[ck3D]

dandouglas, on 13 November 2022 - 05:06 AM, said:

Ah, I've actually locked player movement for the duration of the countdown - thinking perhaps if the player's health is below a certain point it could print out a photo of Duke's face all bashed up though.

Really random and quick idea I'm not even sure would work but, how about Protozoid Slimer penalty spawn/photobomb?

[Danukem]

This is kind of old (11 days now) but I'll post it to keep the thread going. I added some interactive bowling physics to AA just because I don't like how there was bowling pins and you couldn't knock them down.



The map area is from Fallout Freeze by Brullov
btw it really bothers me that the ball makes a squish sound after getting hit by the sword (I will fix that) -- it has something to do with the sword being the most recent hit.

[Graphics]

I just watched the video with Duke riding a car in the roadway. That's epic work. As for me, I finally got off my butt and released my first playable BETA for Retro Deathmatch. But it, needs a lot of work. Gameplay is really early in development and the weapons are not balanced. It's more like a, let's test it out and see if it works BETA. Here's a picture from it. Thank you to anyone that's helped me with this project.

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[Mark]

Shooting the last pin was a good final touch to a cool effect.

[Danukem]

Mark, on 14 November 2022 - 11:10 AM, said:

Shooting the last pin was a good final touch to a cool effect.

I was trying to show in the video that the pins are falling based on damage, and sliding and angled depending on the direction the damage is coming from. There are two voxels, one of the pin standing and one of the pin on its side. This doesn't allow for rotation and tumbling, but I tried to add some realistic movement at least. Models are better because they can pitch and roll for more realistic looking reactions.

There's a sound of one pin falling, and then a "strike" sound -- the strike sound only plays if 5 or more pins are credited to the bowling ball within a short enough time.

[Aleks]

Haven't posted any new screenshots from my map in a while (besides some freaky elevator videos on the Discord channel), so here's a bunch of assorted ones. At the stage I'm in right now with this map, there's not much spectacular stuff to design, but more patching and fixing the effects/tying loose ends really.

[Mark]

That warehouse area looks good.

[DNSkill]

Wow, a pallet jack from 3DR Studios! Love these screenshots, Aleks!

[ck3D]

The pairing of that arguably difficult-to-use tiled floor texture with intrinsic yellow and the pal 23 on those walls actually is pretty cool, too, I can relate to and like seeing that style in approach. Good luck with finalization! Had we kept count, I probably still owe you testing for maybe ten maps now.

[Danukem]

ck3D, on 16 November 2022 - 01:25 AM, said:

The pairing of that arguably difficult-to-use tiled floor texture with intrinsic yellow and the pal 23 on those walls actually is pretty cool, too, I can relate to and like seeing that style in approach. Good luck with finalization! Had we kept count, I probably still owe you testing for maybe ten maps now.

Wait, so the floor is actually pal 0? I don't remember that in the tile set -- maybe it's not used much.

[dandouglas]

ck3D, on 13 November 2022 - 05:27 AM, said:

Really random and quick idea I'm not even sure would work but, how about Protozoid Slimer penalty spawn/photobomb?

Haha, that's a great shout!

[ck3D]

Danukem, on 16 November 2022 - 01:51 AM, said:

Wait, so the floor is actually pal 0? I don't remember that in the tile set -- maybe it's not used much.

Oh yeah it is. Don't quote me on that but I think it's part of the lunar tile set, either that or early episode 3 tiles, whatever. Difficult pick as I was saying because it's pretty lo-fi and Build yellow is generally unpopular, unless you create some kind of pattern around it (singular instances would just stand out too much and clash against the overall less pristine tone of most Duke textures). That sort of coherence is in fact exactly what I was trying to say is rather nicely achieved here. Major reason why you might not see that texture used much in user levels is it's tempting (for more neutral settings) to default to the classic black and white tiled floor, or maybe the E4 beige and black one which essentially achieves the same visual impression but toned down many a notch (so more reasonable-looking, probably higher definition too or at least looks more detailed - E4 style).

[Aleks]

Thanks, guys! Yeah, I don't think that yellow tiled floor texture was ever used in the base game at all, but I remember this being used quite extensively in very early usermaps (perhaps because of the novelty aspect as well). And have to agree with ck3D, it's difficult to pull reliable yellows in Build, funnily enough the shade bar for them isn't even so limited, but they just often ten to drastically go into weird muddy green/brownish grey when increasing the shade values. One way around it in Polymost is using black transparent tiles for shading tints that make it look a lot better.

