[Stabs]

just always think "ground up" never ever, modify a ceilings height or shape a ceiling until your sure a ceiling is going to be a ceiling, just think about room shape at the start and make sure that is nicely fleshed out before you go up, its like a fine strategy game how you have to think ahead so far

[Micky C]

Has anyone had any problems copying stacks of sectors between maps? I highlight all the sectors, then switch maps, and the connections between some of the sectors are messed up. Not broken, but messed up.

[Helixhorned]

Copying bunches between maps isn't really supported, so it's best to clear any extensions before highlighting sectors intended for another map.

[Micky C]

Can anything be done about the awkward joining of sectors? I've been putting up with it for quite a while. I'm referring to the joining of regular adjacent sectors, nothing really to do with TROR except that it gets in the way. When I try to join sectors normally, what happens is that it always says "no sectors joined" or on rare occasions it says "are you sure you want to join non-adjacent sectors?" It never, ever seems to get it right, which means I have to resort to using the z-lock feature, which leads to a lot of resetting of the editable z area which slows down mapping considerably. If there's any way where if you're pointing the cursor over more than one sector, press join, then press join in another adjacent sector on the same level, that the engine can figure out which sectors to join, or, in the unlikely event of more than one possibility of sectors to be joined, that it asks which pair you want to join.

While I'm nagging, I might as well restate how imperative it is to TROR mapping that if you create a sector, extend it, then create an identical child sector in the top and bottom layer, that a mapper be allowed to break the connection only in that child sector. This makes it a bagillion times easier to add TROR geometry to maps which have already been extended, and to rearrange heights and so on. I know you have real life to get on with, and that TROR is only one of the eduke32 features that you're generously donating your time to, but this feature should take priority over the joining thing mentioned above and even the slicer IMO, as we currently have no way to insert new buildings or objects in multiple layers without a) creating lots of sectors, then doing lots of joining (grr... joining), or b:) breaking the TROR link, creating new sectors, then trying to reconnect the sectors, which is almost always quite complicated.

This is the situation: the top layer was originally one sector, with the child sector made afterwards. I should be able to break the connection only between the highlighted child sectors.



And this has nothing to do with TROR but I'll write about it because it's an important bug:
I've noticed several instances over the past few months or more where I'm creating circles, or splitting sectors, and as soon as I hit the space bar (either making the circle, or completing the splitting procedure), the vertexes jump to the wrong spot. The two cases are probably linked, but while the circle problem is random, I've noticed that the splitting problem is more likely if I start drawing walls, insert a point on another wall (while in wall drawing mode), then join the wall to that point.

I managed to cause the circle bug in a test map just now, interestingly it formed part of the circle with the extension's white wall. Needless to say the map is corrupt, but usually when it mis-places the vertexes when making a circle, it misplaces the vertexes from the loop the circle is made from.
Here's the map.

Attached File(s)

•  circleproblem.zip (580bytes)
  Number of downloads: 256

[Helixhorned]

Check out r2093, there's something for everyone there.

Micky C, on 29 October 2011 - 11:03 PM, said:

Can anything be done about the awkward joining of sectors?

Has been partially taken care of. Now if there's more than one candidate for either the first or second candidate, it asks you to choose one. The code could be a bit more clever at figuring out beforehand which combinations are nonsensical, but I hope this solution does it for now.

Quote

While I'm nagging, I might as well restate how imperative it is to TROR mapping that if you create a sector, extend it, then create an identical child sector in the top and bottom layer, that a mapper be allowed to break the connection only in that child sector.

So "sucking" a void island out of a nearby white wall is impractical?

Quote

And this has nothing to do with TROR but I'll write about it because it's an important bug:
I've noticed several instances over the past few months or more where I'm creating circles, or splitting sectors, and as soon as I hit the space bar (either making the circle, or completing the splitting procedure), the vertexes jump to the wrong spot.

These were indeed pretty bad, thanks for bringing them to my attention.

[Zaxtor]

I always wondered what are the keys to make the "level map" of mapster diagonalward like in his picture.



Because if we can see EVERY layers / floors of a level diagonal it would be damn interesting seeing my whole level sideways all the floors etc. Just like some old doom editor that you could see an entire level's map diagonal / side etc. Lagged as fuck but was an old 4/96 computer at the time.

maybe my comp can handle it.

[Helixhorned]

From the wiki:

F3 enter/quit side-view mode

in side-view mode:
Q, W: orbit around center
A, Z: change azimuth
MMB: change "player" z
RMB: change "player" x/y

[Micky C]

Thanks Helix, that helps a lot

Helixhorned, on 30 October 2011 - 12:53 PM, said:

So "sucking" a void island out of a nearby white wall is impractical?

