[Forge]

 Aleks, on 22 July 2023 - 01:14 AM, said:

I don't think there's one, but a good idea might be to just paste the blocked water texture around all the floors/ceilings with e.g. a different pal (like pal 2) to make sure you've covered all the small sectors, and then do it again without the pal.

I do something similar.
During the initial construction, instead of a water texture, I simply use something else (and make it semi-transparent so I can look through the barrier).
After all the sector work is done & it's time to texture & shade - I simply make one of the tror barrier sectors the water texture/transparency I want & blocking, then I copy & paste it over all the non-water looking sectors which are very easy to see and tell apart.

[BestViking]

I'm in the process of TROR'ing the bodies of water. The big lake is the biggest project, because of all the underwater child sectors. I'm pondering on how to solve the eyesores: those ugly transitions between waterfall textures and the transparent water, and the weird way it just "disappears" as it hits the surface. I'm torn between trying Williams suggestion or just opting for non-transparent water. After all, Duke has managed with that kind of water for almost 30 years. As you can see in the attached screenshots, I added sloped rocks under the waterfalls as a possible solution, and also to make the transition to that river less abrupt. But it still kind of doesn't work.

I really like the transparent water though. Especially when you decorate the bottom really nice with slopes, seaweeds and other stuff.

After that I need to add gameplay and polish.

Attached thumbnail(s)

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[William Gee]

Does the lake in the second screeshot glitch? normally a shape like that would have visual glitches.
When I look at the water in your nature scene I would either go 100% transparent on all water even waterfalls or 100% non transparent on all water.
If it were me I would choose non transparent, just to make it easier, but if you do go transparent it will look amazing, just alot more work.

[Aleks]

 BestViking, on 24 July 2023 - 09:02 AM, said:

I'm in the process of TROR'ing the bodies of water. The big lake is the biggest project, because of all the underwater child sectors. I'm pondering on how to solve the eyesores: those ugly transitions between waterfall textures and the transparent water, and the weird way it just "disappears" as it hits the surface. I'm torn between trying Williams suggestion or just opting for non-transparent water. After all, Duke has managed with that kind of water for almost 30 years. As you can see in the attached screenshots, I added sloped rocks under the waterfalls as a possible solution, and also to make the transition to that river less abrupt. But it still kind of doesn't work.

I really like the transparent water though. Especially when you decorate the bottom really nice with slopes, seaweeds and other stuff.

After that I need to add gameplay and polish.

I really like how it's turned with the transparent water, as William mentioned it would probably be more work to properly pull it off like that, but I'd say it's worth it. The waterfalls can be, obviously, made with translucent sprites and as for the point where they hit the water, you could use a similar technique I used in Submachine (see attached picture) - it's just stock assets: spotlight sprite and 2 octabrain blast animation frames on top of each other (probably you could also add some extra effects like rotation to make them look even more alive).

[BestViking]

That looks nice!

The only problem I might encounter if I'm going to make all the water transparent, is the sloping river that ends in a waterfall in that cave. How would I make an underwater current? I would have to make the water low enough that duke touches the ground upon submerging, so that he is carried by the "conveyor belt" floor. But I still don't know if that would actually work. So in that case I might drop the sloping river. Just flatten it. It's not too big of a loss anyway. But for the sake of realism, I'd still want a current, for obvious reasons.

I'm going to have to ponder about it. I have enough backups so I can try just about anything.

[William Gee]

I'm pretty sure you can still add a current/conveyor belt on transparent water... just make it really shallow. You can also angle the transparent water/portal.
Give it a go... I may be wrong. :s

[BestViking]

After some trial and error, messing around a lot and having to deal with this (see attached screenshot), I've decided to go with non-transparent water instead.
Work continues though.

Attached thumbnail(s)

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[Forge]

 BestViking, on 30 July 2023 - 11:53 AM, said:

After some trial and error, messing around a lot and having to deal with this (see attached screenshot), I've decided to go with non-transparent water instead.
Work continues though.

are you putting two tror layers next to each other?
(it looks like you're trying to put a flat tror layer next to a sloped tror layer)

that thin 'wall' is the result of doing that. there are construction techniques to get around that, but trying to maintain a transparent surface layer for the entirety of it may be a little tricky and involve the old transparent water build trick. A lot of effort just to maintain an aesthetic in 1 foot deep water.

