RiftQuake

[Dutch]

@gypsy: Lol hardcore man. This next question is directed at you, but if someone else has a tip, by all means chime in.

I'm about to flip the hell out on Blender. I made a new ranger model. It turned out pretty slick. What I did was import the original player.mdl model and tripled the vertex count with more detail and an actual armor piece and helmet.

Problem is, I didn't realize this mesh editing would become a child of sorts to the original mesh. There's a jumble of keyframes and other shit that I can't get rid of, because Blender, despite it's infinite possibilities, lacks a sensible "delete" function for fuck's sake.

Exporting my finished mesh saves a file missing half of my mesh, because the actual object doesn't recognize the added vertices. It's still kicking out a modified version of the original model.

How the hell do I translate the new mesh geometry over to the actual object? What I think happened is I did my edits within a frame and the object isn't recognizing it. But I really don't know, I'm throwing darts with a blindfold on here and wasting valuable time.

EDIT: Ok, I've narrowed down the problem a bit. I've got an object mesh WITHIN an object mesh. Trying to figure out how to remove the 'parenting' or whatever, but the top object is not labeled as a parent.

EDIT2: My boss always says "Don't holler till you're hurt" when I think I screwed up a weld project that's easily fixed. Well, that applies here. I figure it out. "Delete All Shape Keys" was the answer. Back on the saddle fellas, sorry for the drama.

[MadGypsy]

just to be clear... I was absolutely joking. I've never done any of that stuff, not even the Focus Factor. My real secret to staying up and burning the midnight oil is: don't go to sleep.

If you start to get super sleepy, stand up, enjoy a short lucid dream and whatever free thoughts that are beginning to take over your mind (you know.. the epiphany that only other people that have been up for 3 days will understand)... then sit down and get back to work.

[Nickelbawker]

Oh I just get my energy from my body's extra testosterone by not having a _ _ _ _ _ _. It's working out great for me never realized it was an issue. Also figured out how to timeblock and got a timeblocking app that I haven't used yet usually just block like 3 hours then break autopilot.

I know what you mean madgypsy I was so behind on sleep once that I was tired for a months couldn't catch up because of the schedule at the time. I have been up for 3days before apparently that isn't good for your heart at all though.

@Dutch you need to apply transformations to the object and delete all of the frames that have incompleted versions of the model.

Alt+i deletes animation frames from the time line when your mouse is in the 3d view.

Ctrl+A gives you the apply menu, I think of it as the opposite of animation it's not a shape keyframe or location rotation, it's modifying the object not the animation.

I'm sure you already know X is delete.

If you're accidentally animating stuff you should drag the corners make your 3dview bigger by erasing the timeline. I work this way a lot have it saved out as 3dview 2 or modeling.

Ah nvm looks like you solved it, I was thinking of using google sketch up for levels but they say it makes tons of double faces so decided not to.

[MadGypsy]

Google Sketch Up is pretty cool in my book but you have to buy it if you want to export anything. That's like a 100% reason to never use it. Blender is infinitely more powerful than Sketch up and it's free. I found a lil free program once that was pretty similar to sketch up but I can't remember the name. It also only exported to obj I believe.

If you just want to try something different for mapping you could check out Deled3D. There is a community edition that is free. It's pretty similar to Radiant but (if I remember right) there is no entity interface. All you can do is make brushes. I believe it also only exports as obj, so you would have to bring the completed version into blender and take a lesson from golden_boy on how to use blender for quake engine mapping. it could be useful (deled) for creating the basic layout though. It also comes with a lot of pretty decent textures. They are hidden though. You have to add the names by hand to your texture picker config. I think they just messed up basically and included all their textures in the free version.

[Nickelbawker]

Google Sketch Up is pretty cool in my book but you have to buy it if you want to export anything. That's like a 100% reason to never use it. Blender is infinitely more powerful than Sketch up and it's free. I found a lil free program once that was pretty similar to sketch up but I can't remember the name. It also only exported to obj I believe.

If you just want to try something different for mapping you could check out Deled3D. There is a community edition that is free. It's pretty similar to Radiant but (if I remember right) there is no entity interface. All you can do is make brushes. I believe it also only exports as obj, so you would have to bring the completed version into blender and take a lesson from golden_boy on how to use blender for quake engine mapping. it could be useful (deled) for creating the basic layout though. It also comes with a lot of pretty decent textures. They are hidden though. You have to add the names by hand to your texture picker config. I think they just messed up basically and included all their textures in the free version.

