dusk-modding

[ancient depot]

The BSP tree is used for collision basically

[lament ore]

ah

[ancient depot]

Basically it stores references to a bunch of faces defining a collision mesh of sorts

And then it specifies what it is, water, solid, etc

Not too hard to generate probably

[lament ore]

time to read up on bsp trees again oh boy

actually y'know what I've actually taken my data structures class since the last time I looked at anything BSP related maybe it won't be so bad this time lmao

anyway tl;dr vriska brushes i.e. convex solids are not represented by simple triangles/face and vertices in the .map format, but rather a solid is formed by the intersection of infinite planes

[ancient depot]

For reference, what you suggest would likely work in og quake and hl too

[still raptor]

the biggest issue i see with this is that theres very little added functionality here

[lament ore]

yeah the "extra consideration" part was mostly regarding Quake/HL getting collision data from the bsp tree rather than naively from the triangles

[lament ore]

personally I'd find a lot of use with it, provided collisions are properly mapped. All of the rocks and cliff faces and etc could've been modeled in blender instead of JACK for my outdoors map which would've saved dozens of hours, for example

although I recognize the extreme level of jank to achieve something that would be relatively easy to add with access to the codebase lmao

[still raptor]

a perfection of a model format into .map data would be more ideal tbh

[lament ore]

no thank you

I will not be working with infinite planes today good sir thank u very much

I made that mistake before LOL

[still raptor]

well its the exact opposite really

you are defining finite planes

[lament ore]

yeah I suppose you're right but you're limiting yourself to convex solids exclusively which is not really easy to guarantee in blender

at that point the vertex tools in JACK/TB are fine enough

[still raptor]

and tbf a lot of that legwork has been done, its just needs work

[lament ore]

it's not so much that it just needs work, it's moreso that convex solid limitation isn't something that can really be worked around. It's non-trivial to convert a potentially non-convex non-solid arbitrary 3d model into something that HAS to be a convex solid

[still raptor]

thats correct,like i said, it needs work

it can completely be done

the tooling has to have strong design however

[lament ore]

in theory but idk I doubt I'm smarter than the people who already took a crack at it with things like obj2map and bsp decompilers

[still raptor]

obj2map is a mess

[lament ore]

my point stands

[still raptor]

thats khreathor's work

and i promise, youre just as smart as him

[lament ore]

lmao

[honest stag]

im a simple user that doesnt understand shit but obj2map caused monstrous amounts of pain and crashed TB at least 12 times

[lament ore]

still, bypassing the convex solid requirement is something I see as highly preferable, so I personally wouldn't go down that route

[still raptor]

i think thats a lazy approach tbh

[lament ore]

correct

Realistically I have to figure in how much time and effort I am both able and willing to dedicate to this

I am not paid to do this after all

[still raptor]

i think its a not great idea considering the dozens of issues with it, and the improvements that are on the way for it

one of the most obvious issues being lightmapping

[lament ore]

do we have a timeline on custom model support? if it were within like, six months then yeah I wouldn't bother

[still raptor]

i think youll have it in 6 months, but thats by no means a commitment or even an estimation

and that still doesnt solve the lightmapping issue which is shitty

[lament ore]

hmmm

I'll see how my free time allows

I'm by no means opposed to working on fruitless projects as long as they improve my learning, which this will

[still raptor]

theres the possibility that you could precompile a lightmap and bake it into your models uv2 or something along those lines

[ancient depot]

You could just run light on it after adding the models in

Shouldn't even be an issue

[lament ore]

oh would it really be that easy lmfao

oh yeah it would I forgot light operates on the bsp not the map

[still raptor]

yeah its a bsp compiled step

[lament ore]

yeah heck that makes things a lot easier

my only real concern for myself is handling bsp tree collision but hey that'll be a learning experience

[bold orbit]

wait what are we trying to convert to map

[still raptor]

no

[lament ore]

nothing by me good sir

[bold orbit]

no is a good thing to convert to map

[still raptor]

its a difficult problem

[ancient depot]

This is the low level code needed to just read/write a BSP

The sample app will just take a bunch of BSP files as an argument and spit out copies of them through the API

[lament ore]

anyway since quake mdls are supported by assimp that could provide a pretty decent workflow. The custom fgd entry would both provide the filepath to my tool and also tell JACK/TB to render it as a preview model in the editor

[lament ore]

That's perfect, thanks a bunch!