My opinion - unless you plan on getting really detailed with the floor of the underwater sector, just slope it up to meet the top surface at the border

[BestViking]

Thank you. I'll keep that in mind. Both adjacent layers are flat in the layer where they meet. IIRC, one has a slope underwater. Now knowing this, I should have constructed everything around that to begin with.
So for now, I've settled for non-transparent water for all the outside areas. I might reconsider if my TROR skills develop enough during the construction of this map.
But seeing how cumbersome it turned out to be, I put it in the polish category together with shading and decoration so I won't burn out on this.
A lot of new ideas started blooming as I went on to work on other areas of the map though, and it is branching out even more now.

[BestViking]

I've ran into a problem. It has nothing to do with TROR. What I'm trying to do is have a touchplate activate two things: a shooter, and a lowering floor. So I use the lotag of the touchplate with the activator for the dropping floor, and a masterswitch for the shooter.
Shooter works fine, but the floor does not lower. It starts out at the post-lowering state. However, when I walk onto that sector, it rises up instead.

I made sure to point the tail of the SE downwards. I also raised the SE sprite height to be at the starting position of the floor that is to drop. Also used sector lotag 28 and put a GSPEED in there. Set the lotag to 100.
Basically followed the Eduke32 wiki tutorial step by step.

Does anybody have an idea what could be causing this?

[lllllllllllllll]

 BestViking, on 02 August 2023 - 01:07 PM, said:

I've ran into a problem. It has nothing to do with TROR. What I'm trying to do is have a touchplate activate two things: a shooter, and a lowering floor. So I use the lotag of the touchplate with the activator for the dropping floor, and a masterswitch for the shooter.
Shooter works fine, but the floor does not lower. It starts out at the post-lowering state. However, when I walk onto that sector, it rises up instead.

I made sure to point the tail of the SE downwards. I also raised the SE sprite height to be at the starting position of the floor that is to drop. Also used sector lotag 28 and put a GSPEED in there. Set the lotag to 100.
Basically followed the Eduke32 wiki tutorial step by step.

Does anybody have an idea what could be causing this?

Is your touchplate in the sector that is lowering? If so it needs to be at the same height as the floor (or at the height of the floor's starting position ingame) or the floor moves to the trigger's location when you walk on it.
Use values for gspeed like 64 128 256 512 to avoid small lips in the height. Sometimes you will still end up with +/- a half or a quarter pagedn/up which can be fixed by adding/subbing 256 or 512 to your -T-r-i-g-g-e-r-'s- SE FloorZ's z loc

[Forge]

 BestViking, on 02 August 2023 - 01:07 PM, said:

I've ran into a problem. It has nothing to do with TROR. What I'm trying to do is have a touchplate activate two things: a shooter, and a lowering floor. So I use the lotag of the touchplate with the activator for the dropping floor, and a masterswitch for the shooter.
Shooter works fine, but the floor does not lower. It starts out at the post-lowering state. However, when I walk onto that sector, it rises up instead.

I made sure to point the tail of the SE downwards. I also raised the SE sprite height to be at the starting position of the floor that is to drop. Also used sector lotag 28 and put a GSPEED in there. Set the lotag to 100.
Basically followed the Eduke32 wiki tutorial step by step.

Does anybody have an idea what could be causing this?

ST 28 w/SE 21 will only raise a floor or lower a ceiling. afaik, it does not lower a floor.

you can either use the touchplate to manipulate the floor (as long as it's in the same sector as the floor you're trying to lower), or use an SE 31

[Aleks]

Yeah ST28/SE21 is pretty much an obsolete effect that wasn't even used in the game IIRC, as a more convenient method of just using SE31 was implemented, so use that instead.

And as lllllllllllllll, the GPSPEED lotag should be a divider of the difference in Z units between the SE sprite and floor, e.g. having floor at 16 384 rising to 0 you can use 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384...

[BestViking]

It sort of works now with the SE31. When I used a touchplate, it rose back up again, probably because I stepped on the touchplate again. So I used a switch instead, but it seems to ignore my hitag request for a specific sound. It appears to force the access card sound.
At first I tried using the handprintswitch, because it is a temple environment. It wouldn't work as a switch on it's own so I settled on using it for decoration and then turned a one-sided dipswitch backwards to use as the functioning switch. That works, but seems to force the acess card sound. What could be causing that?

Is it also possible to make it so the switch only triggers it once? Because as with the toucplate, when I hit the switch again, the floor rises back up.

Except for the sound and it being possible to activate it again, everything works now, so once again thank you!

I attached a screenshot if that helps to diagnose the problem.

