DescentBB

i can't wait. that's why i asked if lvl types can mix. next level for me i take advantage of every thing i can figure out and fit in. the behaviour section i also understand. it's the ai section that's similar but not so obvious. i think behaviour is to modify a CLASS of robots. any instances will have those characteristics set in behaviour when i modified the count and probability of the "contains" property ALL of the robots of the same type had the same starting values.
ai i believe (i'll be testing in about a half hour) sets the behaviour for an instance and only that instance of a class. we'll see shortly.

I created a ring, projected 1 up and created another ring on top of it and then created another ring on top of the second and found that the top points of the second layer were not consistant in height and that the third ring was created on an angle.

I also found that if I selected a point using P, entered a new axis value, clicked "apply" and then clicked P again that a new repair centre cube was created rather than the next point selected. I would have to hit L and then P again before I could step unto the next point. I have just discovered that after hitting "apply", that any of the special cubes can be selected via their letter. (what is the key combo to get the letter shortcuts to work as I can't make it happen?)

Is there a way to put XYZ markers onto the centre sphere? I spend so much time trying to work out which direction is which when point editing.

using v 1.5.10

If I open a level with a whole bunch of custom bots that has no bots already in the level (it's D2X-W32 if that would make any difference). The hog manager tells me that it's loading 22 custom bots. If I insert some bots into the level, then save it again, it only saves the behaviors of the bot types that I used in the level (the polymodels remain untouched)! This means that bot types that were not saved will have the custom polymodels like they should, but will act and sound like the corresponding regular bots!
Whether or not this is supposed to happen, it shouldn't, because then when I do add the other bots in, they get messed up like such!

The easiest way to fix this would be to make DLE-XP leave the HXM file alone, except when you explicitely edit it w/ the object tool.

Some bugs w/ the new RGB light colors... first off, when I pick a color from the dialouge brought up by clicking the "RGB" button, the red and blue are switched in DLE-XP... ie 255,0,0 becomes 0,0,255 and vice versa.
Also, the old palette color picker no longer seems to function, ie I can no longer select colors from it...

#1 Don't tell me how to fix bugs.
#2 Learn to use the edit button.

Color bugs fixed. Re the hxm problem: Try to add one bot of each modified kind to your level, then delete it again, and see whether DLE-XP now keeps the changed bot info regardless of whether such a bot is present in the mine or not.

Whenever I'm dealing with tools that I don't have a good knowledge of the behaviour of, I take the paranoid response; keep backups of all of the component parts, and work on them separately when needed.

Diedel,

Thanks for the changes to the lighting "refresh" when working with the Textures tools. Love it.


Now I'm trying to work with positioning some bots... I can't seem to change their angle (point the bots in a specific direction). Am I missing something?

Select objects, click on the bot and use the numpad keys

To switch to object mode ("select objects", as Weyrman put it), click on the magenta angled arrow at the far left of the toolbar.

Hmmm....

All I'm seeing is a red line in the place of the bot and I can move it side to side, up and down, fowards and back, but I cannot rotate it. The numpad 1 and 3 keys don't appear to have any effect, yet when I run the level the bot then has a different starting angle.

For most bots/objects, there is a purplish "carriage return" arrow which indicates the bot's starting position and orientation. But for this one, all I'm getting is a angled red line (not an arrow).

EDIT:
I opened the level with DMB2 (it's a Descent 2 level), deleted the robots I'd added using DLE-XP and re-added them using DMB2. That worked and I was then able to see the correct arrow for them and change their orientation, using DMB2 or DLE-XP.

Any ideas on what was wrong would be great. By the way, the diagnostics showed nothing wrong all the way through this.

Please e-mail the original level (w/o fixes by DMB2) to karx11erx at hotmail dot com, so that I can take look into this.

in diagnostics there is an autofix check box.
this seems to only show up if something's wrong but by then dle has "fixed" the problem.
would rather fix things myself.

how to turn off "autofix"?

uncheck autofix check box before clicking the diagnosis button.

the only time i see that check box is AFTER i run check mine. i don't see that check box anywhere else.

edit: i found it. my screen res puts some of the tool pane off to the side. sorry!

np.