If I can be assed I could even automatically collect all the textures from the mdls and pack them into a WAD

wouldn't be a bad workflow tbh

[still raptor]

wouldnt be a great one either lmao

[lament ore]

listen I'm making this for me specifically okay lmao

[still raptor]

yeah i mean, jank has its drawbacks

but if it works, it works

[ancient depot]

Aside from lightmaps, this'll be largely superceded by place_model in the end

[lament ore]

ye

[ancient depot]

But even if only for the lightmaps, it could be useful

The problem is defining how the models are placed in the BSP and where

[still raptor]

thats both the main drawback, and benefit

[ancient depot]

Are you going to have dummy entities that it looks for or something

[lament ore]

that's the easy part if you use mdls

just an fgd entry

then it's displayed like any other entity with an MDL preview

[bold orbit]

Bry what specifically are you trying to convert over to a map file

[ancient depot]

I mean from the perspective of the tool

[still raptor]

they arent

[ancient depot]

how will it know where to insert the vertices, etc

[lament ore]

Oh, yes, I misread your message. The dummy fgd entry would give me the file path and location, rotation, scale, etc

then I just delete the dummy entry before outputting the final bsp

[ancient depot]

You'll need to write a .map parser then, since entities in the BSP are just a copy of the .map with the brushes removed

[still raptor]

qbsp.exe is open source anyways

so

[lament ore]

the entity entry will be in the final bsp unless that's different for quake bsps

[ancient depot]

Oh I think I'm seeing what you're saying now

You're just going to generate the .mdl and the .fgd and let qbsp shove the model in

[still raptor]

yes

you could either do it with qbsp

[lament ore]

correct, the bsp compiler doesn't know the difference

[still raptor]

or post process the bsp

[ancient depot]

I was thinking you were going to inject the mesh data itself into the compiled BSP

As a post-processing step

[still raptor]

yeah that was my initial thought as well

[lament ore]

well yes but the entity entry tells me where to do that

i.e. the entity entry will contain the filepath to the model file (ideally mdl so editor can display it) and location, rotation, and scale in worldspace

I could fork qbsp to do this I discussed that as a potential possibility way earlier in the thread

[still raptor]

thats probably the best path

[ancient depot]

If it were me I'd do the mesh injection approach since it'd mean I could use any BSP compiler with the map

but that's also a lot more complex

[still raptor]

significantly so

you have to resize everything etc that way

[lament ore]

that's trivial

the only non-trivial part really is the bsp tree stuff

[still raptor]

right, it is, but its extra work for no benefit

[ancient depot]

Yeah the harder part is definitely adding the collision info

[still raptor]

other than choice of compiler

[lament ore]

that depends on how easy it would be to feed non-solids data into qbsp. I have no idea how qbsp works internally so it could either be trivial or very non-trivial

so it's worth taking a look at

for me, that is lol

[ancient depot]

I'd definitely recommend spending a bunch of time embedding the Quake specs into your brain first

[still raptor]

qbsp is not too bad

[ancient depot]

It's an invaluable source of info

[lament ore]

yeee for sure

[still raptor]

https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-Tools/tree/master/qutils/QBSP

[lament ore]

Oh I definitely wouldn't use vanilla qbsp, there's too many limitations with it. I'd want to fork one of the "modern" qbsp forks

I forget the name of the one I was using when I was mapping last

[still raptor]

for sure

its probably ericw's

[lament ore]

yup that sounds right

[still raptor]

https://github.com/ericwa/ericw-tools/tree/master/qbsp

again though, the important part is the spec

[bold orbit]

Good ol Ericw

[still raptor]

you can extend it however you want, thats why i linked the original

[lament ore]

icic thx

[still raptor]

Eager to see what you come up with

Could result in some neat maps

Or some really lazy ports

You know, like ones that get exported from another game as a giant mesh, then imported into a bsp via your tool

[honest stag]

"hey guys i recreated the entirety of doom 2 BY HAND check this out"

i'd still play that though

[still raptor]

lol

[honest stag]

reading that many terms that i dont understand led me to actually trying to read on what bsp is and how it works at least on a surface level

wow whoever came up with this is a genius

[ancient depot]

It's a lot simpler than it's made to sound

[still raptor]

its just a data collection

[honest stag]

yeah i'm starting to understand what you people were talking about

[ancient depot]

Like if you break up the words "binary space partitioning" it's like

"huh, it makes sense now"

[honest stag]

yup
it took a visual demonstration on top of that but i think i got it

[still raptor]

so its important to nope

note*

bsp and .bsp arent the same thing

bsp is the concept, binary space partitioning

where .bsp is a storage format, that makes use of that concept

[ancient depot]

Yeah, a .BSP is just a collection of models split by a BSP tree

[honest stag]

yeah i figured as much
wouldnt make sense if all these games had so many maps made in the same format

i sitll have a lot to figure out about it but things certanly became much clearer

[ancient depot]

wouldnt make sense if all these games had so many maps made in the same format
Man, figuring out how to make DUSK accurately detect what game a BSP is from was absolute torture

Source and SiN BSP were definitely the most annoying

[honest stag]

huh? they're different?
sin just seemed like a half life 2 mod to me

[ancient depot]

