who..? what..? Where am I? I lost my teeth..

[ILR]

Hi there, I'm a veteren map maker from WorldCraft (halflife and Q3), so I know most of this stuff in Radiant already. The technical stuff isn't what is gettin me... it's the damn navigation! Radiant is SO different from WorldCraft as far as selecting things and moving stuff that that is the biggest obstical so far -_-; bla bla bla.. my question is: can I have two active windows with two different views running? That skinny "Z view" is an extremely poor replacement for a full active window view on the Z plane. And wtf is up with the 3D view? Are a, z, d, c, and the arrow keys honestly the best way to navigate that thing? And there's no "Redo" command either! I was messin around with some brush settings, I made a little mistake, I hit UNDO, and my entire brush disapears. It'd be nice to redo something as big as that, eh?

 

Can anyone help this geaser out? I dont need "making first room" or "making rocks" tutorials! I need a "How to make Radiant's navigation less crappy" tutorial!

[rgoer]

Are you using GtkRadiant? Switching to Gtk may solve many of your problems... for example, in Gtk, "redo" is just ctrl+y. There are various viewport setups you can choose from in Gtk's preferences, maybe you'll find one you like better than the standard "skinny z plane" setup. As for 3D view navigation: in Gtk, if you rightclick in the 3D viewport, the mouse becomes "look" (a la "mouselook" in any quake-type game) and the arrow keys become "forward," "back," "strafe left," and "strafe right" (WASD)--by the way, in right-click mode, if you look straight up and move "forward," you will move up (as if you were hitting "d" in normal 3D view).

 

:EDIT:

 

By the way... you mentioned a buggy behaviour that exists in JK2Radiant, the "undo = brush/patch death" weirdness; happily, this bug does not exist in GtkRadiant.

[wedge2211]

You can also move the camera (in Gtk) by holding Ctrl and pressing the middle mouse button somewhere on the 2d map. The camera will then jump to that point.

[Leslie Judge]

And you can "target" the camera in the 2d view by pressing the middle mouse button somewhere. The camera will turn towards that point.

 

 

And in the default layout you can rotate between the 2d view by CTRL+TAB.

[rgoer]

Originally posted by Leslie Judge

And in the default layout you can rotate between the 2d view by CTRL+TAB.

 

That is, hitting ctrl+tab will cycle the 2d view between X-Y, Z-X, and Y-Z planes. I know this is what LJ meant by his post; his succinctity may have robbed the uninitiated of potential understanding, though ;^)

[Leslie Judge]

Thanks man, I couldn't remember the right word.

[ILR]

yeah I've tried GtkRadiant... its a step in the right direction.. when it works... ya see -- itse silly really-- well.... the dern thing crashes every time I make a brush *cough* *hack* *weeze* Any clues as to why it might be crashin on me?

 

edit- NM! nm.. i figured it out. Gtkradiant doesnt like me making brushes when no texture is selected. But this all lead me to another problem (last one, i swear)... the textures.. in the menu it seems I load them by spicifying what map I rip them from. But I dont get much, and often times nothing loads at all. Back in the day, you just nabbed some .wad files that were set aside, and you had the entire game's texture library ripe for the pickins. The manual is stubborn, can you guys help me out (last time for at least three weaks I swear!!)

[Leslie Judge]

You mapped for q3. So you know there are textures and shaders. In the textures menu you can see the folder names which are inside the base/textures folder (yes, in the assets0.pke also have a textures folder) and the shader files' names too.

 

You don't rip the textures from actual maps. They are grouped by map name mostly but not always. You will see that this is very comfortable when you want to use custom textures.

 

It is possible that in a shader file there are shader definitions but for textures in an other dir. There is for example the imperial.shader file which contains lots of shaders but for other sets. That's why sometimes you don't get any textures when you select a set.

 

GtkRadiant uses the radiant/notex texture if you don't select anything. That is in the mapextras.pk3 or mapextras2.pk3.

 

Hope I could help.

[ILR]

I've dealt with shaders and textures before, but worldcraft handled it differently. Ok, I see now that its finding the shaders and not the textures, like you said. How do I make sure the textures are in the right dir? Do I need to unpack my assests files, and then tell Radiant to look there?

[rgoer]

Hmmm... what exactly is the problem? Under the "textures" menu, do you see a list of "level-ish" names, (bespin, common, doomgiver, system, yavin, et cetera)? And when you pick one of those options, does Radiant think for a second while it loads .jpg file after .jpg file, then give you a window full of textures to choose from? Have you changed your layout from the default four-pane style (thin z-slice on the left, large work space in the middle, 3D view on upper right and textures on lower right)? If you changed your layout, perhaps you have lost your textures window. I'd suggest just getting used to the default layout, it's not that bad once you figure out the keyboard shortcuts to change the cycle the 2D viewport. If none of this is the cause of your problem, I'd suggest you re-install Radiant. Don't try any custom crap, just let Radiant install how it wants to. It takes about two minutes to install. Then try your textures again.

 

By the way: there is no need whatsoever to unpack your assets0.pk3 file. Radiant can read it. Something else is the problem.

