Mapping in Darkplaces engine

[Zylyx_]

Hi!

I'm Zylyx, I'm a n00b here, nice to meet all of you. I've stalked this website before for some QC tutorials (even though I'm very lazy these days when it comes to programming, still got that unfinished Pong game lying around....), lol, anyways moving on...


I got hold of this very lovely hi-tech quake engine mod, called Darkplaces, like last year, and now I wanna start tinkering a bit more with it.

The thing is I'm not really used to mapping with the Darkplaces engine, so I have a few general questions that I hope you will be able to answer:

I'm currently using Worldcraft (coz I was into HL mapping, so it kinda stuck with me), and I've patched it up with that Quake Adapter utility (made a few test maps, it works nicely), but now I want todo some more advanced stuff using the Darkplaces engine, so here are my questions:

1. How do I make custom textures?
Basically, I have a few cool hi-res 24-bit TGA textures lying around, and I would want to use them in my map, but how do I go about doing so? I can’t import them into Worldcraft coz the WC Quake wads only support 8-bit BMP textures, so it makes them look like crap? I've read that you have to make a tex dir in you mod dir (like mymod/textures), and put the textures there, but how will the engine know how to find the correct textures for the map? Or do I have to put the hi-res TGA's in the textures dir, then make a copy of them and convert them to crappy 8-bit bmp's in a wad file (keeping the same file names), and map using the 8-bit textures and hope that Darkplaces will know to look in the textures directory and replace them with the hi-res TGA's at runtime? Is there perhaps a simple way of making custom maps with custom hi-res textures in Worldcraft for the Darkplaces engine?


(ok, this next question is a tiny bit off topic, but still relevant)

2. Models...which file format it best to use (HL 1 MDL, MD2, MD3, DPM) and will I have to put the textures in the texture dir like for the maps above, or can they be in the model dir? I know some file format like HL1 MDL embed the textures in them, and I was wondering if anyone here remembers if HL1 MDL supports 24-bit BMP, coz it was ages ago that I did HL1 modeling?


Anyways, those are the problems I'm having trouble figuring out at the moment, and any sort of help or advice would be well appreciated (oh and thanks in advance ).


- Zylyx

[Zylyx_]

Ok, I think I got it working, but I still think it's not the most effective way of doing it. Here is how it goes (my little tutorial, lol):


How to prepare textures and load hi-res textures in Darkplaces using Worldcraft:

Since WorldCraft doesn’t allow the use of anything other then crappy 8-bit bmp textures, certain actions need to be taken in order to use Hi-res 24-bit TGA textures when mapping.

1. First decide what the map is going to be called
2. Then create the hi-res TGA's and place them in the textures\mapname\ dir
3. Then take all the hi-res TGA, and open them up in Wally
4. Create a new Quake Wad file
5. Then Copy and paste each of the TGA's into the Quake WAD (IMPORTANT: Keep the names of the Hi-res TGA's and the BMPS' In Wad file the same)
6. Save the Wad file (name it after the name of the map, such as mymap.wad)
7. Load it up into WorldCraft
8. Build the map
9. Put the compiled BSP into the mymod/maps dir
10. Start up Darkplaces (with the -game mygame parameter)
11. In console type in “map mapname”

The map now shows the hi-res TGA's instead of the crappy 8-Bit BMP textures in the wad file.

Now I just gotta figure out the development pipeline for the models...

- Zylyx

[Sajt]

[Zylyx_]

[Chris]

[Sajt]

[Urre]

[leileilol]

[Sajt]

[Urre]

That does indeed change my view on the deal. Blender exporters are all good and fun, but other non-free modeling programs are suffering as well as it is. I'd really love to see tools which convert commonly used/supported formats to DP compatible ones. Especially ones with vertex weights.

[leileilol]

how about a COLLADA support in dpmodel, that's supposedly the so-called new godsend of exchange formats.