Check out the first ~120 lines or so in BspUtility.cs in that code archive above

SiN Episodes is on Source

SiN is on modified Quake 2

[honest stag]

ohhhh you mean the og sin

got it

[ancient depot]

but shit like this is just

why valve

[honest stag]

oh jesus christ
why wouldnt they at least name them differently or something

[ancient depot]

It's insane because other than that, it's impossible to detect the difference

L4D2 is Source BSP v21, but no other BSP v21 game has that change

I don't even get why that change was made because there's no benefit to it

[still raptor]

hmm

[lament ore]

interns

[still raptor]

the only possible reason i can think of is actually console ports

[ancient depot]

Even then it's weird because this data is all packed together and is always read in sequence anyway

SiN and Raven (SoF2, Jedi Academy, etc) BSP both start with RBSP so that one was a fun bit of CBT too

[still raptor]

i cant say i know enough about the consoles it was ported to , but its like the only possible thing i can think of

thats not lol whoops

[honest stag]

you know, i barely understand things like that
but even i wouldnt name 2 different projects by the same name

[ancient depot]

In this case it was a total coincidence

[honest stag]

i'd at least add a number or something to make sure to tell them apart

[ancient depot]

SiN developed by Ritual

therefore RBSP, Ritual BSP

[honest stag]

oh well a coincidence is gets a pass ofc
but that valve stuff like
wtf

[ancient depot]

Titanfall BSP could've been another mess too

but they seem to have known that RBSP was in use

so it's rBSP instead

[honest stag]

CBTSP

[still raptor]

yeah id imagine that was the case

[ancient depot]

(no dusk cannot load titanfall maps, it can only recognize them)

[sleek ore]

can it run hl2 maps?

[ancient depot]

The next update can

[still raptor]

actually, i recently learned that they used DarkRadiant to make titanfall

[sleek ore]

oh my fuckin god

[still raptor]

as in, the editor for the Dark Mod

[ancient depot]

huh, I assumed they used a customized hammer or something

[still raptor]

nope

customized darkradiant

[sleek ore]

will the broken stuff like models and switches be fixed?

[ancient depot]

Yeah

[still raptor]

https://twitter.com/thezilch/status/915059507180347392?s=20

Michael Kalas (@thezilch)

@Fr0z3nR @MonsterclipRSPN Heavily modified DarkRadiant.

Twitter · Oct 3, 2017, 3:42 AM

[honest stag]

switches are broken?

[sleek ore]

(cause the models instead of the hl1 ones switch to the regular dusk ones)

[sleek ore]

in the sdk

[ancient depot]

Campaign switches

[honest stag]

ohhhh

[still raptor]

pretty wild for them to be using a mod's editor for their commercial game

[honest stag]

is anything NOT broken in the campaign lol

[still raptor]

but if it works, it works

[sleek ore]

some map switches are broken

[ancient depot]

The campaign was never intended to be in this version of the SDK

[sleek ore]

like they go through a wall after being pressed

[ancient depot]

but people wanting to make texture mods and stuff would've been mad if it wasn't there

lmao

[sleek ore]

goldsrc and quake maps i mean

[ancient depot]

broken in what way

[sleek ore]

after being pressed

they go through a wall and disappear

its funni

[ancient depot]

Yeah that's because func_button is implemented to the Quake spec

not the HL spec

[crimson patrol]

When are we getting scrolling textures

[sleek ore]

also, the loading triggers are replaced with end level screens

[honest stag]

yeah because trigger_changelevel do be like that

[ancient depot]

That will probably not be fixed any time soon

[lament ore]

I recall fixing that somehow with FGD stuff

but this was a year and a half ago

[crimson patrol]

So I don't have to use func doors rapidly switching on off in the same place to simulate a moving object

[sleek ore]

theres also sky problems

[ancient depot]

Support for those skyboxes is coming later yeah

[sleek ore]

as in goldsrc and quake maps, it gets replaced by dusk

[ancient depot]

Dusk has its own skybox system

[honest stag]

you mean they "slap a sky texture on a celling brush" skyboxes will be a thing?

the*

[ancient depot]

Yeah

[honest stag]

that's... actually awesome

and the scrolling sky HOOO BOY

[ancient depot]

Light styles might be in the next update too

It's complicated but I've been working on it

[still raptor]

lol

[crimson patrol]

Scrolling sky?

[sleek ore]

will hl1 weapons also work?

