BeigeAlertTexasJoin Date: 2013-08-08Member: 186657Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, Pistachionauts
edited July 2014
Sweet! I'm still wrapping my head around the LVL format, and figuring out workarounds for some Blender limitations... but I think I might have a Blender LVL importer in the works soon...
Align to world may work OK, but it stretches texture.
Align to face gets rid of the stretching, but leaves an unaligned mess
Manually incrementing the x offset would take a minute or so if you're really quick. With alt+rmb:
Truncated pyramid-thing:
Looks like a total mess with world or with face alignment:
10 minutes of tinkering by hand to get the exact correct rotation and offset is replaced by 3 clicks of the mouse:
Bottom texture flows smoothly onto adjacent faces. Seam along the top edge. It is not possible to eliminate seams in this case because it would require cutting everything up into triangles and stretching the texture differently on different triangles. E.g. like UV-unwrap in blender does.
Align to world may work OK, but it stretches texture.
Align to face gets rid of the stretching, but leaves an unaligned mess
Manually incrementing the x offset would take a minute or so if you're really quick. With alt+rmb:
Truncated pyramid-thing:
Looks like a total mess with world or with face alignment:
10 minutes of tinkering by hand to get the exact correct rotation and offset is replaced by 3 clicks of the mouse:
Bottom texture flows smoothly onto adjacent faces. Seam along the top edge. It is not possible to eliminate seams in this case because it would require cutting everything up into triangles and stretching the texture differently on different triangles. E.g. like UV-unwrap in blender does.
If I choose a viewpoint like "Top", I want everything I draw from that viewpoint to stay in one fucking plane, please.
Oooh that reminds me! Orthographic views... I do NOT want to see the skybox in these views. I usually don't work in wireframe mode, so the skybox gets in the way of every angle except perspective.
If I choose a viewpoint like "Top", I want everything I draw from that viewpoint to stay in one fucking plane, please.
Oooh that reminds me! Orthographic views... I do NOT want to see the skybox in these views. I usually don't work in wireframe mode, so the skybox gets in the way of every angle except perspective.
About the wireframe.
I want to be able to see more than a really tiny section of it when aiming somwhere with a tool (line, rectangle, etc.).
I want to be able to force aligning to a plane while using one of those tools. Click + drag to draw something, mousewheel to scroll between Force X Plane/Force Y Plane/Force Z Plane/Force no Plane while dragging.
I want to be able to select how far from my viewpoint I am going to start drawing, so it's not IN MY FACE every time (seriously, try drawing a new square on 2048 grid. Impossible.). I want to be able to "zoom" the starting point to or away from the camera with the mouse wheel. (If you use the mouse wheel to navigate, fuck you. Use WASD and learn to use hotkeys.). Connected to that, if I get a decent preview about the wireframe when I'm starting to draw something, I do NOT want it to suddenly snap back RIGHT INTO MY FACE again when clicking.
Thank you.
edit:
Furthermore, Props need to be categorized and organized in a folder like structure. With filters. Entities could do with a fav function, because frankly, you only use 5 out of those 100. (Who would ever want to pre-place a phasegate on his map...?). While you're doing that, add a folder function to layer organization. Thanks. And give me a way to view the origin of the wireframe. And the possibility to not snap the CENTER of a selection to the wireframe, but instead a vertex that previously WAS on the wireframe, or at least a vertex of my choice.
Please make the quick map test tool official, and give me a way to preview the minimap in-editor. While you're at it, make props show up on the minimap, and let me export and import that map to .png, so I can edit it in photoshop.
Callback to props and entities: Finding textures is terrible right now. The only way to find a texture is knowing the first few letters. I mean, who knows the first few letters of a texture file? That was a rhetorical question. At least give me the ability to search for them like for props.
(To illustrate this: If you know the prop you want is from refinery, you type in "refinery", because every prop has the map it's on in it's name. If you type in "refinery" to the texture tool, though, you only get textures which start with the string "refinery". So, basically, none.)