Attached thumbnail(s)

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[Aleks]

 BestViking, on 03 August 2023 - 11:00 AM, said:

It sort of works now with the SE31. When I used a touchplate, it rose back up again, probably because I stepped on the touchplate again. So I used a switch instead, but it seems to ignore my hitag request for a specific sound. It appears to force the access card sound.
At first I tried using the handprintswitch, because it is a temple environment. It wouldn't work as a switch on it's own so I settled on using it for decoration and then turned a one-sided dipswitch backwards to use as the functioning switch. That works, but seems to force the acess card sound. What could be causing that?

Is it also possible to make it so the switch only triggers it once? Because as with the toucplate, when I hit the switch again, the floor rises back up.

Except for the sound and it being possible to activate it again, everything works now, so once again thank you!

I attached a screenshot if that helps to diagnose the problem.

Dipswitches can be used in combinations, so the hitag won't work on them for sound - use some other switch (also one that can't be shot but only pressed, I usually use "slotdoor" one), should work with the hitag.

To make the effect activate only once, use a masterswitch instead of an activator, masterswitch activates only once. It will work like this with touchplate as well.

BTW, remove the hitag from the SE sprite, it doesn't need a hitag and IIRC for SE31, hitag delays the effect a bit, but only from the second activation onwards.

[BestViking]

Thanks! I'm one step closer now. Also learned something new about the masterswitch. When I was learning from the FAQs way back, these details weren't explained. The tutorial just said to put a masterswitch in a sector, but not why.
A strange thing that happens now though is that the sound I chose to play when the floor is lowering doesn't play during activation now, but starts playing as an ambient sound when the sector finished lowering. Very strange! With the activator, it worked as I had intended: playing continously as the floor lowered. What could be the cause?

[ck3D]

Re: your sound issue, I have no idea, sounds can be rather unreliable in Duke depending on the type of effect or sound used, every now and then you'll get weird results (most common one being some doors that play their sounds twice, or play them out of controllable order). Different sounds also are defined with different priorities so it could be a speed thing, so many variables, spontaneously I'd doubt it's the activator to masterswitch change however.

Mostly posting since I can find a few minutes to address some fundamentals that seem unclear to you:

- Touchplate always should be on the same Z height as the floor if you don't want it to ever act like a SE 31 or interfere with existing ones (or really many other effects that potentially adjust to a sector floor's height, be it the present one or the immediate next);

- Angle of the touchplate being down means the player will trigger it even if they're not touching the floor when entering the sector; default 'up' angle will only trigger after the player has actually set foot into the sector, the distinction is more important when it comes to gameplay flow than one might think;

- Activator use means the sector will never be able to be activated manually (by the direct means of the space bar/use key), it will always depend on the corresponding switch or touchplate, but function as many times as the trigger can be hit;

- Masterswitch means the effect will be triggered by the touchplate or switch just once, hitag (on most effects) corresponds to the delay between activation and beginning of the effect. After that one first time though, the effect will be operable manually (if the game allows it: doors and elevators are locally pressable and thus will now forever be unlocked, SE 31's aren't and thus will now forever be locked), no more delay;

- You can have several masterswitches (with different timings), touchplates (linked to different effects, will 'go off' simultaneously but the masterswitches will respect their own delays), activators (linked to different touchplates) and even activatorlockeds inside the same sector/effect for several triggers, timed behaviors and what have you as long as your math for the implementation is correct, then most combos should work;

- You can use an activatorlocked with a bogus tag in masterswitch-operated sectors you don't want to ever be locally operable even after the fact; the first activation will operate the masterswitch indeed and deactivate its lock, but the one of the inaccessible activatorlocked will be in place still. You can use this trick in many contexts (for instance to make one-way transport elevators, etc.);

- Always give your masterswitches a hitag that isn't zero, I personally just use 1 all the time (doesn't seem to offset any sequencing), that is a failsafe in case you ever feel like adding a reactor to your map at some point (sometimes the idea comes up late) since exploding a reactor will trigger every masterswitch around the map with a hitag of zero;

- Touchplate hitag is the possible number of triggers to the effect it will try calling (upon each new entrance of the player into its sector) until it runs out, and so for a one-time touchplate you might want to give the sprite a hitag of 1;

- Some effects aren't compatible with all the possible triggers (basic example: touchplate can not control forcefields).

Random unrequested tips I know, but they might help.