[honest stag]

seen a quake sky?

that

[sleek ore]

and quake weapons

[crimson patrol]

Yea yea

[ancient depot]

lmao

[crimson patrol]

With the clouds and shit

[lament ore]

I thiiiiink potentially if you set the lip value to the distance it WOULD move then the button won't move on a func_button

[ancient depot]

I assume you mean replacing the pickups

[sleek ore]

yes

[ancient depot]

but I like to imagine you mean the actual hl1 guns

[sleek ore]

and viewmodels

[still raptor]

hl1 weapons will have to be implemented as mod weapons

if you want them to work

like the guns themselves

[ancient depot]

The idea isn't to just have HL1 running in Unity lmao

that'd be boring

[still raptor]

yes and a ton of work

that we get no benefit from

if you want to do the legwork to add hl1 weapons, by all means, youll be able to

[honest stag]

that makes me think why doom 1-2 were ported into unity by bethesda

[lament ore]

that was indeed the strangest decision of all time

[ancient depot]

Unity was more like an outer shell in that example

[honest stag]

is it just to make them run on moder systems without using a community source port?

[ancient depot]

The game itself was still the usual C code

[still raptor]

yeah think of Unity as almost a VM

[lament ore]

How does that port even work? Does it emulate x86?

ah

[ancient depot]

Unity was a layer on top providing input and displaying the rendered view

[lament ore]

that is.....an interesting decision

[honest stag]

ah huh alright

[ancient depot]

basically using Unity as if it were something like SDL

[honest stag]

that makes more sense now
i thought they actually ported doom into unity and was very confused for a long time

[still raptor]

no lmfao

[ancient depot]

A lot of people did, especially since there was a lot of evidence pointing to that

but in time it was shown to be false

[lament ore]

probably just didn't want to deal with licensing issues with using a community sourceport commercially

but still a strange decision nonetheless

[still raptor]

well about that

lmao

[honest stag]

ye that's what i thought too

[ancient depot]

I imagine it's more of a "we get all these ports for free" thing

[lament ore]

surely would've been easier to build their own SDL port

[lament ore]

ope

[ancient depot]

Unity already runs on a shitload of platforms

[still raptor]

there was some code that wasnt supposed to be there iirc

[ancient depot]

I dunno if anyone actually knows about that lmao

or even if it was removed yet

[still raptor]

i believe it was removed

thats my recollection

[honest stag]

...huh

[still raptor]

it wasnt actually being used

but it was in the compiled rom

[honest stag]

by "wasnt supposed to be there" do you mean "it's from somewhere else"

[sleek ore]

i hope doom maps might have compatibility, but theres a doosk mod so, idk

[still raptor]

yes

[ancient depot]

Basically someone on Doomworld several years ago posted some code for loading doom stuff into Unity

[honest stag]

wow

[lament ore]

yeah possibly but man that's still so strange. Surely writing a makefile for the finite number of platforms Unity runs on is easier than writing an x86 emulator in Unity to run a single game lol

[ancient depot]

And all that code was just... in there

[honest stag]

what the fuck

[ancient depot]

I assume the Unity port started out as playing with that idea

and then it became a proper port later

[still raptor]

and , importantly, the license wouldve required bethesda to open source the port

[ancient depot]

but the old stuff wasn't removed, and Unity failed to strip it from the build

[lament ore]

doom maps are an entirely different can of beans

[honest stag]

imagine being the guy that wrote that

[ancient depot]

yeah it had GPL'd Doom Builder code

[ancient depot]

There's no emulation

[still raptor]

i doubt that guy even knows its in there

[ancient depot]

It's a native dll that gets compiled and they call functions in it

[still raptor]

afaik the list of people who know about that is extremely short

[honest stag]

well it just expanded a bit

[ancient depot]

So they just have a DLL that exports functions like Update, Render, etc or whatever

and they just run those from Unity and then display the result

also yeah there are zero plans to support doom maps in the SDK

[lament ore]

okay now that's even stranger since they're porting the DLL to the platforms anyway

[ancient depot]

supporting BSP is exhausting enough already

[still raptor]

also once the sdk gets open sourced you can add your own doom map loader

[honest stag]

doom 3 maps tho 😳

[still raptor]

or use one thats available already

[ancient depot]

Using Unity is basically just a way to avoid needing to write code for rendering and getting input on each platform

[lament ore]

is there a timeline on that too? 👀

[ancient depot]

Since Unity does that for you

[still raptor]

no theres no timeline

[ancient depot]

It's being open sourced when it's finished

[still raptor]

when its done ™️

[ancient depot]

Maybe slightly sooner if a near-final build is tidy enough

[still raptor]

there are several major landmarks to go

[ancient depot]

ngl I considered looking into this

but I don't think they're BSP at all

[still raptor]

extremely unlikely theyre bsp

[ancient depot]

They're basically just .map files

The game loads them raw because >dynamic lighting

[still raptor]

especially given the nature of the lighting

yep

[honest stag]

oh god yeah i forgot doom had dynamic lighting

doom 3*

[still raptor]

its impressive for its time

[ancient depot]

It'd be funny to support doom 3 maps but the game can load enough gimmick formats as it is lol

[honest stag]

i just thought the level designers forgot to put lights at all

[ancient depot]

wait until you see the long list of games it can load maps from in the next update

it's comically long

[still raptor]

its real silly

[honest stag]

got i cant wait

[bold orbit]

Less than 20?