BTW, just noticed now how on my 2nd screen the bar above the door lines up with the yellow line on the wall, it wasn't intended (I was mostly designing the door from "the other side"), but turns out to be a nice touch.

[LakiSoft]

I definitely remember that yellow floor texture being used ONLY in some early amateurish 1996 maps. It's not used in main base game AFAIK to be honest. Maybe it's used here and there at some newer user levels, but indeed it's used very rarely nowadays and only think i came up when it was being used it was shitty multiplayer maps from Shovelware CDs. However they way how you did it placed @Aleks actually it's getting new purpose and volume, Nice Screens BTW.

[ck3D]

Trivia question I could easily look up the answer to myself, but might be more fun to ask others this way (someone actually might know without needing to check, too): talking those floor tiles, which base Duke 3D level is the first one in the set to use the chessboard style black and white one? Asking because in the texture list it's actually nowhere close to most other floor tiles and instead feels isolated with the Launch Facility rocket textures. I always sort of wondered if that had been its sole original purpose and only later then people started applying it to floors. It probably was designed with that possible use in mind too anyway, but non-mappers might appreciate that cute little oddity.

The yellow and grey one though I kind of use a lot myself, but it really only works in certain contexts, and an area's darkness can facilitate its use, since (as Aleks brought up) darker shading will completely wash out the yellow real quick.

[Reaper_Man]

I have some tilenum usage audit M32 scripts from when we were working on AWOL and I ran those on the 4 retail episodes. The black and white checker texture, tilenum 414, is only used 43 times. It's only used 15 times in Launch Facility, I'd have to go back through and see where else it gets used. EDIT: Looks like the other uses are a couple exterior walls in E2L3, floors in the mess hall in E4L1, and in a few places (such as the start) as floors inside the grocery store in E4L3.

The yellow and gray tiles, tilenum 720, isn't used at all in the retail maps.

A few other fun facts:

tile0 is used 100,163 times. There are 4,937 SECTOREFFECTORs in the retail game. There's only 2,218 SEENINEs.

The 5 most common used real textures are 1169 (brown rockface), 802 (beige concrete retaining wall), 442 (steel wall with a vertical beam), 783 (interior wall with the 2 horizontal brown strips), and 745 (dark brown vertical wood).

The last 3 maps in Episode 3 somehow have invalid tile IDs, using tile ID -1 which shouldn't even be possible. This broke my audit script! It looks like they are all overpics in the damage section at the end of Farenheit / start of Hotel Hell, and all of Stadium

[Aleks]

Reaper_Man, on 16 November 2022 - 01:37 PM, said:

I have some tilenum usage audit M32 scripts from when we were working on AWOL and I ran those on the 4 retail episodes. The black and white checker texture, tilenum 414, is only used 43 times. It's only used 15 times in Launch Facility, I'd have to go back through and see where else it gets used.

The yellow and gray tiles, tilenum 720, isn't used at all in the retail maps.

A few other fun facts:

tile0 is used 100,163 times. There are 4,937 SECTOREFFECTORs in the retail game. There's only 2,218 SEENINEs.

The 5 most common used real textures are 1169 (brown rockface), 802 (beige concrete retaining wall), 442 (steel wall with a vertical beam), 783 (interior wall with the 2 horizontal brown strips), and 745 (dark brown vertical wood).

The last 3 maps in Episode 3 somehow have invalid tile IDs, using tile ID -1 which shouldn't even be possible. This broke my audit script! It looks like they are all overpics in the damage section at the end of Farenheit / start of Hotel Hell, and all of Stadium

That's really neat information actually, in fact after 20 years of mapping we've all grown more accustomed to how textures look in that Build spreadsheet rather than their actual usage within the game, which sometimes leads to surprises - like how some tiles were never or only barely used. Quite surprised how 745 would be among the most used ones (I'd expect either concrete tile #790 or raw concrete #815 to be among the most used, but maybe they aren't because they're mostly on the floors). Then there are tiles like #714 and #715 or #1105 and #1106 which look familiar, but I don't think are used anywhere. And completely bizarre #3420 which doesn't even look like something with similar style...

[Reaper_Man]

Keep in mind that this counts all walls, even hidden or "invisible" walls IE two red walls that are the same height. And that each side of a red wall has a different picnum, even if one side is never seen. For example a pit may have 1 texture on the side you see, but if you raised it up instead of making it a hole, the walls on the now "outside" are a different wall with a different picnum. This also goes for overpics, both sides of a red wall can have different overpics. Which essentially means any given red wall in Mapster accounts for 4 possible textures being used. Lastly (as I'm sure you know this) when you create new walls, the previous wall's picnum and overpicnum are transferred to the new wall you use. So you can end up with situations where white walls have overpics that would never be seen.

