Just Downloaded DMB2 (nondemo)

Sapphire Wolf · Post by **Sapphire Wolf** » Sun Oct 10, 2004 4:39 pm

I just downloaded the full version of DMB2 at D3 Italia. I might use it to make D1 levels. I still have DLE-XP(still using it). Oh I got it, I'll switch back and forth from DLE-XP to DMB2, DMB2 to DLE-XP! what?

Top Gun · Post by **Top Gun** » Sun Oct 10, 2004 5:12 pm

DLE-XP is a big update to DMB2; you should be using the former.

Sirius · Post by **Sirius** » Sun Oct 10, 2004 9:54 pm

DMB2 will hardly do anything DLE-XP won't; there isn't too much reason to be using it.

The -one- thing I've found it supports that DLE-XP doesn't is floating-point move rates.

Sapphire Wolf · Post by **Sapphire Wolf** » Sun Oct 10, 2004 10:09 pm

Don't worry, I'm still using DLE-XP.

Sirius · Post by **Sirius** » Sun Oct 10, 2004 10:29 pm

Which doesn't really explain why you want DMB2.

DLE-XP does D1 levels as well.

kurupt · Post by **kurupt** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 12:09 am

what i dont get, is why he feels he has to inform us of his decision?

TigerRaptor · Post by **TigerRaptor** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 12:21 am

I know that software is old but isnâ??t DMB2 still under copy right not to be downloaded as freeware.

Out of curiosity does DLE-XP support the Infinite Abyss. I know the updated version of DMB2 does.

Sirius · Post by **Sirius** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 3:13 am

Support the Infinite Abyss how? You mean the Vertigo expansion or...?

BUBBALOU · Post by **BUBBALOU** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 5:46 am

kurupt wrote:what i dont get, is why he feels he has to inform us of his decision?

look at him

...why do you even ASK?

TigerRaptor · Post by **TigerRaptor** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 9:30 am

Sirius wrote:Support the Infinite Abyss how? You mean the Vertigo expansion or...?

Robot and level texture wise. I know the update version of DMB2 will allow you to add Vertigo droids to a level. But you could never edit the robots strength, speed, sound, or choice weapons for that matter. Does DLE-XP support Vertigo also allowing you to edit the vertigo robots configuration?

Sirius · Post by **Sirius** » Tue Oct 12, 2004 12:39 am

Works so far as my test indicates... managed to change the weapons of a couple of Vertigo bots just fine.

Tyranny · Post by **Tyranny** » Tue Oct 12, 2004 11:14 am

To answer your question Tiger, Bryan Aamot gave the go ahead for Dietfrid (Diedel) to release DLE-XP. So it is freeware now.

As for DMB2 v2.6 itself, I'm not too sure on that. I could ask Bryan for you but I'd imagine since he allowed DLE-XP to be produced and given out freely that there wouldn't be a problem with the older counterpart. There really isn't a reason to use the older version anymore though.

Anyways, while we were beta testing it thats what Dietfrid and myself had to wait for was the green light to release it. Otherwise you had to have special permission to even use it due to Bryan's ownership of the code and whatnot.

TigerRaptor · Post by **TigerRaptor** » Tue Oct 12, 2004 5:18 pm

Ok I got you now. Just one more question how do I configure DLE-XP to work with Vertigo. Where it shows mine type D2 Vertigo is faded out.

Kyouryuu · Post by **Kyouryuu** » Tue Oct 12, 2004 8:53 pm

Sometime, I'm going to have to bust out another D2 map. They're so quick and easy to make, and just as much fun as their D3 counterparts.

Sirius · Post by **Sirius** » Tue Oct 12, 2004 10:13 pm

Firstly, it appears you need to have Vertigo installed on your system.

Secondly, you have to make sure the 'missions:' 'folder' under Preferences is pointing to your Descent 2 HOG file.

You will need to click 'Apply' then restart DLE-XP for the Vertigo option to become available.

Gregster2k · Post by **Gregster2k** » Mon Dec 13, 2004 3:00 pm

Yes, I know this thread is two months old right now. I don't care...I thought I'd let you know MY two cents on DLE-XP.