[ancient depot]

A lot more than 20

[lament ore]

Doom 3 map format is clearly an evolution of the earlier BSP formats but it isn't strictly a .bsp ye

[bold orbit]

May I ask why

There are more than 20?

[lament ore]

also @ancient depot to be clear does the new version use the clipnode tree for collision or the BSP tree?

[ancient depot]

The BSP tree

clip nodes, as I understand it, are just an optimization technique

[lament ore]

ye

okay good to know

I'm thinking my project would better be left as a separate application rather than bodging the functionality into qbsp. Looking through the qbsp source I'd pretty much be doing everything separate and then just coming in at the end and writing my extra stuff to the bsp anyway

workflow would be entirely unchanged anyway other than instead of qbsp->rad->vis you'd set JACK/TB to run qbsp->myapp->rad->vis

and that obviously enables allowing any qbsp compiler so long as I take the format differences into account

the only extra work I'd be doing is creating my own data structures to represent the bsp which is entirely trivial

[ancient depot]

yeah

[lament ore]

I'm very glad you gave me the duh moment of not needing to deal with lightmaps lol that makes this all much easier

[ancient depot]

Trust me, nobody hates dealing with lightmaps more than I do

[lament ore]

oh I know, I remember those corrupted lightmaps early on in the dusk sdk

[ancient depot]

and the dynamic lightmaps for Gloomwood

and now light styles in the SDK again

[lament ore]

I do not envy thee

someday I'll learn how lightmaps work. today is not that day

[ancient depot]

They're conceptually simple

It's just that the things I've had to do with them get brain meltingly complex fast

[honest stag]

man

[honest stag]

dont even remind me

[ancient depot]

What fucked me up was learning that Darkplaces actually had the same issues

tfw we currently produce better lightmap results than DP

[lament ore]

oh my god there's no other feeling than being like "this is unacceptable. I have to fix this." and then after you fix it you go and play a commercial game or big project and realize they decided "fuck it, leave it in"

[ancient depot]

I'm pretty sure Quakespasm was the only port that managed to get the lightmaps correct for arxeternal (or whatever the final map was called, I always forget)

[honest stag]

i've never used anything aside from quakespasm and never felt the need to

does doom or quake have more source ports?

[lament ore]

I'd bet money on doom

[honest stag]

prolly

[sleek ore]

yeah i think its doom

[lament ore]

I'd not only attribute that to doom running on far more platforms but also there being several "enhanced" versions of the doom engine

[sleek ore]

it has a long linage

[lament ore]

i.e. Boom and Zdoom and such

[sleek ore]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho6mY3gIRDM&ab_channel=Dwars

extremely condesed history of source ports

[lament ore]

and then even for boom and zdoom there's at least two or three different ports implementing the enhancements

[honest stag]

and 20 years down the line we'll get dusk source ports too

[ancient depot]

It's criminal that the best Quake port died though

[sleek ore]

the main "popular" ones rn are prboom+, crispy doom and gzdoom

[lament ore]

20 years down the line we'll still be waiting for the rewrite

[ancient depot]

Engoo will live on in our hearts

[sleek ore]

gzdoom is the most popular

lots of games run on its engine

and theres so many mods

[lament ore]

also there's things like chocolate doom

[sleek ore]

doosk, as a example

[sleek ore]

yeah chocolate doom was related to crispy, a fork i think

[lament ore]

yeah there's so many more doom ports than quake ports lmao

[ancient depot]

Quake probably wins out in engine derivatives if you count all engine versions

[sleek ore]

wrath is probably the only game that uses the quake engine on steam probably

[ancient depot]

With GoldSrc, Source, IW Engine, etc being based on it

[sleek ore]

it uses darkplaces

[lament ore]

oh for sure

[sleek ore]

true

[ancient depot]

In general though doom wins no question

[lament ore]

I'd consider source ports a different ball game than derivatives for sure

[ancient depot]

Steel Storm does

[lament ore]

like heck isn't the modern CoD engine a derivative of Quake for that matter

[sleek ore]

oh cool

there are less "foancy grophics ports" for doom, makes sense as its a 2.5d game and it wouldnt work
quake on the other hand well, darkplaces

[lament ore]

obviously Source and Source 2 and so on as well

[ancient depot]

I don't think modern CoD is still Quake

I could be wrong

but I know at least Modern Warfare (the og) still had Quake roots

In fact it still uses the Quake 3 Arena weapon bobbing code

[honest stag]

nothing new was ever invented since the quake engine tbh

(obviously joking but still)