Yes. As DanM has stated, us mappers have to think 2 steps ahead, because once we've made an extension, there's no easy way to add multi-level geometry. Sucking a void island out of a nearby wall can be very time consuming if there are more than two layers. However, another problem is that what if there isn't a white wall nearby? There could be several sectors between where you want to create your geometry, and the closest white wall.

Ideally, the ultimate solution would be if there was an feature to create a sector in an extension, then "stamp" it into the sector below, then have the option to break the TROR link between them. However at this point I'm willing to settle for simply allowing the breaking of connections between manually created sectors.

[Zaxtor]

Soo interesting the art of TROR. Imagine if is in color would be crazy. Is the level I just finished today.

[Helixhorned]

I've been receiving problem reports that all originate from one and the same cause and decided to write a mini-article about it. The problem usually manifests itself when highlighting many sectors at once, doing some editing with them, and after de-highlighting, discovering that some of the red walls (especially with TROR secors) have either become white, or connected improperly, for example to a wall on a different level.

To understand why this is happening, first you have to know how Mapster creates red-wall connections without any RoR involved (this is also called "pointer checking"). When two walls meet such that their endpoints coincide and have reversed orientation with respect to one another, that's when a red-wall link is created between them.

|   sector 1   |
x______________x
w1.point2      w1

^              ^
 would be red wall
if dragged together
v              v


w8             w8.point2
x--------------x
|  sector 2    |

This works fine as long as no two wall-lines overlap in the x/y-plane. Of course, TROR totally violates this innocent assumption since there now might be many candidates, making it necessary to do some more elaborate checking than the simple "does the two walls fit by their coordinates?".

One measure to prevent "bad" new connections after de-highlighting consists of saving the existing red wall (nextwall) relation just before whiting out border lines during highlighting. This permits the editor to reconstruct the previous connections later, but only if there have been no structural modifications. (The reason is ease of implementation, since one would have to tweak indices whenever something got e.g. deleted or inserted.) If there have been such modifications, the editor clears the old-nextwall information and has to rely on heuristics later on.

Here's a list of what is considered a structural modification. Most of them happen from 2D mode.

• Setting the first wall of a sector (!)
  
• Mirroring or flipping sectors
  
• Auto-attaching an inner loop to a sector
  
• Joining sectors
  
• Inserting circle points
  
• Adding an inner loop to a sector
  
• Splitting sectors or joining two loops
  
• Deleting sectors
  
• Inserting points

Thus, if any of these operations are carried out while there are sectors highlighted, the red wall determination after de-highlighting them might not choose the same connections as before.

In the OpenGL modes, you usually notice a badly-connected wall because it shows some z-fighting. In that case, pressing DELETE while aiming at it in 3D mode will clear the red-wall connection so that you can try again manually (this time in 2D mode, either by dragging points or pressing ENTER on a line).

[Micky C]

With the WGRealms 2 maps I'm working on, the TROR floors, at least the ones which have the SE 13s on them, keep resetting to tile 0, no matter how many times I change it to a different tile. I'm not sure what causes it to reset, but it's doing it fairly frequently. I've seen that ugly brick texture several times after I was sure I changed it.

[Helixhorned]

I'm back from a 1-week trip to Moscow. The recent changelog bears witness about how being offline can be a good thing . Especially r2125 and r2130 should be interesting to some people here.

Micky: sounds strange, I don't think there's an occasion where Mapster should do this. Anything more specific?

[Micky C]

Welcome back, having looked at the changelog, it seems that christmas has come early this year

After it finally occured to me that I had to actually start drawing a wall for the cutter, I got it working, and it's amazing.

However I'm having some trouble with the loop punching.


In the above scenario, the red loop in the middle has its points flashing, so it's the only thing highlighted, yet apparently I "must have a unique highlighted CCW loop to punch." Is it not unique?
I then decided to go on ahead and punch a sector below manually, by hand, and then pressed ctrl-u in the above triangle sector, however this broke the connection with the entire room, not just the loop itself, which is a problem...?


About the tile reset problem, the next time I work on that map, which might not be for a while, I'll try messing about to see what triggers the reset.

[Helixhorned]

This can be chalked up to a combination of bugs that made the feature work when I was testing it. r2131...

[Micky C]

Thanks a bunch Helixhorned! It works now. TROR mapping has taken a huge step closer to perfection.

[darkcaleb]

if its not much to ask but is it possible that anyone could make a good explaining video TROR?

[Micky C]

Upon experimentation it appears that using Ctrl-u on individual sectors to make islands only works on sector-punched sectors. Is there any chance of getting it to work on any sector that has an identical counterpart below it? It's just that the system would be far more flexible that way, allowing the creation of islands connected to other islands (will permit the joining of islands), and would also allow the creation of bits jutting out of a white wall, which is where I'm stuck at the moment.