It was well-intentioned, but failed to live up to my expectations of an advancement from DMB2. DLE-XP changed a whole slew of keyboard commands, and DIDN'T give an option to customize them. To this day I continue to find DLE-XP awkward and difficult to use in comparison to DMB2.

In addition, one of the ways of rotating/moving the level, either the move in and out keys or the zoom keys...was REMOVED...but I always used those two features interchangeably.

If you guys can show me a version of DLE-XP that has the very same keys as the original DMB2 and the movement ability just the same, I'll be happy. Otherwise, DLE-XP in my opinion is useful only for its highly advanced treatment of lighting the mine over DMB2's original options. I can try to learn DLE-XP, but I'd rather just stick with what I'm accustomed to (DMB2 2.6)

Oh, by the way, DMB2 supports Descent 1.

Duper · Post by **Duper** » Mon Dec 13, 2004 8:16 pm

zoom and rotate and scew are done by using mouse and control key or shift. More like a modeling program. If you are use to using the D3 editor, this comes quite easy.

did for me.

DCrazy · Post by **DCrazy** » Mon Dec 13, 2004 8:57 pm

Why would you use both the move in/out commands AND the zoom in/out commands at the same time? I always found this annoying, and I still do in editors like MaxED (Max Payne).

Duper · Post by **Duper** » Mon Dec 13, 2004 11:45 pm

DCrazy wrote:Why would you use both the move in/out commands AND the zoom in/out commands at the same time? I always found this annoying, and I still do in editors like MaxED (Max Payne).

Was that for me or Gregster?

DCrazy · Post by **DCrazy** » Tue Dec 14, 2004 5:56 am

More for Gregster. He finds the lack of both zoom and move annoying; I find the existence of both annoying.

Vindicator · Post by **Vindicator** » Tue Dec 14, 2004 12:15 pm

I thought they were redundant more than annoying

Sirius · Post by **Sirius** » Tue Dec 14, 2004 5:39 pm

Move is used if you're trying to do first-person, e.g. Devil or Miner, style editing... zoom is more useful if you're doing third-person style.

I prefer third-person style myself since you can actually rotate the viewpoint around things rather than having to correct your view all the time.

Kyouryuu · Post by **Kyouryuu** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 1:02 am

I tend to be more used to third-person as well. Consequently, I too find DLE-XP disorienting and strange because the keyboard shortcuts I became used to are different.

So I wholeheartedly agree with Gregster. It's well-intentioned. It also does away with a lot of bugs, quirks, and the annoying "window panel hell" that DMB2 was so fond of. But I don't particularly love it either. I suppose once you're used to doing things the "old" and "broken" way, it's hard to adjust to the "new" and "improved" way.

Incidentally... why is DMB2's/DLE-XP's viewpoint so warped and strange? I know there's an adjustable level of view exaggeration, but it looks oddball no matter what you set it to.

Tyranny · Post by **Tyranny** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 2:30 pm

I've wondered the same thing. When you look at it, it doesn't seem like it should look all THAT different. Yet there it is and it bugs the hell out of you for some reason. *shrug*

As far as I know sol, the shortcuts are virtually the same give or take a few here and there. Nothing that couldn't be re-learned in a half hour or so playing around with it IMO.

Duper · Post by **Duper** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 10:41 pm

In both editors:

Go to preferences and turn off prespective.

BUBBALOU · Post by **BUBBALOU** » Fri Dec 17, 2004 7:34 am

Kyouryuu is an old man at heart.. DOES NOT LIKE CHANGE even if it's minor.

How he even had the ability to comprehend anything other than the DMB2 as a modeling tool...is beyond me

I bet if a descent editor worked like Maya he would not complain, but if one shortcut was different he would burn it at the stake...

[sarcasm]j[bustanut]k[/sarcasm]

Sirius · Post by **Sirius** » Fri Dec 17, 2004 3:13 pm

Seems to make it worse, Duper - orthogonal is even harder to work with sometimes. I remember I have used it on occasion for weird alignment jobs, but generally I stuck with medium perspective.

Problem is, in DLE-XP the medium perspective doesn't seem to be quite right. But I'm not really worried about it.

For the record, Kyouryuu mainly used Devil for level structure as far as I remember.

Duper · Post by **Duper** » Fri Dec 17, 2004 7:45 pm

Sirius wrote:Seems to make it worse, Duper - orthogonal is even harder to work with sometimes. I remember I have used it on occasion for weird alignment jobs, but generally I stuck with medium perspective.