[lament ore]

yeah Modern Warfare is derived from Q3A and thus Quake that's probably what I was thinking

[honest stag]

im just shocked how manu things have some bits and pieces of quake in them

[crimson patrol]

Quake is like the bacteria life evolved from

[honest stag]

lmao

[sleek ore]

what happend to mark 5?

quake port

[ancient depot]

Mark 5 evolved into Quakespasm, I believe

[lament ore]

honestly if you look at the quake source code you can see why. there's a ton of fundamental stuff in quake that basically boils down to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"

[crimson patrol]

Man I should make cookie cutouts of my other brush trees

[lament ore]

and it's flexible enough to be adapted into pretty much anything that's a first person shooter

[ancient depot]

Okay no I was thinking of FitzQuake

[sleek ore]

i use vkquake, which is basically a port that adds vulkan rendering to quakespasm, made by Axel Gneiting

[still raptor]

the newest cod engine is no longer based on q3a

[honest stag]

be a lot cooler if it was

[still raptor]

they broke it off finally with modern warfare

[sleek ore]

hes now the engine programmer of doom recently

[ancient depot]

I wonder how much IW BSP differs from Q3BSP

I don't plan to support it, but I'm curious

I know that it uses IBSP which could cause conflicts with idBSP (which also uses IBSP)

but I don't think it shares any version numbers with any idBSP formats so that could disambiguate it

[lament ore]

imagine if BSP magic numbers were standardized by ISO

[ancient depot]

It's a real can of worms

[lament ore]

[honest stag]

just in case anyone gets any funny thoughts huh

[ancient depot]

I agonized for a long time figuring out a nice way to model the evolution of the BSP format in the code

Since Q1 & GoldSrc don't even have magic numbers

they just have a version number

Like normally you get a magic number, then the version followed by the lump directory

[lament ore]

ahhh the beauty of supporting many slightly different versions of essentially the same thing

[honest stag]

fucking allied assault? wow

[ancient depot]

yeah that's one of the "we can recognize it but not load it" formats

in the code it's treated as a separate BSP format because I haven't actually looked into it yet

so I don't know if it derives from Q3BSP, for example

[honest stag]

ah alright

[lament ore]

joke idea: if it's a recognized but undersupported format, just load de_dust2

[ancient depot]

Heavy Metal FAKK 2, Elite Force 2 & Titanfall are the other "I recognize this but I can't load it" cases

[honest stag]

crash the game if someone tries to load Heavy Metal FAKK 2 maps

[ancient depot]

Hilariously, I could actually support DOOM 2016 & Eternal maps to an extent

They're closer than you'd think format-wise

I won't, but the thought is funny

[lament ore]

can't wait for the "Big John rips and tears his way through Doom 2016" mod

[ancient depot]

It'd make for some pretty funny news articles

[lament ore]

zombie how big was your fear of releasing the sdk and nobody being able to figure it out

[ancient depot]

I wasn't worried about that at all tbh

[lament ore]

because just a few days ago I developed a whole app for a guy for my job and I made it literally a single drag and drop operation and he still can't figure it out

[ancient depot]

imo it's less complicated than Source modding and people figured that out

[honest stag]

im shocked that people actually understand anything about modding source

aside from garrys mod

[lament ore]

i'm shocked I managed to do it in my preteens

[ancient depot]

My vision for the SDK has always been combining the best parts of Quake and Doom modding

[lament ore]

to be fair there's much nicer tools even for source 1 nowadays

mdl compilation in the olden days was SO fucking complicated

[ancient depot]

Like look at texture replacements

doesn't get much easier than plopping a png in there

[honest stag]

i'll be honest
i've looked at how people make quake mods and stuff
talked to people in that community too
and i dont want a quake community tbh :)

[lament ore]

I do wonder if the source ever gets released how many people will choose to create mods at the unity level rather than at the sdk level

[honest stag]

doom dudes are so nice

[lament ore]

as much as I love Quake SDK tools once the source is available I'll probably just do my own thing from within Unity since I'm just as experienced with Unity stuff if not moreso

[ancient depot]

I'm more interested in whether or not people will base new games on it

[honest stag]

i will, that is a PROMISE

ever played cry of fear? yeah

[hard pollen]

I imagine Titanfall, Titanfall 2, DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal maps are too mesh based to really be able to be imported without data loss.

[lament ore]

that'd be a cool thing. dusk-engine derivative games lmao

[ancient depot]

them being mesh based is exactly what makes them easy to import

[hard pollen]

O.

[lament ore]

yeah lol non-mesh stuff is the hard stuff

[hard pollen]

Okay.

[ancient depot]

the hard part is just figuring out the formats themselves

[hard pollen]

Yeah that makes sense I guess.

