DescentBB

Fixed: Exploding light calculation didn't work anymore.

After a few conversations and thinking about the subject, I managed to come up with a few things that might actually be helpful in DLE-XP...

Firstly, it would be nice to be able to turn off the feature that vertically offsets each new object placed in the same cube (they are placed 2 units above the last) - since I would rather do this myself, and the separation I'm looking for may not be vertical anyway.

Secondly, it might also help, for people trying to do things precisely, to be able to move vertices/sides relative to the x/y/z axes of the level as an alternative to relative to the current cube. In this case, you would change which axis you wanted to move the points relative to, instead of which side of the cube.

Thirdly, some algorithm that automatically calculates cube light, not just texture lighting, for the entire level. The current system of a blanket setting for all cubes in the level is useful sometimes, but might not cut it when a level has both dark and light areas - and manually setting cube light is rather arduous.

Fourthly - and it's fairly minor - the tendency of DMB2/DLE-XP to unmark points when a side is marked, followed by a cube somewhere else, can be annoying. The workaround, of course, is to mark things in reverese order - but is there any reason why we should have to?

Fifthly, it would sometimes be nice - but not really necessary every time - to be able to horizontally or vertically flip entire primary textures. It shouldn't be too big an alteration...

Sixthly, in situations like this:

It would be nice to have an easier way to align the bright blue streaky texture...

I know it sounds like quite a list... but it'd speed up the process a lot for many people...

Hmm... This could get interesting.

1: You can use the object browser I'm pretty sure - just need to know what you added. Again, I'm thinking of an option rather than a forced setting; it would actually be less work for me to hunt it down in the object list, especially if it's added last.

2: That's what I currently use, and it works fine once I find a cube that I can do that with. It's mainly for the benefit of other people who are more used to Devil.

3: Yes, but cube light is set, as far as I know, in a relatively simplistic way; it just sets the light of every cube in the level to the same value. If you want to have objects become dark as they move from a light room into a dark room... well, it won't do that. Again, I -could- work it out manually, but I also could do all the lighting for the textures by hand. It's still a lot of work.

4: That works for regular geometry; failing that I can mark the cubes first then the sides. It's not really significant, just a pet peeve.

5: That doesn't really reverse it, so to speak, just turn it around 180 degrees. I'm thinking reflection as opposed to rotation.

6: That would be right - for this particular case I could align the faces properly fairly easily, with a few tricks and some work. However, many of the levels I've made had texture arrangements that took hours to align by these methods, while it would only take a few minutes if there was some automatic system in place.
Is that possible? Perhaps something that doesn't depend on what plane or side each cube is in, and just tries to align textures between the marked sides if it's possible in some way? You'll note those two textures do at least share a common edge...

A couple of other things came to me, as well...

I'm not sure whether this happens to -everyone-, but I've noticed that in DLE-XP I have to select the Preferences tab before they are actually loaded - at startup settings like move rate and depth perception don't take effect. I'm not sure why this is, but is it fixable? Yeah, I could always just remember to hit the Preferences tab first thing.

Another thing, again about textures, is a 'copy alignment' feature... could be useful in a few places I can think of. Either from the other side or a copy/paste function would be fine with me.

How do you want cube light to be calculated? That would be a pretty complicated thing.

Mirroring textures is not that simple. DLE-XP would need to create a new texture and a pog file to store it.

The preferences thing is a bug; I had noticed it too. Have to look into it.

I don't know enough about 3D math and DMB2/DLE-XP's handling of it to really implement texture alignment across side planes. Tried to do it, but it didn't work too well.

Edit: Preferences bug fixed.

Yeah, I realise that. It could be a problem.

Mirroring textures, well... I don't mean THAT kind of mirroring, just flipping the co-ordinates of each point on the texture map around either axis, as in x = -x or y = -y.

Same texture and all, just that the face uses it the 'wrong way around', so to speak.

Cube light is indeed a bit complex, but one implementation I heard was to make the cube light the average of the lighting values of the faces in the cube.

You'd run into problems with cubes that are joined to other cubes at all faces; but possibly you could then set the lighting value to the average of those other cubes.

I can do a pseudocode algorithm if you want.

I know what you mean about the 3D math, though... I just figured that from 'align children', aligning around edges isn't much more of a stretch than ignoring being on the same side for the marked faces.

Light values are a vertex, not a side property. Your idea is good. I don't need pseudo code though.

Texture flipping ... has to be done with the texture uvls values somehow ...

Texture alignment across side planes ... have to look into that again.

omg.. can someone tell me where i can download this please? all i see on this board are updates to d2x, and no download =[

Here.

Click on the DLE-XP link and scroll down to the page's bottom.

Get used to searching through Diedel's profile... you'll have to do it a lot.

Edit: Or use bookmarks, like everybody except me probably would.

If this board would allow sigs to be displayed, the link would be readily available in each and every of my posts.