This is why I made this script actually, we had a situation in AWOL where breakable glass was set as the overpicnum on a wall early in a map's design, which then unknowingly was transferred across 90% of the map, which caused havoc when we made our breakable surface system. This also explains why in Duke3D and in usermaps, sometimes random walls will shatter with glass if you toss a pipebomb at them but not when it explodes or takes damage. The overpic is likely set to glass or some other breakable surface, so the invisible overpic breaks.

So I suspect most of these "most used" surfaces are probably in some way invisible. 1169 for example is probably used on both sides of all walls in the exterior of The Abyss, which is why it's the most commonly used wall by a large margin.

[ck3D]

Reaper_Man, on 16 November 2022 - 02:40 PM, said:

This also goes for overpics, both sides of a red wall can have different overpics.

Everything else you said is 100% correct but I have doubts on this. Pretty sure one same red wall can only have one overpic for both sides. IIRC in situations where both sides of one same wall are visible (e.g.. stairs with a symmetrical pattern going on on the ceiling so that the wall for a bottom of a stair will also make for the wall for the top of the next one and vice versa), as soon as you apply overpic, both sides seem to become co-dependent there unless you play mapper tricks (i.e.. draw another fake wall, or cover the undesirably effected part with sprites); they will take the other side's properties as you change them, tilenum, pal, repeat values... Now remove overpic display and you can edit both sides separately/as per usual again.

edit - wait, it's too early and I'm not caffeinated enough to be posting. Upon rereading, I now realize that with overpic, you really mean the maskwalls. Whereas I'm referring to whatever it is named that is triggered by pressing 2 on a wall in Mapster in 3D mode, to allow for different 'top' and 'bottom' texturing on the same wall. Only in this scenario, the wall properties will interfere. Sorry for the confusion.

It's also really cool to finally have more of a confirmation that the black and white checkers texture/414 really never was intended for floors at all, but maybe as an afterthought. And yet somehow user mappers always spontaneously recuperated it as a floor texture it seems. Levelord used to post on here for a brief stint, would love it if he ever had anything to say on the matter (but we user mappers probably nerd out on this type of stuff a lot more than the original Builders ever did).

[Danukem]

ck3D, on 16 November 2022 - 10:30 PM, said:

edit - wait, it's too early and I'm not caffeinated enough to be posting. Upon rereading, I now realize that with overpic, you really mean the maskwalls. Whereas I'm referring to whatever it is named that is triggered by pressing 2 on a wall in Mapster in 3D mode, to allow for different 'top' and 'bottom' texturing on the same wall. Only in this scenario, the wall properties will interfere. Sorry for the confusion.

This continues the tangent so I'm getting a little off the thread topic now, but...

maskwalls are one of those things that mappers understand because they work with them, but the term is not really defined in any documentation. The closest we get as far as I know is this entry in the infosuite by Ryan Lennox

https://infosuite.du...age=ae_walls_a1

But it still doesn't define what a masked wall is, just how to make something a masked wall and noting that a masked wall can be edited on both sides (which is not helpful because that is also true of non-masked walls). Essentially a masked wall is when you take a wall that is not rendered (because it is the border between sectors and it spans the plane of "air" above the floor where the sectors border) and set a flag on it so that the wall is rendered, but such that transparent pixels stay invisible like they are on sprites.

If you have never been into level editing and you come at it from the code side as I have, you can go for many years and not have a good understanding of what a masked wall is since it is never defined. overpicnum is the wall struct which determines the mask tile, but in mapster it doesn't normally say that is what you are editing. If you press G on the masked wall in 3D mode, it says you are editing the "masked wall picnum" which makes it sound like you are editing the picnum of a different wall, rather than a different value on the same wall. This is reinforced when you point the mouse at the wall and in the preview pane it says "pic" regardless of whether you are viewing a normal wall or masked wall, not distinguishing between picnum and overpicnum.

[Aleks]

ck3D, on 16 November 2022 - 10:30 PM, said:

edit - wait, it's too early and I'm not caffeinated enough to be posting. Upon rereading, I now realize that with overpic, you really mean the maskwalls. Whereas I'm referring to whatever it is named that is triggered by pressing 2 on a wall in Mapster in 3D mode, to allow for different 'top' and 'bottom' texturing on the same wall. Only in this scenario, the wall properties will interfere. Sorry for the confusion.