A copy of the "un-fixed by DMB2" version of my level has been emailed to you. I included what bots show the problem and the cubes they are in.

Thankx!

ok.

Btw:

2000!

Congratulations. I don't have many more than that myself...

i am finding that while aligning a texture, other textures in other nearby cubes become misaligned. this includes doors.
have also run into a lighting problem. maybe it's me as i do not understand completely how checked selections affect the lights.
when trying to set lights for exploding lights, expected cubes are unaffected by the adjustment. that is a cube you would expect to be dark when the light blows, is not.

this also happened with a blinking light. two cubes on either side of the cube with the blinking light were so glaringly bright and did not blink when they should have that i had to remove the light and start
over but even this didn't turn out too well.

btw; i will always be referring to the latest ver if it is not i will say so. ty

i need some examples of what each box will do under what conditions in the lighting panel. I have been experimenting and can get most of the lighting ok except for this last problem with the exploding/blinking lights.

i can't think of why a texture that is two or three cubes away gets messed up but i am now sure that it happens. problem is duplicating it every time.
i will be making that level available for download and you can take a look at it then. perhaps it's something weird about the geometry that i created.

jakee308 wrote:i am finding that while aligning a texture, other textures in other nearby cubes become misaligned. this includes doors.

If they share the same primary texture, this is going to happen. If you don't want a texture to be aligned by a certain operation, change the primary texture temporarily while you do it.

Doors likewise - yeah, it's a bit weird that door alignment gets altered on the other side of the door when you align wall textures, but you get used to it.

thanks for the note, sirius. believe me when i say dle is far and away better than dmb/dmb2. dmb did a lot of strange things.

now that i think about it, THAT'S the commonality between the texture i was aligning and and the other skewed textures. i wasn't using the "align child sides check box though. i'm referring to individully aligning the texture to the side it's on. i know using the align child sides will change every texture touching the cube you're working in.

i'm just mentioning these things as they happen to:
a. get input what I'M doing wrong.
b. let diedel know and if other people have it or he recognizes what is causing it he might want to change things next time he's rewriting things. i mention the misalignment as they happened in places i didn't think to check and only saw it when i played. now i know to recheck EVERYTHING after making any changes.

jakee is a very good tester.

I must not be understanding something.

I can't seem to get the SpeedBoost cube feature to have any effect. I'm probably doing something simple wrong.

have you looked at diedel's site for info?

did you create a new d2x-w32 level or convert one started as a regular d2 level to d2x-w32?

no special features otherwise.

Yeah, the texturing system is a little tricky because you have to make the level editor do what the user expects where possible.

It isn't always possible, of course, for a program (if the input is this do it this way) to tell what the user's intention is without seriously advanced heuristics that are both a nightmare to implement and can potentially get in the way of users who want to have exact control over things. But for the most part, I'm happy with how DLE-XP manages things.

The only thing I wish for one day in the future is to have a feature to align sides from cubes that don't completely neighbour each other, but last time I asked for that Diedel said he didn't have the 3D math knowledge to pull a trick like that off.

But one day...

jakee308 wrote:have you looked at diedel's site for info?

did you create a new d2x-w32 level or convert one started as a regular d2 level to d2x-w32?

no special features otherwise.

Well, that would explain it. Since I was trying to do it with an existing project... guess I would need to do it with a new project. Hmmm... there seems to be an idea rising to the surface...

Diedel,
Do you think you might do a DLE-XP for Linux someday? I don't have a Linux box at this time... but curious anyway.

TechPro,

all the fancy new D2X-XL features are only available in D2X-W32 type levels (hm, gotta rename that too ), to avoid ppl trying to load them with other D2X flavors and crash their program.

A Linux port of DLE-XP is very very very very very unlikely, as DLE-XP contains much more OS dependant code (the UI) than D2X-XL. If I ever want to learn everything about X, I might do it ... but as I said, chances are extremely slim.

Sirius,

that feature isn't forgotten, and I want to have it myself. So 'the day' might be closer than you expect.