[ancient depot]

being mesh based makes them hard to decompile

but not load

or rather, hard to decompile into a brush format

a BSP itself is actually pretty heavily mesh-based

[lament ore]

yea if games don't care about the bsp tree info you could just as easily edit the bsp mesh and re-export it, but obviously the bsp tree info is important

[ancient depot]

the brushes are moreso just what those meshes are authored with

and depending on the format, the brushes might also be used for collision

the main level in a BSP for example is actually just one big static mesh

and the BSP contains information on how you can split it up if you want to render it cheaply

[crimson patrol]

What are the differences between mesh and brushes

[honest stag]

ok so i've been trying to figure this out but i'd better ask
when you said "dusk throws out the bsp tree info" do you mean it renders everything ahead in the field of view without considering if the player can see it or not, right?

[hard pollen]

Yeah that makes sense, I knew most BSP formats these days are meshes of polygons Just kinda dodgily authored ones

[ancient depot]

a brush is just a set of planes that define a convex shape

a mesh is just a 3d model

bunch of vertices and triangles

[hard pollen]

and faces.

And normals.

[lament ore]

A brush is a convex solid defined by the intersection of infinite planes which form its faces. Mesh is just triangles pretty much

[hard pollen]

And seams, just a bunch of other things.

[ancient depot]

triangles = faces

[crimson patrol]

Thx

[hard pollen]

Whoops didn't realize you said triangles.

Oops.

[ancient depot]

(although in Q1BSP you have to generate triangles yourself, the faces are just polygons)

[lament ore]

I assume Dusk just renders the entire map apart from whatever optimizations Unity automatically does for rendering meshes

Which is honestly fine given that the BSPs we're talking about here are in the single digit thousands of triangles

[honest stag]

which is what you mean by says it throws out the bsp tree info right?

by saying*

[lament ore]

not entirely

[crimson patrol]

Huh, I wonder if this ^ may be what causes the huge lag spike when I look a certain direction on my map

[ancient depot]

The BSP tree splits up the map into segments that define what each segment is (water, solid, etc) and also connects the geometry to visibility data so you can cull it when it's out of view

DUSK simply just doesn't use that stuff in the current build

[lament ore]

bsp tree also defines collision data but I assume Dusk currently just puts all the triangles into a collision mesh

[honest stag]

ok yeah that makes more sense

[ancient depot]

The lag spike is likely not caused by that though

There are... a lot of inefficiencies in the current build

[honest stag]

was wondering about that too

[ancient depot]

on a modern GPU it's usually more efficient to just render the whole map

modern GPUs like static data

[crimson patrol]

I'm gonna guess dusk loads the battery array of explosive barrels and teleporters under the map

[lament ore]

unless your maps are ridiculously high detailed (like hundreds of thousands of triangles or millions) it's very unlikely

[lament ore]

also this

[honest stag]

it's
um

i've seen his map

[lament ore]

uh oh

[honest stag]

it's fucking massive and very detailed

[ancient depot]

is it ad_sepulcher tier

[lament ore]

still it probably wouldn't necessarily benefit from utilization of the bsp tree

[honest stag]

would you kindly boast the map my man

[crimson patrol]

Specifically the bridge part that has a fucking landfill of entities

[ancient depot]

this is ad_sepulcher's main map mesh

[honest stag]

0h DEAD GOD

dear

wtf

[lament ore]

by far the slowest part of rendering things is buffering data. modern gpus have more than enough VRAM to just hold millions of triangles in VRAM

oh my

[ancient depot]

on that note, ad_sepulcher loads in around a second or two on my PC now

[lament ore]

how the hell does he even open that in any Hammer-like editor

[honest stag]

is it in the default arcane dimensions?

[ancient depot]

just to put into perspective how slow the old SDK code is

[honest stag]

because i will try to load it if it is

[ancient depot]

ad_sepulcher used to take several minutes to load

mostly due to lightmap atlasing time

[lament ore]

Did he make that in Trenchbroom? I honestly can't imagine opening that in JACK let alone Hammer lmao

[crimson patrol]

[ancient depot]

I wrote my own texture packer to replace Unity's and now the atlasing is only a fraction of the load time

[honest stag]

im downloading and trying it out on my crappy laptop
let's goooo

[ancient depot]

ad_sepulcher is a separate map from main ad

it's like an addon

[honest stag]

ye im downloading it rn

[ancient depot]

and it requires its own build of Quakespasm (or at least, it did at the time) because the map is so huge it goes past the engine limits

[honest stag]

oh jesus

i hope i can run it

[ancient depot]

I use it to benchmark things in the SDK

because it's like the most complex map out of anything we support lmao

[lament ore]

why the hell is it so huge did he model a bunch of trees in the editor

[ancient depot]

it's just ridiculously detailed

[lament ore]

cripes

[honest stag]

ok wow it loaded almost instantly

[ancient depot]

like here it is without textures

[honest stag]

and i have my browser open

[ancient depot]

it's MASSIVE

[crimson patrol]