Nah you can export to blender with free, but you're missing some of the better tools you export it as col-data or what ever works fine. Oh I'm not making a quake mod or game, eventually an FPS down the road making a Castlevania style game that's way more complex also right right now I'm making a shump for google play andriod it's almost done though. I have pieces of the castlevania type game done although that's not really at all what the game is going to be. It's probably closer to golden axe but way more modern and different.

Thanks for the suggestions, may check those out later, for now I actually am just using blender I use quite a few softwares would like to limit my software library to things I need to keep workflows a certain way.

[MadGypsy]

I haven't tried sketch up in years maybe they relaxed the restrictions a bit. When I had it all you could export as was some nutty file that only sketch up recognized.

---

Deled3D is not awesome. It's like a sad replication of Radiant. If you are making maps in blender, Deled3D has nothing to offer you. Deled3D would be good for someone that wanted to make games for Panda3D or Ogre. It's not impossible to use it for Quake but Quake already has much better editors. Actually if you wanted to use it for Quake, you are just gonna end up right back in Blender before you are done cause Deled3D does not export in any recognized Quake format.

It's a lil fun to play with though cause it is quite simplified in contrast to radiant. I never even read any of the instructions. I opened it up and was mapping immediately. I even figured out the texture thing on my own cause there was a whole lot of textures in the folder but not so many in the editor. I tracked down the file that includes all the textures and wrote the rest of the code to include them and I didn't even know their code. I just copy pasted that shit and changed names.

I just want you to understand that I am not necessarily recommending Deled3D. It's good for what it is but can't even hold a candle to blender, radiant, etc.

heres a look at the interface


also this was supposedly made in Deled but it must have taken forever. All those textures you see are the ones it comes with.


EDIT: Ya know after taking a look at that above map and some others I saw when I did the image search maybe I should take back a little of what I said. Apparently it is not "sad" but I stand by what I said about it being useless for Quake mapping.


Woooah, apparently this was made in Deled. [shocked] They must have done some serious upgrades cause there was no way in hell you could make this with the version I used.



Golden_boy has been struggling to get rid of triangle soup from Q3map2 in blender, maybe he should take a look at this program.

[Dutch]

Last night was a huge milestone in the weapons system regarding weapon slots, parms, switching, picking up, etc. These last few weeks have been insanely productive in learning how to write clean, functional QC. Some of the functions I've written regarding gibs and guns I could not have done even just a month ago. The rabbit hole is going deep....

Anyway, hopefully some pics soon.

[Syluxguy28O3]

progress ftw

[Dutch]

I have a non-vital question more out of curiosity than anything.

When a player dies, the dead body twitches for one frame upon respawn. Can't remember if vanilla engines do this or not, but DP sure does. I tried implementing the EF_TELEPORT_BIT effect upon respawn thinking it was an animation interpolation issue, but that didn't seem to do anything. Also poured through the respawn and a couple other associated functions in code to see if I could find anything there, but no dice. Also did some google searching but came up dry (didn't really dig that deep though, more pressing matters at hand). Anyway, just wondering what causes this if anyone cares to share, thanks.

[Seven]

Hello Dutch,

My english is not ver good, so I do not fully understand your sentence:
"When a player dies, the dead body twitches for one frame upon respawn."
'Respawning monsters' is not a vanilla Quake feature, so do you mean your mods 'respawn' feature ?

I just tested vanilla Quake + DP and started E1M1 in skill 2.
I always do this for developing. It is good, because you face 1 soldier right at start point and there are no other enemies near, so you can test things quite good.

Please do the following:
Shoot the soldier one time and just before you shoot him the second time (so he dies), type into console: slowmo 0.2.
Then shoot him the second time and you will see him fall in slowmotion and can therefore look very good ich which exactly position the issue happens.
In vanilla Quake + DP the soldier falls to floor and has no frame-loss or other issues.

I also have a "respawn after deathe" feature in the smc and tested it the same way with slowmo 0.2. I could not see a frame-loss or frame-jump in it as well...
I play the soldier�s death animation backwards to make him stand up again. I did it because I do not want to add extra frames in the model due to vanilla Quake compability.