Problem is, in DLE-XP the medium perspective doesn't seem to be quite right. But I'm not really worried about it.

For the record, Kyouryuu mainly used Devil for level structure as far as I remember.

hmm.. I wonder if there is something about your system that DLE doesn't like. It looks great on mine.

I've always used 0 prespective as it made making symetrical levels difficult.
If I had web space, I'd post a picture of what it looks like on mine.
I never cared for Devil. Mainly because I wasn't willing to learn how to use it. If I tried now, it probably wouldn't be that bad.

Kyouryuu · Post by **Kyouryuu** » Fri Dec 17, 2004 11:26 pm

BUBBALOU wrote:Kyouryuu is an old man at heart.. DOES NOT LIKE CHANGE even if it's minor.

It's true, I tend to be resistant to changing things - especially when I fail to see the reason for a change other than some programmer's whimsy. Incidentally, I don't like Diedel's "D2X" much either because he totally jacked the turning speed for some unknown reason.

BUBBALOU wrote:I bet if a descent editor worked like Maya he would not complain, but if one shortcut was different he would burn it at the stake...

Maya is not without its quirks. There are things lesser editors do better than it does. One of the things about Maya I find annoying is how you need two hands to just navigate around because you have to hold ALT whenever you want to move (normally). UnrealED or even D3Edit you can mouse around the entire scene pretty easily. D3Edit also has depth-based selecting. If you keep clicking on the same spot to select something, the selection will get deeper and deeper into the scene. This allows you to easily select things that are behind others. Seems like in Maya or UnrealEd you have to get right up next to things to select them because it only takes the thing closest to you.

Because I used DEVIL so much, I was never particularly fond of DMB2. The biggest thing DMB2 had going for it was stability. I don't think I've ever crashed DMB2, whereas DEVIL crashed umpteen times when I would make campaigns. DMB2 also had a superior lighting algorithm. But DEVIL had a far better curve generator (though DMB2 compensates with Descent Block Builder 2). DMB2's insistance on having scads of little panels annoyed me. A panel for walls, another for doors, textures, lighting, etc. Diedel's DLE-XP did a lot to address that by going with tabs. I just don't particularly care for the other changes that came with it. Even though I eventually learned DMB2 (because with the passing of MS-DOS, DEVIL became useless), I never felt as quick or agile about building levels with it. Naturally, that concern is null and void since I don't even remember how to use DEVIL.

DarkHorse · Post by **DarkHorse** » Tue Jan 11, 2005 3:30 am

I was pretty much using DMB2 the whole way along. It was the latest tool when I started building levels, it was the latest when I finished (about seven years later). I have used plenty of other modellers though... and strangely enough D3Edit has a lot of similarities to Luke Schneider's Polytron which was used for building D2 robots (but was vastly inferior to Truespace once Garry Knudson released the cob2pm utility).

The worst editor I have come across so far has to be the Mechwarrior 4 one. The process of making maps for that game is like pulling teeth - especially when the tools provided are very crude and crash-prone. You actually need a hex editor and a host of conversion apps to get everything working properly, and even then custom maps frequently have stability problems.

Thankfully, Descent 2, even with all the .ham and .pig hacks that had to be done for the more advanced stuff, was never that bad.

Diedel · Post by **Diedel** » Thu Feb 10, 2005 6:23 pm

Geez.

Nobody has to use DLE-XP if he doesn't like to. And as nobody paid a cent for it nobody loses anything when deleting it from his HD. The exact same goes true for my version of D2X.

Apart from that I'd like to share some insight on DLE-XP and D2X.

DLE-XP is not a completely new program. It is based on the DMB v2.7 rendering and data manipulation code. As a sidenote this means that perspective handling has not changed in DLE-XP compared to DMB2. DLE-XP basically provides a new, cleaned-up user interface and a hole lot of bug fixes and improved functions (see my DLE-XP page for an overview). I tried to keep all keyboard shortcuts; if any are missing it is by accident, not by purpose. One exception might be the zoom keys; I might have ditched them because zooming with a mouse wheel is way easier. Zooming DMB2 style by moving the mouse while pressing some keys may have had its justification back in the times when there were no wheel mice. I found it awkward then and I find it even more awkward today. Just look at D2's map view controls and see how it could and should've been done right away. In that light, DLE-XP even still is a compromise.