[Aleks]

 ck3D, on 03 August 2023 - 01:49 PM, said:

- Masterswitch means the effect will be triggered by the touchplate or switch just once, hitag (on most effects) corresponds to the delay between activation and beginning of the effect. After that one first time though, the effect will be operable manually (if the game allows it: doors and elevators are locally pressable and thus will now forever be unlocked, SE 31's aren't and thus will now forever be locked), no more delay;

Seeing how ck3d's made a small compendium here, I'll just add to this one a few details:
- since a few dozens (probably about 2 years) of EDuke revisions, you can add pal23 to a masterswitch and it will activate many times like an activator, but keep the delay - which can be very convenient for more complex effects (however, it doesn't function the same with every effect in the game, so test if it does each time when using);
- I think Infosuite mentions it, but masterswitch hitag translates to time such that hitag 30 = 1 second (30 frames), can be useful for precisely timed effects.

[Forge]

 BestViking, on 03 August 2023 - 01:01 PM, said:

Thanks! I'm one step closer now. Also learned something new about the masterswitch. When I was learning from the FAQs way back, these details weren't explained. The tutorial just said to put a masterswitch in a sector, but not why.
A strange thing that happens now though is that the sound I chose to play when the floor is lowering doesn't play during activation now, but starts playing as an ambient sound when the sector finished lowering. Very strange! With the activator, it worked as I had intended: playing continously as the floor lowered. What could be the cause?

It happens because M sprites are treated as ambient sounds unless the sector they are in has either an activator, or is ST tagged
you can have both an activator and a masterswitch in the lowering sector - give the activator a hitag of 1 and the same lowtag as the masterswitch.
this will also prevent the player from going to the lowered sector and being able to activate it manually by pressing use on it

An option would be to remove the masterswitch, stick to the activator & go back to your original touchplate design. - Give the touchplate a hitag of 1 (for one time use) and aim the tail down.

[BestViking]

Thank you again for all the great advice! I added the activator, but the problem with the sound remains.

When that didn't work, I thought it could be that the sound I'm using was defined as an ambient sound. IIRC i used GENERIC AMBIENCE 2, which references grinding.voc. I later noticed this same voc is also referenced by DUMPSTER MOVE, so I tried that instead, since that is not defined as an ambient sound in the CON. With my SE31 there is no difference. But when I tried these two with regular st20 ceiling doors, the dumpster sound played only once, while the generic ambience played for the whole duration of the movement. So, even though it didn't solve my problem, I learned something useful.

I've been hesitant to go back to the touchplate activation, since I kind of want that switch. But if nothing else can solve the sound issue, then I will try it out and see if it helps.

In the meantime I've been working on other parts of the map because I have a whole bunch of ideas. There's one thing with TROR now that I'm trying to accomplish that gives me a bit of a headache:

Let's say I have a room with a pool that is split up by a bridge going across. So I have two separate pools of water. I extend them downwards, then I gray out the upper layers. Now in theory, shouldn't I just be able to insert two points on each of the opposing outer lines of these sectors, build a connecting sector inbetween, and then join it up to those points? Basically, I want this underwater tunnel connecting the two pools. But the new sector extends all the way up through both layers, cutting through the bridge in the upper layer and creates ugly glitches and the hall of mirrors effect.

Am I missing something that allows me to draw that sector in the lower layer only?

[ck3D]

Can't help you with TROR but re: sound concerns, if things ever really have to come to that (it's not the best workaround) I reckon one 'patch' that should fix most things would be the use of a helper sector. That is, you build a simple inaccessible sector out of bounds and replicate the set-up there that sounds the way you would like it; the player will never see it, but it will play the sound you want all the while the actual effect that is visibly triggered can be made silent, if you sync their triggers. There probably is a way more practical and rudimentary solution in your current case but that's always something you now know you can do, even to overlap sounds, or create sound sequences with successive timed masterswitches.

Keep in mind the sound from the helper sector will play from its location and so, ideally you'd want to move it wherever it feels natural the sound should be coming from. That includes Z height which means your helper sector (or probably really just the M sprite) should be at height coordinates it can be heard from. You can drag the helper sectors literally over the visible effect if you want too, since they are treated as a different map layer they wouldn't render from the main room, but then there is a risk the player may clip into them if sector over sector detection fails on them and they get softlocked, so out of bounds is recommended unless working with a central effect inside a really large room where for the sound source to be credible the sector overlap can't be avoided (and you can minimalize the clipping possibility by having the spaces never meet in height).

[William Gee]

My Bridge tutorial basically explains your TROR question. The answer is yes but I have no idea where you are going wrong.