Maybe try the following if you cant find out what the root cause of your issue is:
Add this to your respawn code:
self.frame = self.frame - 1; // or + 1 depending if you have a frame-loss or frame-double.
It will hopefully help to fill the "gap".
I do this exactly thing in mission pack 2 (Rogue) for the animated lava nailguns feature.
When starting developing it, they also made a frame jump. I could correct it with a fixed frame reduction like mentioned above. Now it runs smooth.

Hopefully it will help to iron out the bug somehow.
Best of luck.

[Dutch]

@Seven

Thanks for the tips, that is a good method to know.

I should have given a little more detail though. The "twitch" (quick movement) happens when a client respawns. In this case, it was a FrikBot on coop mode. So after the client dies and is laying dead on the ground, when he respawns (presses a button), the dead body twitches, as if it is calling the stand frame that the respawned model is calling. I don't think it's a bot thing, I remember this happening playing people before too, but I could be wrong.

It's hard to explain, I can post up a video tomorrow if you'd like. Thanks for the response!

[Spike]

sounds like the engine you're using doesn't reset interpolation to the current state when the entity is new, but rather uses frame 0. can't see any other reason for the corpse to briefly stand up like that.

[Dutch]

sounds like the engine you're using doesn't reset interpolation to the current state when the entity is new, but rather uses frame 0. can't see any other reason for the corpse to briefly stand up like that.

That makes sense to me. But I checked and it happens in QuakeSpasm as well. Now I'm thinking it's the FrikBots, unless both engines have the same 'bug'.

I found this line in BotFrame() for the bots, which gets called on startframe() in world.qc:

real_frametime = frametime; // in NQ this is alright

I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking at here, but I have a suspicion this is the problem. What do you think? Doing some searching right now on the web.

EDIT: I remember reading that frametime is sort of vague, and only used in CheckWaterJump().

EDIT2: Scratch everything I just said. It's not just the bots.

EDIT3: Just had a big revelation. The twitching only happens on the 5th dead body of a player. So, the first four player deaths do not do the twitch, but the 5th always does. The InitBodyQue() function only stores up to 4 bodyque owners. Beyond that, the dead bodies are overwritten by a new one. If the body to be overwritten is the same dead frame as the one that is overwriting it, the twitch does not occur.

EDIT4: Confirmed. I coded in a 5th bodyque storage into the function, and as I expected, the twitch did not occur on the 5th dead body. Now to go about fixing it.... I tried some different interpolation cvar settings but nothing yet.

[Seven]

Hello Dutch,

Good to see that you found the root cause.
Maybe this information helps you somehow: As far as I know you can raise the max bodyque count much higher in advanced engines. Something like 200 should be no problem. There are only few maps with bigger numbers of enemies in single player.
But I do not know much about multiplayer.
I think the higher the number the less chance to see that tiny bug you encounter.

A question:
How does the dead monster respawn in your mod ?
When they are lying on the floor, will they have a raise animation or will the pop up into stand frame (like regular monsters when loading a new map) ?
I ask because maybe the self.frame - 1 trick could still work, or not ?

[Dutch]

Hey Seven,

The problem isn't the monsters, as they don't respawn. This is all for actual clients in multiplayer. When a client dies in multiplayer, the dead body is copied into a string of spawned entities known as bodyque_heads, so that several bodies of the same player can lay dead around the map. Upon starting a map, a player is allowed 4 (by default) body ques before they are overwritten with a new body upon death. So a player can only have 4 dead body models laying around a map at a time. When a player dies a fifth time, the first body que is overwritten with the fifth, and there is a stutter in the frame only if the 5th dead body has a different frame than the first. I believe the engine is reading the first dead body frame for a split second before overwriting it with the fifth body's frame.

To fix it, I simply did away with the bodyque_head storage function, and spawned a new entity that exactly matches the player's properties (including final death frame) when the player respawns. This has effectively fixed the bug.

EDIT: Forgot to add that I also put a removal think time on the dead body entities to make sure they don't build up too much and kill framerate on us players with dinosaur computers lol

EDIT2: I want to state that that is my interpretation of what's going on, I put all of this together through trial and error and I don't mean to sound so matter-of-fact about something I don't have a full understanding of. I could be totally wrong about some of that. All I know is that my solution seems to have side-stepped the issue.

- Dutch