You can use fractional move rates in DLE-XP, btw.

Kyo,

a word to you. You might call a program changing (for the worse or not is another question) a "programmer's whimsy" if you were forced to use some software such updated. As nobody forces you to use DLE-XP and as it comes for free, your remark is simply inappropriate and impolite. I had been building D2 levels with DMB2 for several years, spending literally thousands of hours on it, and I know what I wanted to be different with DLE-XP and what DMB2 bugs (e.g. in the exact lighting code that impresses you so much) I wanted to be taken care of. I wrote it primarily for myself. It's just that everybody who likes it can profit freely from my work that went into it (and it was a signficant amount). So don't call it a "programmer's whimsy". Btw, I am certainly quite a bit older than you, and I can tell you one thing: If you cannot be bothered with getting accustomed to change now already, you make me wonder how you want to master life, or a (new) job, in your future.

As far as D2X is concerned: Did you know that there wasn't a really working Windows version of it around before I started to work on it? Entering joystick config would crash the original d2x_gl, it simply was unplayable for mousers, and there were lots of other quirks I have fixed. If there should now be a working "official" version of d2x-gl, it is based on my work. Btw, I haven't increased turn rate by fiddling with some related data in D2X. All I have done was to cap mouse sampling rate at 30 samples/sec. This leads to increased mouse sensitivity esp. with the current high res mice and ballistic mouse drivers. So basically I simply removed a program flaw ruining mouse sensitivity.

So you better be careful in the future with what you say and how you say it.

Sirius · Post by **Sirius** » Fri Feb 11, 2005 4:28 am

Diedel wrote:You can use fractional move rates in DLE-XP, btw.

I've noticed, and it is useful. I should note that that post I made was created before DLE-XP did support them.

Zoom keys do still exist; numpad / and * do the trick. Although I was used to + and - doing that rather than adding/deleting cubes (insert/delete were just fine in my opinion) I don't mind really. It just takes some getting used to.

On the lines of another 'feature request'; I just realised I would find it handy to have shortcut keys to change cube insertion mode between normal, extend and mirror...

But it does do quite a neat job... the one thing that changes the way I work with it the most at the moment probably has to be the lack of error/warning messages though.

It's nice to have the editor just do it for once, even if I've been living with it so long it's almost unnerving to lose the messages.

Diedel · Post by **Diedel** » Fri Feb 11, 2005 5:52 am

Sirius,

I had to change the insert key because M$ chose to deliver their newer (ergonomic) keyboards with only one insert key (the one on the num keypad), and save a key by omitting the other one. This imo really qualifies as designer's "whimsy" - their keyboards are expensive enough, and I really miss the 2nd insert key.

As I found "-" for deleting cubes more logical if "+" means adding cubes, I changed that one too. So blame the mastermind at M$ who thought it would be a great idea to make 5 cents/keyboard more by annoying the hell out of its users.

You can turn on warning and error messages in the preference dialog: It's the check box with the "stop askin' those questions all the time!" text.

I will check whether there is an insertion mode shortcut, and if not, I can easily add one. Any propositions for a key?

Edit: How about Ctrl+I for toggle insert mode?

See my Descent site for an updated version of DLE-XP.
_______________

Dark_Falcon,

you can create/edit D1 levels with DLE-XP too.
_______________

For a list of a enhancements in DLE-XP view this page. It's fairly, though not entirely complete.

Sirius · Post by **Sirius** » Fri Feb 11, 2005 12:54 pm

Ctrl-I would work. Just as long as I don't need the mouse to do it since it's something I do very often.

Diedel · Post by **Diedel** » Fri Feb 11, 2005 6:12 pm

There's a new version of DLE-XP available, supporting changing the insert mode with the keyboard (Ctrl+I).

It also contains some fixes and improvements in lightmap handling.

Sirius · Post by **Sirius** » Sat Feb 12, 2005 2:41 am

Okay, thanks.

Diedel · Post by **Diedel** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 6:10 pm

Kyo,

name me one shortcut from DMB2 that does not work in DLE-XP - including DMB2 style mouse controlled zooming!