Diedel: wxWidgets cross-platform UI library.

my my my....everyone got their W32 linux version...don't push our luck

btw...wine doesn't work with DLE-XP

I do find it hard to believe that there would be very many people around that wanted to do level design that didn't at least have access to some version of Windows.

I had been asked by a Linux user already for a Linux version of DLE-XP, so you better believe it.

it seems to me that the see thru textures like the
grills and fan and grid like door have a light blue
highlight around the see thru areas that i don't
remember being there before.

also when setting blinking lights, they look just
right viewing them in dle but when i play the level,
the amount of darkening and how many cubes affected
is way less then what i saw in dle.
also have found that even when i mark cubes for
lighting and then press apply, other cubes that
were not marked are changed. this plus the
"aligned here but misaligned in new place"
thing is driving me nuts.

is it me, gremlins, dle, what?.
(there needs to be an emoticon for feeling frustrated.)

jakee308 wrote:also when setting blinking lights, they look just
right viewing them in dle but when i play the level,
the amount of darkening and how many cubes affected
is way less then what i saw in dle.

I had this problem too when I use to develop with the old DMB2. It has something to do with how many light sources you use on a cube....if you put 2 or 3 lights on a cube, then it will appear like in the editor....

misleading, but you learn to live with it :p

there were those signs that are lights that appear to be readouts.

New question.

marked a block of cubes. set the current side where i wanted to be able to attach the block. saved the block. attempted to paste the block onto the current side i wanted the block to attach to. no go.
1st only the red highlighted points show up not the wire frame. i think dmb did that too. can't remember
2nd the block attempts to place itself on a different cube and side than what is current.
3rd moving the block to the correct side and cube doesn't work as then the block won't join with
"join current side" menu selection. using any other type of joining on the menu results in a mess.

is it me or dle?

I am trying a brand new level as i hope all my other problems were derived from the dmb based original file on the other level i've been having trouble with. So far setting the lights works more intuitively since i started fresh.

Might be that DLE does not join the 2 sides any more. Need to investigate, but only after Linux port is done, I'm afraid. I brief test did not reveal any problems, so I need level + blk file + info which seg+side to join the blk to.

Actually, DLE-XP should work fine with DMB2 levels, as it basically contains the DMB2 engine with a lot of bug fixes and enhancements.

I will also look in the block lighting issue.

Behold, jakee:


Edit: Is it possible to kill the current cube indicator, just for screenshots? There are workarounds of course, but they aren't pretty...

Edit #2: Couple weird display issues I've been seeing in 1.5.13.
Firstly and more obviously, in the texture panel rock021 is always indicated as secondary texture on faces that have no secondary texture.
Secondly, when depth perception is on (I've managed to get it in medium and high, at least), and you have zoomed in sufficiently far, off-screen parts of the level start to render on-screen at a smaller size. Reminds me of a fractal in a freaky way.
It isn't level-dependent, but certain levels make it more obvious than others. If you open up the final level of Apocalyptic Factor (Thorium Core) and position the camera somewhere along the long corridor, looking toward the reactor area, you should see the start area visible above the reactor somewhere.

Does it make sense to zoom out that far?

The render depth feature helps immeasurably to reduce it, but I still sometimes get it when doing close up work.

This is zooming in, for the record, not out - and if memory serves I didn't have to zoom in much at all in Thorium Core to show the double render thing.

It rather baffles me since I have no idea how on earth a renderer could even do that...

Oh, zoom in, ok. Misread that. Baffles me, too.

edit: i beat my head against brick walls because it feels so good when i stop.

re: problems pasting a block in. 50% my problem.

found that quick paste instead of paste gives me actual cubes i can see and seems to let me line up the points more accurately so that a join takes place and i can see it. found that i was actually pasting the block in but it wasn't showing up. yes i adjusted the render depth. when i began deleting some cubes, the pasted ones were still there. i had multiple cubes superimposed on each other. ALL the pastes i had attempted but thought hadn't happened.

as i recall dmb may have done the same thing. used quick paste instead of paste. the only diff should be that you can select the block but somehow it's different.