going into game mode at all. Any ideas?

Headspin on 30/4/2011 at 19:45

Still playing around with the editor. I've been getting a very persistent error message of the form:

TriangleGroup::load_archetype - Serialized index is out of range

To get rid of the error it seems that removing some of the last smeshes/actors I added is enough. Conversely, right now I have something that works but if I add an AI pawn to it then I get the TriangleGroup error again no matter where I place the pawn.

I take it to mean that the map has exceeded some sort of limit, but which one? The map basically consists of Garrett's place (SQ_int1) merged with the area of SQ that's near the fountain. I deleted almost all the AIs and there are only two left so I don't see that being the problem. FPS is good everywhere. I even looked at the lighting to make sure I didn't have lights hitting too many objects but that didn't solve the problem either. The map has a smaller memory footprint than most of the OMs.

The only thing I've noticed is that if I go to tools->view meshes requiring publishing, there's a long list of meshes that the editor has marked as "dirty". Could this have something to do with the error?

Edit: I tried using "autopublish meshes" and that didn't help so I don't think the problem is related to the dirty meshes list after all.

Beleg Cúthalion on 30/4/2011 at 19:55

The original maps, especially the City sections, are extremely cramed with e.g. scripting and patrol paths. Since deleting objects causes some sort of fragmentation problem (without that we'd have a defrag tool, although some programmer might help), deleting a couple of objects will only help e.g. rendering problems but non which exist because too many objects are only there.

Frankly, this is me speaking about the property limit again, but it might be worth a try to check yours. What numbers does it copy into your T3Main.log when you type dumpinternalpropinfo into the console after starting the game in debug (joystick symbol) mode?

Headspin on 30/4/2011 at 20:20

It's telling me it stored 16810 properties, of which:

-Tag: 2555
-Touching: 1892
-Smesh: 1714
-Objmesh: 1380
-bHidden: 1292
-Group: 948
...

And a long list of other things. Is this the problem then - too many properties?

Edit: Just looking at some of the OMs it seems that they store more properties than my map: Castle2 stores 18947 and Hammerintro1 uses 22355. But I can play those in debug mode without any trouble...

Headspin on 30/4/2011 at 20:47

Problem solved! There were some warning messages just before the error in TMain.log about vertex pools so I increased their number in user.ini. How come my map needs more vertex pools to run than the OMs if I'm using less properties, and is there anything I can do to optimize the use of vertex pools?

Thanks for the tip, I didn't know about this log file.

Beleg Cúthalion on 1/5/2011 at 18:07

No idea, especially since increasing the vertex pools is relatively easy for now (as far as we know) and won't affect your map building significantly.

The limit for used properties plus used-but-freed properties (on top of the list) is about 40,000-45,000. While the (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=91954&p=1172466&viewfull=1#post1172466) T3Ed limit is at 61,440 and the absolute cap at 65,535 creating a savegame throws in app. 1/3 of the existing properties. That's why you have to stop at some point beforehand. This is indeed a point where I'd like to see some hacking or at least map de-frag tool... since you can copy all of a map into the clipboard and paste it as a huge list into notepad, re-arranging the index numbers might (me speaking as a noob programmer) help reducing the count.

Cryllia on 3/5/2011 at 21:00

Hurrah for newbie questions! I'd like to get my hands on the sound files from T3. Garret especially, of course, but the others as well, but I can't seem to find what I need to do to get them. In T2 all you had to do was change the sound.cfg to sound.zip and voila! I get the impression its not so simple for T3? Or am I missing something obvious?

Thanks!
~Cryl