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DLE-XP Questions And Answers Thread

This thread is intended for DLE-XP questions and answers. No bug reports and no suggestions here please.

Please keep this thread clean. In case some issue needs detailled discussion, I will open an extra thread for it.

Diedel (a.k.a. karx11erx)

about cameras;

put in a wall, added a trigger. designated a wall in another cube as target. first check mine said that this door has no cube on the other side.
redid everything and check mine ok but when run i get a warning: "gal side, type (3), type = 0, segment # = 0" and game exits. (actually i'm not sure gal is the word as that font is wierd looking but the g i'm sure about and the a is a triangle the l could be a 1)

what's this mean? what'd i do wrong?

edit: discovered that most other levels started from within dle. ver 1.5.13 have this same crash. starting from normal new game menu the levels load.!

to avoid confusion, i'm not going to edit the prev.

this is where i started. 1st the above situation was because of spaces in internal file names and something else.

i got to that point because i'm experimenting with cameras

i'm not getting something so i'll recap and somebody correct me.

1st pick a side, add a wall, add a trigger type camera. pick a side for target add that to trigger target list. the view from the trigger should be seen on the target. is that right?

it's not working for me.
1st what type of wall to use? i get error msgs on check mine unless i use overlay.

read the manual on descent2.de site. ???? seems to me i'm doing what it says. i'm not doing something or doing it right. help!

edit: something else. in some levels when they load, if they have special textures, dle shows a green ughly looking texture in their place. i've tried putting the hog file in the same dir as dle. but that doesn't work either. example: g-house by diedel.

The HOG being in the same directory won't help much. You need to have the .pog in the .hog file you're opening the level from (oh, and you must be loading the level from a .hog file or it probably won't load it either, unless Diedel has made DLE-XP smart at that).

jakee,

I have had some cases of old levels containing custom textures where some custom textures were bogus, showing a greenish, distorted image instead.

If you have an actual level of yours with a pog file that ought to be intact, yet showing the same faulty behaviour, please e-mail it to me.

it's g-house from your site.

I have seen this problem. Strangely enough it disappeared when loading another level and then reloading g-house.

yep it comes and goes. reloading the level sometimes makes it work.

I am using 1.5.15 and any wall I put in does not show on the automap. I have created an octagonal room with with pockets containing robots closed with walls and triggered elsewhere. In the automap, the walls show as hollow spaces, but the pockets don't show, giving away that there is something behind it. Is this a bug or am I just missing something?

What should the default setting be for a wall? Cloak and transparency seem to be the same thing. One directly affects the other. What does strength do? This is driving me nuts!

Take a look into the preferences dialog.

I'm sorry but that is no help at all. Which preference dialog where?

What program are we talking about?

Click "preferences" tab and check "walls" and "robots" in the corresponding visibility settings.

OK sorry for not making myself clear. In dle, everything looks fine, walls show where they are supposed to be, 2 back to back xxs. When I then test run the mine in d2x, the walls are in place on screen but do not show up on the automap. Wherever I have xxs, the map has nothing, there is no wireframe for that cube face.
This led me to believe that I was incorrectly setting the values for the walls, hence my request for an explanation as to how the settings affect a wall and what a "standard" setting should be.

I am assuming that the fault is with my usage of dle as no-one else seems to have the same problem. Any ideas?

Oh ok, now I understand. I will check that and come back to you when I know what's going on here.

Weyrman, i believe that is normal behaviour. i recall being able to spot places where hidden walls were because the wire frame lines were missing.

Diedel, Speed boosts: when arriving at the target cube side, will any angular change due to new target occur instantaneously or is there some inertia? will you possibly hit side of cube before angular change takes effect? imagine a tunnel starting out level then sloping down then further on sloping more.
same ? about left/right angle. how much of an angular change can occur?

No inertia. Any angle.

Diedel wrote:Oh ok, now I understand. I will check that and come back to you when I know what's going on here.

Umm ... I understood nothing. The automap doesn't show walls, afaik.

There are many instances where the map shows e.g. a straight section of standard tunnel that you pass through and then fly through a trigger which removes walls from the tunnel behind you, opening pockets filled with robots or powerups. These "walls" showed on the map as standard sides, what I am getting is empty spaces.
I have included screenshots showing:

The mine in the editor


A view of the wall from in the game


The automap view, showing the "missing" walls

That's exactly how such walls look in the automap. Actually that's a hint in the automap to such walls.

When I made Strike (My D2 level. Get it at http://strike.biz.tc ) I had to get a PC (I only have macs). So, It would be great if somebody could port DLE-XP to the mac. PLEASE!

DLE-XP is making heavy use of the MFC (C++ Windows API wrapper classes). Porting it would be a major task involving rewriting all GUI stuff.

Where on the site you are linking to is the level?

OOOPPPPSSS!!

Wrong address!

Try:

http://strikemap.biz.tc

Is there any option in DLE-XP to rotate objects? I´ve looked nearly everywhere in the editor, but i couldn´t find such a feature...

Click on the object control in the toolbar (purple, angled arrow). Then select an object (right click on object in map view or select in object tool), and rotate it with the keyboard or the toolbar's rotate buttons.

The hotkey 'o' will switch you into object movement mode; from there you can move objects like sides or cubes.

Be aware, though, that the behaviour (which way the object moves/rotates/etc) depends on the orientation of the cube, as it does for side mode.

on occasion when working on a level one of the cubes becomes corropt in some way and usually causes the program to crash when you try to view that cube from a certain angle. now, is there a way to debug such errors. like an error message giving me the bad cube's number so that it may be removed and replaced? right now the process of finding bad cubes is quite tedious. requiring me to remember all the cubes ive added or changed, and delete them one by one untill i find the bad one.

Please send me a level with such a cube. DLE-XP should neither cause such problems nor crash when encountering them.

il send you my level, (the same one i sent you last time, but now with more geometry). im trying to put in a teleporter at the end of a tunnel, but to make it look like the others i need to add one more cube. every time i insert a new cube and try to view it from a lower angle, it causes a crash whenever i try the view the cube from a lower angle. il send you the file with the cube,side number. select the cube and side and insert a new cube and you should see the problem. while youre at it can you look at the light color selection because i cant seem to add any colored lights to the level. it just doesnt show the color selector.

Fixe-dee-fixed.

I have a very stupid question, How do I make a Custom Hi res Animated texture(not a door) in DLE? For example: the water texture.

How do I set a open/unlock door trigger in DLE-XP? I can't figure out how these things work.

Add an open wall somewhere (invisible fly-through wall), attach an open/unlock trigger to it and add the cube and side of the intended door as its target.

I can't seem to make the blocks appear. I mark a set of blocks by clicking and holding making all the blocks yellow, save them as a blk file but then when I paste them all I get are red point markers where the blocks are supposed to go. If I could just make the blocks appear it would work fine.

Any suggestions as to what I'm doing wrong?

Are you working with decreased rendering distance?

yep that was the problem, thanks D

how do I align/reset secondary textures like doors or lights?

I get the texture lined up and my door texture is offset a little but I can't seem to find a way to move/adjust/reset only the second texture.

I think #1 instruction and #3 instruction on the texture tool diagram on the dle-xp help manual are mixed up but checking only the 2nd box and using the texture adjust buttons does not adjust only the second texture it adjusts both of them causing the primary texture to become mis-aligned when trying to adjust only the second texture.

You cannot align 2nd texture separately. Their basic alignment is always the one of the 1st texture. All you can do is rotate them in 90 degree steps relative to the base texture.

Descent engine limitation, sorry.

I could change that though ...