Thank you very much.
edit2: Also, please fix this annoying issue where you can not create a face between 4 clearly connected lines that are lying in one plane. And fix the metric system. And make it so my textures and not so horrendously TINY when I create them (0.25. dafuck?). Make create and flip face work even when the "select" tool is not selected. Make flipping work properly (try it on props).
Oh, and last but not least, let me define my own layer colors, please. Currently you run out of colors rather quickly.
Thank you so much.
/rant
edit3: And give the little x/y/z axises (? whats the plural of axis? axes?) a description, so you dont mess up x, y and z all the time.
edit4: An option to turn all layers invisible and an option to invert the visible and nonvisible layers
And the possibility to not snap the CENTER of a selection to the wireframe, but instead a vertex that previously WAS on the wireframe, or at least a vertex of my choice.
What you can do is copy + paste ONE vertex, snap that to a grid, then use our very good friend "vertex snap drag thingamajigger" to line it up
Please make the quick map test tool official, and give me a way to preview the minimap in-editor.
As much as I want this too, it sort of flies in the face of keeping the editor "spark" instead of "ns2". You'll notice everything in the editor that's specific to ns2 is defined in the editor_setup.xml file. None of it is hard-coded into the editor, to my knowledge. I might look into writing a batch or program or whatever to automatically preview the overview for you.
Callback to props and entities: Finding textures is terrible right now. The only way to find a texture is knowing the first few letters. I mean, who knows the first few letters of a texture file? That was a rhetorical question. At least give me the ability to search for them like for props.
(To illustrate this: If you know the prop you want is from refinery, you type in "refinery", because every prop has the map it's on in it's name. If you type in "refinery" to the texture tool, though, you only get textures which start with the string "refinery". So, basically, none.)
Erm... you CAN search for textures... Not sure what's giving you trouble with that. I can type in "refin wall" and it'll show all the refinery wall textures it can find. (Note: you should use "refin" instead of "refinery" as some of the textures are, for some reason, categorized under "refining", and using "refinery" will filter them out.
edit2: Also, please fix this annoying issue where you can not create a face between 4 clearly connected lines that are lying in one plane.
I've never had an issue creating a face from 4 edges that are perfectly planar. I suspect you're seeing edges that appear planar, but are ever so slightly off. Though I will say I would also appreciate some looser tolerances here, in addition to merging two faces by deleting an edge... sometimes the faces both disappear because they're slightly non-planar.
And make it so my textures and not so horrendously TINY when I create them (0.25. dafuck?).
No, please don't. Faces automatically are set to be 1x1 scale with a 256x256 texture assigned, which happen to be the dimensions of the dev_floor texture. What spark does is if you have a 256x256 texture, scaled to 1:1 on a plane, and you change the texture to a 1024x1024 texture, it scales it so the relative texture coordinates remain the same, so the resulting scale in this case would be 0.25:0.25. I wouldn't mind the default changing to 1024x1024, but let's not remove the functionality that makes these scale corrections on texture change, just to be clear.
Also, try it on faces whose x-component is not coplanar to the xz plane (ie a curved wall trim.). You have to go in and negate the "angle", "xshift" and "xscale" values for the texture to truly flip... and even then it sometimes requires some re-aligning.
Oh, and last but not least, let me define my own layer colors, please. Currently you run out of colors rather quickly.
You can!
Though... using a hex editor like I did here is probably not ideal... Each color value is just 4 8-bit integers (alpha is just on or off. If it's non-zero, the color is used. Otherwise, the default windows beige color is used.)
And the possibility to not snap the CENTER of a selection to the wireframe, but instead a vertex that previously WAS on the wireframe, or at least a vertex of my choice.
What you can do is copy + paste ONE vertex, snap that to a grid, then use our very good friend "vertex snap drag thingamajigger" to line it up
Please make the quick map test tool official, and give me a way to preview the minimap in-editor.
As much as I want this too, it sort of flies in the face of keeping the editor "spark" instead of "ns2". You'll notice everything in the editor that's specific to ns2 is defined in the editor_setup.xml file. None of it is hard-coded into the editor, to my knowledge. I might look into writing a batch or program or whatever to automatically preview the overview for you.
