(1)Info placettes placement + (2) perfect upload server?

[monaster]

(1): Imagine you got a building or a small city or some map where several little shields need to be placed onto walls to inform the player about ... something: who's having his or hers office behind the door or which street the player is strolling down at the moment. What is the best solution to attach these placettes to a wall? Making it a detail brush with crt-m? cgs-subtracting it directly into the wall (ah, I already hear obsidian screaming in pain due to that proposal )? Making a brush with 64x32x1 (for the shield brushes) and then covering every wall with player and botclips thus covering these 64x32x1 brushes too? Or doing something with the nodraw-texture to only show the front side of the shields in case it can't be merged with the wall?
(2): As I'm getting somewhere by now my map should be finished -or at least converted to a beta version- in the next few days (plusminus one week). So what is THEEEEE best (and I mean Diablo I' Farnham the drunk's "theeee" ) place to upload a map and a couple of scrnshts?
I already noticed that other thread where a few proposals were made to Darklord, but I need REALLY reliable sources - doesn't mean that I don't trust the guys who gave tips like megaupload, but megaupload for instance doesn't seem the best webpage to be trusted (after searching only one fucking minute for "megaupload fraud" and nothing more). So what's the best free upload server (or even free homepage hosting site) on the net where you can leave your files for a year or more even if you visit your account every two months or less? Does something like this even exist? Thanks for every (valuable ) idea.

[dichtfux]

(1) Use a decal.
(2) Don't know, I'm using my own webspace.

Expect more people to scream about the CSG-substract idea. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

[monaster]

Don't kill me for that, but what does _decal exactly do? I know how to use this feature (in 1.5.0 right mouse button _decal that obviously does it) and _decal seems to be the abbreviation for decalculate but that's everything I can get out of this term. And I still haven't found it in any GTKRadiant manual yet (including 1.2.1 and 1.5.0).

[dichtfux]

It's not a radiant feature, it's a q3map(2) feature. This short article on decals should help you out.

Most likely it's not an abbreviation or sth but really means 'decal' (in german: Aufkleber). And that is what it does: it projects a texture on a surface (imagine a movie cast on a wall by a beamer). Technically, the texture floats a tiny distance above the surface.

[obsidian]

Solution in one of two ways depending on what you want to achieve:

Doom3/Quake4 uses normal patchmeshes textured with a shader. The patch itself may either float 1 unit above the underlying surface or it may be flush with the surface, but the shader would have to have the "polygonOffset" directive. This may be ideal for signs, posters, blood marks, dirt, etc.

_decal entities are projected, meaning they affect all brush and patch geometry in between the projection surface and the target surface. This is ideal for lighting effects, not so much an actual billboard. They use a patch targeting a info_null or a target_position and everything between ends up with the projected texture.

Both methods may result in Z-fighting over longer distances as the depth buffer will start to equate the small values. You will need to write your own shader using either method, so you should brush up on that. I can't help but feel you are getting ahead of yourself and asking rather complicated questions. I suggest you start small and simple because it seems as if you still need to master the basics. Then work your way up slowly.

[monaster]

First of all, thanks a lot for the tips!
Secondly, considering "master the basics": since I don't have the slightest clue what the "polygonOffset" directive might be it seems that this is a bit too complicated indeed. But I'll find out what I need to know about it and what it means for my map. That always worked during the last few months. The thing is that I need to teach myself mapping with GTKRadiant for Q3 as fast as possible resulting in a knowlegde which lets me produce a map that is more of a fun map but still gotta hold some specialities to impress other people so it will be played from time to time if I'm lucky. On top of that my perfectionism and excitement for the map's theme makes me try more and more stuff and that might result in some problems, which are very specific from time to time: these are then posted here and with your help I can continue mapping, at least until another semester at the University starts which is the reason why I can't spend as much time in my project as I want to (I spent like 50 hours during the first week I started my map and since then I'm fucking around with shaders and all the other "extras" like placettes and so on which do not necessarily HAVE to be in my map but it's like I said: it should make some impression for someone's very first mapping project.)
When I finally release my map (of a beta version of it) I will certainly have some knowledge regarding mapping for the Q3 engine but until then I have to skip a lot of articles and only take the information that is absolutely necessary due to my lack of time. I'm not pleased at all with these circumstances but it couldn't be helped, so at the moment it seems that I have to continue asking every kind of (stupid) question even if it is touching aspects which under normal circumstances should never be asked by a beginner in case he hasn't "mastered the basics" yet. So this is a kind of excuse if I ask for things that I could have known if I had had followed the "normal" learning curve (that means at best trying to understand one topic entirely before moving to another one).