[BestViking]

Quote

My Bridge tutorial basically explains your TROR question. The answer is yes but I have no idea where you are going wrong.

Thanks! That helped me figure it out! I must have joined up the wrong points. This time, I copied the underwater sector, manipulated it into a corridor, and joined it up to make sure I was editing the correct layer. Previously, I must have been in the wrong layer


I have no idea what is happening to my effects though. I've got this touchplate that's supposed to activate four ceiling doors. Two on each side of a corridor. When I used an activator, they all opened, but with different speeds even though I used the same gspeed value. I've been trying with masterswitches too. Then only the doors on one side opened although they are all identically crafted. Went back to activators and changed the gspeed value. Now only one opens and another one glitches, starting a little bit open.

I'm starting to think things are glitching out due to the size of my map. If anyone wants to take a look and help me out, I can PM the map. It's huge now, so it might be the reason for all that strange behavior.

In regards to the lowering floor issue with the sound that played at the wrong time, I solved that by using earthquake SE's for sound. I used three with differently timed masterswitches to have the effect last the duration of the lowering floor.

Sorry for spamming up the forum, guys. And thanks for all the help I've received. It has really helped me get back into the groove of mapping

[William Gee]

If you PM me the map with the start location where the 4 doors are I can have a look.

[ck3D]

 BestViking, on 06 August 2023 - 02:02 PM, said:

I'm starting to think things are glitching out due to the size of my map. If anyone wants to take a look and help me out, I can PM the map. It's huge now, so it might be the reason for all that strange behavior.

Guaranteed that is not the case.

[Aleks]

 BestViking, on 06 August 2023 - 02:02 PM, said:

Thanks! That helped me figure it out! I must have joined up the wrong points. This time, I copied the underwater sector, manipulated it into a corridor, and joined it up to make sure I was editing the correct layer. Previously, I must have been in the wrong layer

Yeah, TROR has this annoying thing that sometimes when working in 2D mode, it randomly drops you into another TROR layer for no particular reason when i.e. moving a sprite or a node. Pressing Page Up/Page Down can help, also switching for a moment to 3D mode and back brings you back to correct layer too, but it's annoying. Using the "3D mode preview" in 2D mode helps a lot too IMO.

Quote

I have no idea what is happening to my effects though. I've got this touchplate that's supposed to activate four ceiling doors. Two on each side of a corridor. When I used an activator, they all opened, but with different speeds even though I used the same gspeed value. I've been trying with masterswitches too. Then only the doors on one side opened although they are all identically crafted. Went back to activators and changed the gspeed value. Now only one opens and another one glitches, starting a little bit open.

I think this is caused by the values on GPSPEEDs with relation to the heights of each doors. Note that, despite its name, GPSPEED doesn't necessarily set the speed, but rather rate of movement, particularly for some effects this is more prononunced (e.g. slide doors will always move with the same speed and GPSPEED just sets the distance over which they move, so technically the time of the whole effect). In the case of moving ceilings/floors like with ST20 door, it should be correlated with the heights, so that the height is dividable by the GPSPEED lotag. Also if e.g. one door has 16 "page up" units and another has 20, I think you should use e.g. lotags 1024 and 1280 to have them both open within the same time.

[BestViking]

It doesn't look like the PM system here allows me to attach files, so I put up a passworded rar here.

Attached File(s)

•  canyon-testversion.rar (28K)
  Number of downloads: 70

[William Gee]

I don't know what was wrong but I fixed the issue by deleting and reinstalling the Speeds.
I did also open the doors a few clicks to have a look, that may of fixed the issue when I closed them again.

My guess is that you had made the ceiling lower than the floor in the broken doorways.

[ToiletDuck64]

*hasn't looked at the map*

I think that if deleting and re-making the speed sprites fixes the problem, then maybe they weren't actually in the sectors they were supposed to be in (as opposed to an overlapping sector or something); check the sprite properties to verify the sector numbers.
([tab] with cursor in sector, for sector properties; [shift]+[tab] with sprite highlighted, for sprite properties)

Also, I could've sworn that Mapster stops you from lowering a sector ceiling below its floor by normal means (with a message like "Didn't move sector ceilings" or something, depending on which method you're using).

[William Gee]

I had another look at the broken version of his map. Everything is in the correct sector, there is no SOS or ROR where the doors are located.
Doors are all at the same correct level.
Looks like a couple speeds and 1 activator were "floating" in the sector and not sitting on the floor... But they were not consistent with what doors worked and didn't.