Callback to props and entities: Finding textures is terrible right now. The only way to find a texture is knowing the first few letters. I mean, who knows the first few letters of a texture file? That was a rhetorical question. At least give me the ability to search for them like for props.
(To illustrate this: If you know the prop you want is from refinery, you type in "refinery", because every prop has the map it's on in it's name. If you type in "refinery" to the texture tool, though, you only get textures which start with the string "refinery". So, basically, none.)
Erm... you CAN search for textures... Not sure what's giving you trouble with that. I can type in "refin wall" and it'll show all the refinery wall textures it can find. (Note: you should use "refin" instead of "refinery" as some of the textures are, for some reason, categorized under "refining", and using "refinery" will filter them out.
Hm. Weird. It does work. I don't know why I remember having issues there. My bad!
Yea for real! They don't even use feet and shit! Seriously though, this is super ambiguous... what do you mean?
In the editor, one unit equals one inch. It is possible to switch to metres and centimetres in the options, but it's not recommended, as you'll lose the 1" and 2" settings. Instead, you gain the equivalent of 2048" and 4096".
It's actually two files; One contains the location names, and one the rest...
Yes, I can work my way around that. Still
Nope. The TGA file is the overview image that you see in-game. The HMP file contains the height-map data generated by the commander camera entities (so the commander camera basically will just read the height from this file, rather than calculate it from EVERY SINGLE CAMERA at runtime). The location names are stored in the LEVEL file, and only show up in the game because that's where they are rendered.
In the editor, one unit equals one inch. It is possible to switch to metres and centimetres in the options, but it's not recommended, as you'll lose the 1" and 2" settings. Instead, you gain the equivalent of 2048" and 4096".
Yea it's best to just stick to imperial for this Which is really strange, because the LEVEL file is encoded in METERS. Seriously, you can make a 100x100 face, and just check out the coordinates in the vertex chunk. Yea it's a lot of gobbledygook, but the float values do not equate to 100.00, but rather to 2.54.
In the editor, one unit equals one inch. It is possible to switch to metres and centimetres in the options, but it's not recommended, as you'll lose the 1" and 2" settings. Instead, you gain the equivalent of 2048" and 4096".
Yea it's best to just stick to imperial for this Which is really strange, because the LEVEL file is encoded in METERS. Seriously, you can make a 100x100 face, and just check out the coordinates in the vertex chunk. Yea it's a lot of gobbledygook, but the float values do not equate to 100.00, but rather to 2.54.
Another really nice Quality of Life feature would be if a newly created layer would be created right under the currently selected layer, and not at the end of the list.
Try deleting a layer and then press ctrl + z. Chances are, it's not going to work. You'll get an error sound instead. A fix would be neat for obvious reasons.
edit: And the maximum-selecting distance can be really annoying sometimes.
BeigeAlertTexasJoin Date: 2013-08-08Member: 186657Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, Pistachionauts
Just updated it with a bug I think everyone would be familiar with: the bug that sometimes when you extrude a face, if it's right alongside some other faces, it'll glitch up and create a new face that's a merging of all the adjacent faces.
I just want my four window view and the ability to place primitive blocks along with a cut tool. I only care about the higher quality face/line editing till I get to the detailing stage. Is there anything I can do to get this editor to behave that way?
I just want my four window view and the ability to place primitive blocks along with a cut tool. I only care about the higher quality face/line editing till I get to the detailing stage. Is there anything I can do to get this editor to behave that way?
Buy the $75,000 game director badge.
You know what? Hell with it. I'm going to go fix up my Blender script so it's a more viable option for at least roughing in the level.
I just want my four window view and the ability to place primitive blocks along with a cut tool. I only care about the higher quality face/line editing till I get to the detailing stage. Is there anything I can do to get this editor to behave that way?
There is a four window view. It's in the toolbar to the very right. I don't know what you mean with a cut tool, though.
I just want my four window view and the ability to place primitive blocks along with a cut tool. I only care about the higher quality face/line editing till I get to the detailing stage. Is there anything I can do to get this editor to behave that way?
There is a four window view. It's in the toolbar to the very right. I don't know what you mean with a cut tool, though.