Enough of all that personal stuff! Does anyone have experience with funpic.de webspace? This seems to be a german server providing quite a lot of possibilities for making an own homepage; but first I will use it as an upload platform only (for a few months then I have the time to do more) and I've been told that your account could get deleted pretty fast that way. So did anyone ever used that funpic thing and can tell my how long you are actually allowed to do nothing more than uploading a few things here and there? Or should I change to savefile and mediafire for having an own not-to-be-payed-for homepage with a fairly large upload space (150-300 MB or more)?

[obsidian]

Sorry if you misunderstood, I'm not discouraging you from learning, in fact it's quite the contrary - I'm here to help and certainly don't mind answering all the questions you may have. I just think it is often easier to take many smaller steps in increasing difficulty rather than trying this giant leap only to find out that half the stuff you've done was done incorrectly. I say this from personal experience.

The first year I started mapping (for the original Half-Life) I created these gianormous maps using lots of CSG-subtract, no optimizations, overdraw, t-juncs, you-name-it and ended up scrapping it all since not a single thing I created was worth keeping.

Then I started working on (over the years, some hundreds of) much smaller test maps reading articles as I went learning about optimization, shaders, etc. until I know enough to put a complete map together. The learning curve for level design is not friendly but time is the best teacher. I hope I can bestow some wisdom from my experiences if it may help you.


I have my own paid server and domain and I pay $5 U.S. per month for some ridiculous amount of storage and bandwidth. Prior to that, I stuck a bunch of stuff on a free Lycos Tripod UK server which I still keep around for miscellaneous junk. I'm not sure if their policies have changed since I signed up, but it was for free and I had (I think) 80MB of storage and unlimited bandwidth, FTP access and I could link to images and files externally.

[monaster]

obsidian wrote:

...I hope I can bestow some wisdom from my experiences if it may help you.

Nice "keep your head up" answer, thanks!
@ server search:
Hahah, Lycos Tripod UK server already offers 1 Gig of webspace, seems that I'm going to use this one, thanks A LOT!

By the way: there's not a chance to clip curves, is it? I tried clipping tiny bits out of an "8" consisting of two thickened cylinders with endcaps. The result should be the letter "S" and bend mode, vertices mode and the like couldn't do much to get me anywhere near my goal.
A second question is related to endcaps: does GTKRadiant support a feature which creates endcaps for two rounded hallways (each consisting of two curves)?

I put a little sketch in here let's just hope it's formatted the right way:

Code: Select all

    ____
    |***__
  |***|     / ***/
|***|    /****/
|**|   / ****/     
|**|/*****/        
|********|         
|********|
|********|
|********|

*asterisks fill the hallways
| and / and _ are standind for walls
The hallways with the junction are seen from above


[EDIT: Works great thank you dichtfux!]

[dichtfux]

I put a little sketch in here let's just hope it's formatted the right way

Use the code tags to have the board software use a monospace font for such sketches:

Code: Select all

     ____
    |***__
  |***|      / ** /
|***|     /*** /
|**|   / ****/     
|**|/*****/        
|********|         
|********|

[pjw]

curve questions

There's really no quick and easy way to do any sort of large-scale curved architecture like that (hallways). You basically need to piece it together yourself with bevels and/or simple patch meshes that have been vertex-manipulated to the shapes that you need. It's really not that hard once you sort of get a feel for it; it's just that the initial learning curve can be a bit frustrating.

(And then you'll want to add vis-blocking caulk brushes in the "dead space" in the middle of any branches for performance reasons.)

Edit: Here, I made a quick S-curve in radiant. Brushes are not selected, but shown; curves are selected and vertex-mode is on so you can see vertex placement. Proportions are a bit crap, and this obviously doesn't show ceiling/floor and other details, but hopefully this will be helpful. There are 8 simple patch meshes used. (Note, when making something symmetrical like this, it can save a good chunk of time to just make half, and then copy/paste/rotate/flip as needed.)