[Leslie Judge]

You can recognize shaders easily. In the textures window if you can see a white border around a pic, then it's a shader, otherwise it's a simple texture.

 

Oh, yes, rgoer is right. If you can't see the textures window because you changed the layout, press T to bring it up.

[ILR]

lol. Thanks for the help, but I can locate my texture window in the settings I have on now. I know.. I know.. trying to exhaust the simple solutions first, but I'm set there.

 

In the textures menu I do see a list of level names. When I click on one, the computer does think for a short second. However when I go to the texture window nothing is there. When I look at the console window for Radiant, it says that it can find the shader, but not the texture.

 

One strange thing though: I have lots and lots and lots of custom maps downloaded in my base file (which im sure we all do ). If I load textures from custom maps, I'll be able to use all of the textures that are unique to that map. They'll load up exactly the way they should. However all the textures that are borrowed from the assets files do not get loaded.

[rgoer]

I have lots and lots and lots of custom maps downloaded in my base file (which im sure we all do ). If I load textures from custom maps, I'll be able to use all of the textures that are unique to that map. They'll load up exactly the way they should. However all the textures that are borrowed from the assets files do not get loaded.

Keep in mind that if you borrow textures from a custom map, other players will have to have that "other" custom map (in addition to the map you are working on, with the borrowed textures) in order to see them in-game. Unless you copy the textures from "othermap.pk3" into "yourmap.pk3" all those "borrowed" textures will show up as the grey and white "oops" grid texture.

 

If assets0.pk3 is really give you as much grief as you claim, it wouldn't hurt to reinstall. Reinstall JK2 and radiant. Backup all the "custom" stuff from your base/ folder (including any w.i.p. .map files you have in base/maps), uninstall JK2, go back in and wipe out all the residual garbage, and reinstall.

 

Once you are working on an un-tainted installation, here is proper texturing technique:

 

Create a folder in base/textures/ called "yourmap" (if the textures/ folder isn't in base/ you should go ahead and create that one too). This is where you are going to store all your custom textures while you work on it in radiant.

 

Create a file in base/shaders/ called "yourmap.shader"--even if you don't have any actual "shader" shaders yet. This is where you will create any shaders you want.

 

Edit the file in base/shaders/ called "shaderlist.txt" and add "yourmap" to the list.

 

Fire Radiant up.

 

Unless you are just browsing around the other "custom maps" texture sets, it's a pretty good idea to work with the "shaderlist.txt only" option enabled in the textures menu of Radiant. This will limit the textures menu to only look in the textures/ directories listed in shaderlist.txt (see why we added "yourmap" to shaderlist.txt?). This means, pretty much, that the only textures you will be using will either be included with your map (because you put them there) or can be found in assets0.pk3. A big step to avoiding the "oops" grid alltogether.

 

We're going to be doing something else, so I guess you should quit Radiant now.

 

Now, let's say you are playing Dad*Mad's duel_snow1 map, and you are really impressed by his beam shader (I know, I know, it's just a beam shader, but this is just an example). You need to open up the .pk3 and take a look at his .shader files and his textures/ directory. Unless you get an author's permission, it is pretty damned wrong to just lift shaders and textures from his/her work! However, you can check to see how they did it and try and do the same thing yourself.

 

Open up Dad*Mad's .shader file and study the shader code that defines the beam shader, so you can write one of your own. Notice, though, that Dad*Mad's code is writing paths like textures/snow/whatever -- you're going to need to change this to textures/yourmap/whatever.

 

Now you need to look in Dad*Mad's textures/ directory. Look for the file that has a matching path to the shader you were looking at. Find the file at textures/snow/whatever, and open that puppy up in photoshop to see how he did it. Oh, a beam shader is just a gradient; I can make one of those. So do it: make your own gradient image, and save it to textures/yourmap/whatever.

 

Now, make sure there aren't any typos in your .shader definitions, save the .shader file and fire Radiant back up. Make sure "shaderlist.txt only" is still active, and choose "yourmap" from the textures menu. Voila, your new beam shader is ready for action.

 

What if you want to make just simple textures, and not fancy-shmancy shaders? Just put images in the textures/yourmap/ folder; as long as "yourmap" is in shaderlist.txt and yourmap.shader is in the base/shaders/ folder, any .jpg or .tga image you put in textures/yourmap/ will show up when you pick "yourmap" from the textures menu. Any .jpg or .tga image whose dimensions are a power of 2, that is (2x2, 2x4, 64x1024, 2048x256, et cetera). They don't have to be the same power of 2, they just have to be a power of 2. And that's all she wrote.

 

Until it's time to pak up your map into a .pk3, but we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.

 

Hope this helps.

[ILR]

Wow... what you just did was use a rocket launcher to kill a fly. lol. Thanks, all very good information indeed. I think I do need a reinstall... because I'm getting bug errors left and right (you can see details about it in the tech support forum.. if you really care that is). Thanks a bunch man, it DOES help alot. Maybe this should become a sticky, eh? Read all the tutorials that peoeple say are the best for Radiant, but none really talk about setting up your textures in Radiant the way you have. Thanks again.