The way it works with other editors, is you have a "brush" (ie a cube), and this cube will "cut" out parts of the level. So you'd move and size the cube into place, cut, move it again, cut some more, and it starts shaping the level using booleans.
BeigeAlertTexasJoin Date: 2013-08-08Member: 186657Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, Pistachionauts
RE: rotating location entities... I could have SWORN I had seen one rotated in an official map somewhere... I want to say Descent? I don't know for sure, and I don't know where... may try looking later.
Another bug report: It is not possible to rotate location entities. Or rather, if you rotate one, the game will just pretend you never rotated it.
Not a tool problem, the way it's implemented in the game, even if you rotated it it wouldn't make a difference.
I know, that's how I found out.
Still, someone fix this, please
Well I fixed the fact that the volumes are not the same size ingame as they are in the editor if that helps (not sure if you ever noticed that ), so far the fix is in NS2+, and eventually in vanilla (not 267).
The thing is, the code just takes the center point and calculates the coords based on that and the size of the model used in the editor (which is a very irregular model at that), and on the fact that you can't rotate them, so...
Another bug report: It is not possible to rotate location entities. Or rather, if you rotate one, the game will just pretend you never rotated it.
Not a tool problem, the way it's implemented in the game, even if you rotated it it wouldn't make a difference.
I know, that's how I found out.
Still, someone fix this, please
Well I fixed the fact that the volumes are not the same size ingame as they are in the editor if that helps (not sure if you ever noticed that ), so far the fix is in NS2+, and eventually in vanilla (not 267).
Comments
Arbitrary convex or concave wall or arch:
Align to face gets rid of the stretching, but leaves an unaligned mess
Manually incrementing the x offset would take a minute or so if you're really quick. With alt+rmb:
Truncated pyramid-thing:
10 minutes of tinkering by hand to get the exact correct rotation and offset is replaced by 3 clicks of the mouse:
Bottom texture flows smoothly onto adjacent faces. Seam along the top edge. It is not possible to eliminate seams in this case because it would require cutting everything up into triangles and stretching the texture differently on different triangles. E.g. like UV-unwrap in blender does.
Ah I get it now.
Oooh that reminds me! Orthographic views... I do NOT want to see the skybox in these views. I usually don't work in wireframe mode, so the skybox gets in the way of every angle except perspective.
About the wireframe.
I want to be able to see more than a really tiny section of it when aiming somwhere with a tool (line, rectangle, etc.).
I want to be able to force aligning to a plane while using one of those tools. Click + drag to draw something, mousewheel to scroll between Force X Plane/Force Y Plane/Force Z Plane/Force no Plane while dragging.
I want to be able to select how far from my viewpoint I am going to start drawing, so it's not IN MY FACE every time (seriously, try drawing a new square on 2048 grid. Impossible.). I want to be able to "zoom" the starting point to or away from the camera with the mouse wheel. (If you use the mouse wheel to navigate, fuck you. Use WASD and learn to use hotkeys.). Connected to that, if I get a decent preview about the wireframe when I'm starting to draw something, I do NOT want it to suddenly snap back RIGHT INTO MY FACE again when clicking.
Thank you.
edit:
Furthermore, Props need to be categorized and organized in a folder like structure. With filters. Entities could do with a fav function, because frankly, you only use 5 out of those 100. (Who would ever want to pre-place a phasegate on his map...?). While you're doing that, add a folder function to layer organization. Thanks. And give me a way to view the origin of the wireframe. And the possibility to not snap the CENTER of a selection to the wireframe, but instead a vertex that previously WAS on the wireframe, or at least a vertex of my choice.
Please make the quick map test tool official, and give me a way to preview the minimap in-editor. While you're at it, make props show up on the minimap, and let me export and import that map to .png, so I can edit it in photoshop.
Callback to props and entities: Finding textures is terrible right now. The only way to find a texture is knowing the first few letters. I mean, who knows the first few letters of a texture file? That was a rhetorical question. At least give me the ability to search for them like for props.
(To illustrate this: If you know the prop you want is from refinery, you type in "refinery", because every prop has the map it's on in it's name. If you type in "refinery" to the texture tool, though, you only get textures which start with the string "refinery". So, basically, none.)
