Posts by Defrag

22 going on 12.

Jesus, the animated .gif banner on your page is 3 Megs. No wonder none of the pics would load for a few minutes.. Sort it out.

As for the map: The outside areas like quite pleasing but the inside areas look like they're rather plain and lacking detail. The interior areas look rather boxy and HL1ish. You need to get the look to be smooth going from yard to inside, at the moment it's like night and day in terms of aesthetics. There also seems to be an overuse of coloured lighting (bright green and red doesn't go). Refine the lighting or make it a little more understated imo. Overall it looks decent but needs fleshing out a little more.

Nice flash game.

66% .. not bad for a Scotsman The central and north western states stumped me mostly.

I dropped in here when someone pasted the URL to the HL1 textures redone thread. Good stuff. I put my feet under the desk when I noticed the amount of talented chaps / industry workers milling around.

Must be a lot of lurkers around these here parts

You can't use CS:S stuff. Not everybody has CS:S installed

Bungee, good luck with Insurgency. A dear John letter would've been nice, though

I hate that. Undo + texture face tool with face selected = bug ahoy.

Thanks for posting that batch file. I was having lockups in hanger whilst compiling (crashed vrad, too). With the batch file it runs swimmingly.

Looks like good fun, I love what you've done with the displacement maps -- nice and original. Now, I wonder what would happen if you spawned the buggy in a low grav environment then made a loop the loop using displacement maps?

Quote from mike-0

Yea, nothing happens. Let me try again.

The adjoining brush faces must either share one edge or one brush face must be exactly half the size of the other (as well as touching the other as normal). Check out the snarkpit's tutorial and it'll show you what I mean (regarding the way in which brush surfaces must line up).

Click and look at the picture showing the displacement surfaces lining up.

The Source SDK page also has some info on it.

Cool, I'll check it out when his site actually works again, thanks.

In days gone by I would use the TBCC (Tool Box Compilation Controller) for compiles. It was a sweet tool that would output a .bat file according to the specifications you set using the GUI. There were loads of options for each stage of compilation set by using checkboxes / fields and whatnot. Great little tool. Unfortunately it got abandoned

Triangles work nicely, cheers (I have nightmares thinking back to making a huge rockwall and terrain solely ouf of vertex manipulated triangles...).

To anyone wanting to know how to very quickly achieve the triangle method just do the following:

[*]

[*:3uzmycej]Select a brush that must be changed to triangles

[*:3uzmycej]Select the clipper tool

[*:3uzmycej]Put a clip node on one corner and the other on the opposite corner

[*:3uzmycej]Hit Shift-X a few times to change the clipping mode so it keeps both brushes (both pieces will remain white in the 2D mode)

[*:3uzmycej]Make the cut

[*:3uzmycej]Vertex edit any erroneous vertices back onto the grid

[*:3uzmycej]Save and reload the file to make sure it's still as you intended
[/list]Pretty obvious stuff, but it beats making the triangular brushes by hand and a few chaps here and there may not twig about using the clip tool as a shortcut.

Perhaps they will release an update to Hammer with a lighting preview in future. We can but dream.

Thanks for the reply. I'll have a go at the triangular approach where absolutely necessary -- most of this stuff will be getting redone as models like you said. I guess it wasn't a bad idea to start learning max a few weeks back.

Pics: (apologies for the delay)

Click the thumbnails to view.

Here's what the geometry looks like in the 3D window:

[Blocked Image: http://img114.exs.cx/img114/2892/verticesproblemoa9tj.th.jpg]

Top view of the curves

[Blocked Image: http://img114.exs.cx/img114/3765/verticesproblemob3au.th.jpg]

Zoomed Top view of the vertex errors.

[Blocked Image: http://img114.exs.cx/img114/8713/verticesproblemoc5av.th.jpg]

Fixing those vertex errors and then saving & reloading the map simply reinstates the errors. This isn't much of a problem for simple stuff like the above example, but if you're making a large curved tunnel with bevelled walkways and things like that it gets extremely crappy.

Pretty much what the topic heading indicates. Several people on the level design team for a Source mod I'm working on have noticed precisely the same thing. When editing a complex shape, usually a torus (I keep typing taurus and then editing it ), the vertices of each part are perfectly lined up on the grid and connect with the other pieces of the shape as one might expect. However, save the file and then reopen it and there are tiny vertex errors all over the place.

Initially I just thought this was Hammer being crappy with rounding errors or something like that. Many of you will no doubt have noticed the new Hammer's tendency to make certain brushes appear as if they are not perfectly square at times. When this happens, the brush will appear to have a slight error when zooming out to a certain level. However, the brush is actually fine in these instances.

The problems I'm having actually involve geometry being altered. I initially thought it was perhaps some new feature where Hammer auto-fixes invalid geometry, but I've yet to trigger an invalid solid warning when using map->check for problems. I've never had such a problem using the old Hammer.

Also, has anyone else noticed that func_details currently split world geometry and look as if they are split themselves? When I load my map using sv_cheats and use mat_wireframe 1 it's subdiv city. I've used func_walls and func_illusionaries heavily for light fixtures and complex detail brushes in HL1 and this has never been a problem. I was under the impression that func_details behave exactly like world brushes except they are discarded during compilation when performing cuts/visibility calculations. Does anyone know what the problem is or whether I'm doing something wrong, or is it the compile tools?

I'll go install Photoshop then post a few pics. Didn't realise it wasn't installed otherwise I wouldn't have typed this post without including pics.

Yeah, they changed the directory structure and also added sdk_dm_lockdown.vmf when HL2DM was released. It's currently located in the sdk_content/hl2dm/srcmaps/ folder iirc.

And yeah, the lighting is a bit of a damp squibb in source after having a poke through the Doom3 editor. The integration of Doom3 Ed is astounding, though anything less would've made editing extremely tedious given that lighting is basically the most important part of the game. With Hammer, it's still possible to get by without a lighting preview, but it does the process no favours really. Hammer's encapsulation in steam also slows things down quite a bit and hogs more RAM. I'll be quite interested to see how editors progress from here.

I'll post a few pics tomorrow as I can't show the map I'm working on right now (see siggy ). I've tried using the spotlights with various settings including quadratic, linear, constant (500,000 like valve used for dm_lockdown) and large/small inner/outer angle values.. but I still typically end up with a very intense look sporting big contrasts between light/dark. I'm not sure whether Source is particularly suited to the option of texture lighting either.

*edit - This is the sort of lighting I typically shoot for, nice and warm -- reminiscent of scary one's HLDM maps. http://img142.exs.cx/img142/5082/scorpius22ae.jpg . (Screeny is from someone's WIP map posted on the other forum. Looks very nice, too. )