[Helixhorned]

It's a matter of adding some checking code and I don't feel like doing it right now. Still, I think that what you want to achieve is entirely possible with the current state of things: just unlink the whole bunch, and "join-bunch" the two separate ones in their stead. The only problem is that it can be fiddly to select sectors for a bunch...

[Helixhorned]

...which a new state in a.m32 now takes care of. I hope it's obvious how to use a combination of the HOME/END modifiers for RAlt (edit: and later, set difference with ";"), the bunch unlinking with Ctrl-U, the new state and the bunch joining feature to emulate loop punching, even near white walls.

[Micky C]

Actually I've never figured out how to get the HOME/END modifiers to work. I've also not gotten alt-a to work, which I think is supposed to get rid of the greyed out walls. Is there a special order to use the keys?

So once I do get that to work, does it mean that I simply select the two punches, deselect the sectors I want as islands, go into the special functions menu and save the highlighted regions, break the TROR connection between the layers, and then restore the highligted sectors and join them? That should do the trick. Thanks again Helixhorned, the effort you put into this never goes unnoticed

Edit: There appears to be a problem with the recon patrol vehicles; as far as I can tell they don't want to enter another layer, and tend to stop at the xy coordinates if the locator is in another layer. I'll see if I can do some more testing.
2nd Edit: Ok, from what I can tell, if the locators are in the sector above, they will along the ceiling of their current layer, to the xy coords of the next locator (but not entering the locator's layer), but if it's two or more layers above, they will just stop at the xy coords of the locator, and maybe circle around a bit.

[Helixhorned]

Micky C, on 04 December 2011 - 03:10 PM, said:

Actually I've never figured out how to get the HOME/END modifiers to work. I've also not gotten alt-a to work, which I think is supposed to get rid of the greyed out walls. Is there a special order to use the keys?

HOME and END are modifiers to RAlt, so they have to be pressed at RAlt release time. END means, "select all floors of the bunch", HOME means "select all ceilings of the bunch". "The bunch" is the floor bunch of the sector under the cursor in any case.
Ctrl-A and Ctrl-Alt-A simply toggle how the view is drawn wrt to grayed-out walls.

Quote

So once I do get that to work, does it mean that I simply select the two punches, deselect the sectors I want as islands, go into the special functions menu and save the highlighted regions, break the TROR connection between the layers, and then restore the highligted sectors and join them? That should do the trick. Thanks again Helixhorned, the effort you put into this never goes unnoticed

Yes, that's precisely what I had in mind.

Quote

Edit: There appears to be a problem with the recon patrol vehicles; as far as I can tell they don't want to enter another layer, and tend to stop at the xy coordinates if the locator is in another layer.

That game code was never rewritten to allow them passing sector boundaries.

[Micky C]

Helixhorned, on 05 December 2011 - 02:32 AM, said:

HOME and END are modifiers to RAlt, so they have to be pressed at RAlt release time. END means, "select all floors of the bunch", HOME means "select all ceilings of the bunch". "The bunch" is the floor bunch of the sector under the cursor in any case.
Ctrl-A and Ctrl-Alt-A simply toggle how the view is drawn wrt to grayed-out walls.


Yes, that's precisely what I had in mind.


That game code was never rewritten to allow them passing sector boundaries.

Ah, that's a bummer. The infosuite was a bit misleading, saying the track sector can be split into multiple sectors. Ironically, the very thing I was trying to do with the flexible island making is now being scraped because of the recon thing. I'm sure I'll find some use for it though.

[Zaxtor]

Well not part of my mod but for future project after my mod. Well was gonna put in what are you working on but put here cus is ROR related.

Just went deeper in TROR. But have to use "Polymer 1" or otherwise it will make "black hom"
Oddly in polymer mode you can go more extreme in ROR and no fuckups. Ship example is insanely complicated and no errors. Has 3 TROR
1 top, 2 middle, 3 bottom.

[Master Fibbles]

That is rather awesome.

[Mia Max]

Oh my god!
TROR is just awesum!
Thank you so much, Helixhorned, and thank you for the tutorial
It's rather easy to make.
Currently I'm making a village, and finally it is possible to make good looking roofs.

@Zaxtor:
Your ship looks very good!
Looks like everything is possible with TROR now.

[rasmus thorup]

That looks really good zaxtor. Remember that 3d models+TROR means low fps.

[Mikko]

Damn that's impressive Zax! You must be building it like a kid working on a LEGO spaceship.

[Zaxtor]

Well was still hard tho.
My comp doesn't experience severe lag.

[High Treason]

Is it actually possible to build this in TROR?

[Zaxtor]

Nice pillars.