Thank you very much.
edit2: Also, please fix this annoying issue where you can not create a face between 4 clearly connected lines that are lying in one plane. And fix the metric system. And make it so my textures and not so horrendously TINY when I create them (0.25. dafuck?). Make create and flip face work even when the "select" tool is not selected. Make flipping work properly (try it on props).
Oh, and last but not least, let me define my own layer colors, please. Currently you run out of colors rather quickly.
Thank you so much.
/rant
edit3: And give the little x/y/z axises (? whats the plural of axis? axes?) a description, so you dont mess up x, y and z all the time.
edit4: An option to turn all layers invisible and an option to invert the visible and nonvisible layers
That muffin better be on grid.
As much as I want this too, it sort of flies in the face of keeping the editor "spark" instead of "ns2". You'll notice everything in the editor that's specific to ns2 is defined in the editor_setup.xml file. None of it is hard-coded into the editor, to my knowledge. I might look into writing a batch or program or whatever to automatically preview the overview for you.
I believe this is in the works for 268+. Check the trello.
It's a TGA file... that's easily opened into photoshop.
Erm... you CAN search for textures... Not sure what's giving you trouble with that. I can type in "refin wall" and it'll show all the refinery wall textures it can find. (Note: you should use "refin" instead of "refinery" as some of the textures are, for some reason, categorized under "refining", and using "refinery" will filter them out.
I've never had an issue creating a face from 4 edges that are perfectly planar. I suspect you're seeing edges that appear planar, but are ever so slightly off. Though I will say I would also appreciate some looser tolerances here, in addition to merging two faces by deleting an edge... sometimes the faces both disappear because they're slightly non-planar.
Yea for real! They don't even use feet and shit! Seriously though, this is super ambiguous... what do you mean?
No, please don't. Faces automatically are set to be 1x1 scale with a 256x256 texture assigned, which happen to be the dimensions of the dev_floor texture. What spark does is if you have a 256x256 texture, scaled to 1:1 on a plane, and you change the texture to a 1024x1024 texture, it scales it so the relative texture coordinates remain the same, so the resulting scale in this case would be 0.25:0.25. I wouldn't mind the default changing to 1024x1024, but let's not remove the functionality that makes these scale corrections on texture change, just to be clear.
Also, try it on faces whose x-component is not coplanar to the xz plane (ie a curved wall trim.). You have to go in and negate the "angle", "xshift" and "xscale" values for the texture to truly flip... and even then it sometimes requires some re-aligning.
You can!
I did not know that.
It's actually two files; One contains the location names, and one the rest...
Yes, I can work my way around that. Still
Hm. Weird. It does work. I don't know why I remember having issues there. My bad!
In the editor, one unit equals one inch. It is possible to switch to metres and centimetres in the options, but it's not recommended, as you'll lose the 1" and 2" settings. Instead, you gain the equivalent of 2048" and 4096".
No, it's not
Yea it's best to just stick to imperial for this
I'm working on an external tool for this right now. Sit tight.
Awsum
edit: And the maximum-selecting distance can be really annoying sometimes.
Buy the $75,000 game director badge.
You know what? Hell with it. I'm going to go fix up my Blender script so it's a more viable option for at least roughing in the level.
There is a four window view. It's in the toolbar to the very right. I don't know what you mean with a cut tool, though.
The way it works with other editors, is you have a "brush" (ie a cube), and this cube will "cut" out parts of the level. So you'd move and size the cube into place, cut, move it again, cut some more, and it starts shaping the level using booleans.
2. There should be no (effective) maximum selection distance.
I know, that's how I found out.
Still, someone fix this, please
Well I fixed the fact that the volumes are not the same size ingame as they are in the editor if that helps (not sure if you ever noticed that
The thing is, the code just takes the center point and calculates the coords based on that and the size of the model used in the editor (which is a very irregular model at that), and on the fact that you can't rotate them, so...
I did notice that and this is great!
Real 2D/3D entities would have brought many possibilities to the game. More than just locations stuff.