Please ask your basic (newbie) questions in here.

Boreas on 17/4/2005 at 22:57

Quote Posted by SneaksieDave

Boreas, you lost me quickly. You made a room with 6 sheets instead of a block? Why? And, (how) did you tell the editor that the area within was to be air instead of solid? I didn't even know that was possible (is it?). Have you ever successfully ran the map and walked around in it? I'm perplexed.

Thats correct because I thought thats one of the ways to make a room. However I have made a hollow cube right next to it. No, I have not sucessfully ran the map because I have not yet textured the surfaces for both of the geometry that I have made. Ill explore more into making this geometry into "something", I think I may have missed a step since you clued me that I had to tell if it was a solid or air.

Mandrake on 18/4/2005 at 00:07

Quote Posted by Boreas

It sounds like you're not clear on the difference between engines that use constructive geometry (for example the Quake engines) and ones that use subtractive geometry. (dromed and UT)

I know where you're coming from, as my only previous map building experience was Quake 1 which uses CSG. (constructive solid geometry)

In a CSG engine like Quake, the "world" is empty when you start, eg its all free space. To create a single room you would then have to create 6 rectangular sheets with a finite thickness to make up the floor, ceiling, and walls. You would have to be careful to snap them to the grid so they all meet up perfectly to avoid BSP holes. A large enough hole would even allow a player to fall out into the "void" :cheeky:

UT (and dromed too) uses subtractive geometry which means that to begin with, the world is FULL of one huge solid slab of material, and you have to SUBTRACT space out of this slab to give you room to move in.

After subtracting a room you can then ADD objects within the subtracted space.

Why do things this way ? Because its more efficient in terms of vertexes, and its also more intuitive for making "indoor" levels.

With the CSG approach, you need 6 sheets (brushes) of finite thickness, which means each sheet has 8 vertexes, (since its not infinitely thin) and 6 faces, which would need 12 triangles to render.

With subtractive geometry the same thing can be achieved by subtracting ONE rectangular cube, and now you only have EIGHT vertexes defining the room, (instead of 48) and "walls" of infinite thickness. You don't have to worry about snapping the corners to the grid to avoid holes, and if you want to move or change the dimensions of the room you're only manipulating ONE brush instead of many.

There are two basic approaches you can take - one is to use a single large brush to subtract an area big enough for your mission and then build it as if it were a CSG engine using additive brushes, but this is generally frowned on as inefficient.

The second and better way is to use subtractive brushes where needed to hollow out the main room areas and then use additive brushes to add back in the needed coarse details. (With static meshes for fine details)

It took me a little while to wrap my head around the subtractive building approach, but once you get the hang of it, you'll wonder why any engines ever did it the other way around :cheeky:

Boreas on 18/4/2005 at 03:51

Thanks that was very helpful! Ill take another shot at it.

str8g8 on 18/4/2005 at 11:21

Quote:

The textures need to be in the PCTextures AND Textures. If you have subdirectories then that subdirectory needs to be copied as well.

Thanks, that works (though it's quite a chore). However, I am getting mixed resultls using custom textures. For instance, I have created .dds files, created a new utx package to keep them separate from the official textures and so on, and when I come to use them the fleshrenderer in the editor doesn't seem to like them, ie. it shows the default grey blobby textures in the viewport. However, when I test the level, the textures are there! And back in the editor when I switch back to a normal textured view, they are there too. This would be ok, except I am using a 9800 pro and get a lot of crashes with the default texturer, and so was trying to stick the the flesh renderer!

Anyway, I'm thinking there are maybe some options in the .dds save as dialog that I can choose that the editor prefers - there are a lot of options in there, after all. Does anyone have any information on this?

Also, how does the editor go about linking diffuse maps and normal maps - do you have to use 3ds max and the create matlibs?

cheers
str8g8

Kin on 18/4/2005 at 11:34

Quote Posted by Mandrake

What zip files ?

Given that there are no T3 fm's out yet, and the method of distribution and file structure for fm's has not yet been fully worked out, it's hard to know what you refer to.

If the zip contains a .unr file, then you need to place it in the maps directory and load it into the editor then compile/run it.

I meant 1 zip file on the tread with the unfinished mission for T3

But editor crashes when i try to play the mission. It shows the loading screen but when the bar fills i hit enter and crashes to desktop.

sirbalu on 18/4/2005 at 11:53

Hi! :cool:

I have a problem with freehand polygon drawing. I put the vertexes on the grid, then right-click, Create Brush. The brush I get is usually ok, but sometimes the editor draws not only the outline of the brush (for example a hexagon), but diagonals as well. This ruins the whole stuff, because after substracting the bottom of the brush is gone or are big holes on it.(and through these you can see the nice blue grid of the editor in Fleshrender mode. :wot: )

mol on 18/4/2005 at 13:31

The Static Mesh browser in T3Ed is awkward to use due to the way the viewport behaves. It's difficult to get a sense (and sometimes even find) of the mesh in the viewport, and takes forever to get a sense what kind of meshes are available.

Is there any other way to browse through the static meshes, see what they look like, have them categorized if possible, with some properties like dimensional info next to them? It would be extremely useful to have something like that. Would it be difficult to construct an external static mesh browser, simply for the sake of learning what they look like and what's available?

Or is there a simple way to do that, which I'm just not aware of?

SneaksieDave on 18/4/2005 at 14:59

sirbalu, be sure you are laying down the vertices in a way that goes around your brush. Does that make sense? Hm. What I mean is, don't just lay points whereever you need them, but actually lay them as if you were tracing the outside of the brush.

If you want to make a square, for instance (follow the numbers):

Don't:

1 3
2 4

Do:

1 2
4 3

I've found that usually prevents what you describe.

Mandrake on 18/4/2005 at 20:02

Quote Posted by Kin

Do you mean Krypt's unfinished mission ?

In that case did you happen to notice where he said that after his most recent changes that it would load in the editor but crash in the game ? Someone further down the thread released a "fixed" version of it that does actually run in the game...

Hogwash on 19/4/2005 at 11:14

Can anybody help me with a simple 3DSMAX task?

Basically, I am looking for an online tutorial or some simple instructions from you guys for making a very simple object (i.e. a crate) in 3DSMAX, texturing it, and then importing it into the editor. All of the tutorials I've looked at are for far more complicated tasks such as animating humans and dealing with more complex objects. I just want to make a textured crate that I can import as a static mesh.

Cheers.