Was also my first thought when I read Reaper's post yesterday, but then I realised/remembered that "overpic" means "maskwall", so don't worry.

This discussion might be getting worthy of its own topic in the end, since it's the little nerdy quirks and some interesting trivia (such as the info about which textures are the most used). Also I've never known that non-masked tiles would break with thrown pipebombs if they have glass texture set as their overpic. Probably could be useful for "mirror" surfaces that reflect shrinker shots without actually rendering them as mirrors I suppose.

A little trivia related to maskwalls I've only recently found out about: there are these tiles with def names "maskwall#" which have the unique - at least for the base game - parameter of having a fixed cstat value so that they appear as blocked, but without hitscan activity (which can also lead to some clipping bugs when you try to "cage" the player in these). It turns out there's a way of making them hitscan-sensitive by giving them a hi-tag value (of course making them also destructible with explosives), I think this way they can also be made transluscent.

[Reaper_Man]

ck3D, on 16 November 2022 - 10:30 PM, said:

edit - wait, it's too early and I'm not caffeinated enough to be posting. Upon rereading, I now realize that with overpic, you really mean the maskwalls. Whereas I'm referring to whatever it is named that is triggered by pressing 2 on a wall in Mapster in 3D mode, to allow for different 'top' and 'bottom' texturing on the same wall. Only in this scenario, the wall properties will interfere. Sorry for the confusion.

This behavior is handled via a cstat bit referred to as BOTTOM_SWAP, I'm not sure what the more common used term for it is, I always recall them being called "bottom walls". Something to note about this is that the bottom wall texture isn't a new property, when the bit is set it just inherits all of the other side of the wall's properties. This may be why you see them sharing overpics or other properties. You're still only looking at 4 possible textures referenced per red wall. It may be easier to think of all red walls as "pairs" of each side of the wall. Each side has a texture (the picnum) and a mask wall texture (the overpicnum), even if the masking bits aren't enabled.

I'm not in front of Mapster right now to check, but I think you should be able to manually edit the overpics for each side of a wall via the F8 menu in 2D mode, if it won't let you make them different through the 3D mode. Mapster may be smart enough to apply the overpic from one side to the other if it's designed to enforce that, but if you make these changes at runtime via CON, there's definitely no such safety.

As for tile 414, it definitely seems like that was a bespoke texture for the Launch Facility rocket. The couple of times it's used in Warp Factor it's not super visible as it's on the outside of the ship and doesn't really match the rest of the hull.

Also Aleks, I wasn't clear about this in my post but ultimately yes, the way wall textures are easily propagated makes them get "used" much more than floor or ceiling tiles. Tile 790 is only used 493 times, tile 815 used 564 times. Obviously there are fewer sectors than walls, and a sector can only use 2 textures (floor and ceiling), whereas each wall is using up to 4. So a square red walled sector uses 16 wall textures but only 2 floor/ceiling textures.

[Graphics]

I couldn't sleep tonight. So, I decided to build on a little map I'm working on. Not too much expansion of the land mass. But I did expand the sky train. Anyways, hope everyone is doing well.

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[Fox]

Graphics, on 19 November 2022 - 02:05 AM, said:

I couldn't sleep tonight. So, I decided to build on a little map I'm working on. Not too much expansion of the land mass. But I did expand the sky train. Anyways, hope everyone is doing well.

That's one ridiculously large highway

I presume it's for Gojira to cross the city with safety

[Mark]

I'm in the process of making models for a possible lost jungle city mod. I liked the looks of this one so much I had to post it.
If it looks this good as-is I can't wait to see it in eduke with Polymer lighting it up and the normal map pops out.

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[Graphics]

Fox, on 19 November 2022 - 03:35 PM, said:

That's one ridiculously large highway

I presume it's for Gojira to cross the city with safety

No, it's too help Godzilla get across the water and safely bypass the city. And you'll be glad to know, it's even bigger now.

PS: Hope you're doing well Fox.

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[Mark]

Another one almost done

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[Reaper_Man]

Back on my bullshit doing texture remakes, I did the unused 720 tiles in the original yellow, a light/dark grey checker pattern, and a palette swap safe blue. The pattern on the tiles isn't exact, the crosshatching is more pronounced and makes me think the original is more of a concrete than a tile.







These are cc0 free for anyone to use.

[Mark]

Texture testing on another model.

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[jimbob]

busy replacing the duke player art for Dough Nookham

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