JESUS

[honest stag]

holy fucking shit

[ancient depot]

I'm pretty sure even quakemash is smaller

(every quake 1 map combined)

[lament ore]

I feel like this is some sort of war crime

[crimson patrol]

How many fucking rooms are there

[honest stag]

this must have taken AGES to make

im playing it right now

[crimson patrol]

I'll be back in like 6 hours

Cyall

[honest stag]

that's a long piss

[ancient depot]

here's quakemash

hard to judge since ad_sepulcher is very bunched up

but file size wise, ad_sepulcher is nearly 2x as large

[honest stag]

absoluetely insane

it can take me up to a month to make a small shitty map

and that's when i have free time

cant even begin to imagine how long it must have taken

[sleek ore]

i need to play quakemash

https://github.com/hemebond/quakemash/releases/tag/v0.7

[honest stag]

how tf do they handle keys

[sleek ore]

doommash when hm

[ancient depot]

already exists

[lament ore]

If it's anything like the Doom in one map mod, they changed the keys to switches for specific doors

[ancient depot]

it might include its own progs.dat

so it can take keys away etc when needed

[lament ore]

o nice didn't know that was a thing in Quake

[honest stag]

makes sense

man

[ancient depot]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SaRdQdW-Ik

this is even cooler

[honest stag]

the fucking compiling of that quake map honestly kind of scares me

[ancient depot]

the tool that does it loads Source engine maps so you can do this with HL2 as well

the compiling doesn't scare me, the lightmapping time does

[lament ore]

wasn't there something with the HL2 in one map thing where it was like "wait a minute we need to add a massive bridge to the coast otherwise it just appears out of nowhere" lol

[honest stag]

that's what i meant lol

it's always the light that takes a g e s

[sleek ore]

doom one?

[honest stag]

and he used soft lights too

[sleek ore]

its different from vanilla doom, adding some stuff

[lament ore]

OpenCL/Cuda accelerated RAD WHEN

[ancient depot]

yeah, look up the doom compile project

I think it's dead now but they at least finished doom 1 iirc

[sleek ore]

https://www.moddb.com/games/doom-compile-project/downloads/doom-1-under-1-level

ohhh

[lament ore]

btw zombie is that ubershader project still on the backburner?

[ancient depot]

yes, I'm not even sure if I'll go through with that lol

it's an insane idea to solve a problem that shouldn't exist

I might do something on a MUCH smaller scale to support quake 3 material definitions though

[lament ore]

Honestly, if you just provide a nice library of relatively flexible shaders, that's probably more than enough for modding tools

[ancient depot]

yeah

[lament ore]

and then if/when source eventually gets released it'll be easy enough to add in shaders there

[ancient depot]

even without that, there are ways we could let people add shaders through asset bundles or whatever

as much as I hate those

[lament ore]

ugh god asset bundles

Unity really isn't the best engine for mod support

[ancient depot]

Out of the major engines it is

[lament ore]

Yea I was just typing Unreal is even worse

[ancient depot]

lmao

[lament ore]

[ancient depot]

I've ranted so much about Unreal with regard to mod support that I couldn't stomach doing it again

[lament ore]

also it's a shame because unity USED to support runtime shader compilation, albeit probably unintentionally

http://kylehalladay.com/blog/tutorial/bestof/2014/01/12/Runtime-Shader-Compilation-Unity.html

back in Unity 4 you could do new Material({shader_code_here});

[ancient depot]

It was very limited and only supported certain types of shaders

[lament ore]

Oh really? I thought it supported p much anything GLSL

[ancient depot]

I don't remember the specifics

but I know it had limitations that made it unsuitable for a lot of cases

[lament ore]

eh doesn't matter, it's long been deprecated and removed

[ancient depot]

You can still sort of hack in runtime shader compilation

but it's so much work

You need to invoke the Unity shader compiler (which requires IPC to interface with) and then compile the shader

then generate an asset bundle in-memory with the shader

and load it through that

[lament ore]

yea I mean realistically how many Half-Life 2 mods, which do support custom shaders, actually use custom shaders

almost none of them

[ancient depot]

yeah exactly

[lament ore]

Given, though, HL2 had a pretty nice library of shaders to choose from to start with

[ancient depot]

I ultimately decided that if someone wants custom shaders, a better approach might be to ask them what exactly they want to do

and just offer that built in

[lament ore]

yea p much

although ubershaders are totally one of those projects that are just so insane you want to do it just because lol

[ancient depot]

the structure of the SDK would let us then give that user a dev build while they waited for the update to come out proper

since we don't have to distribute actual game files

[lament ore]

yee

wouldn't be worth the effort but it would be cool to see some kind of blender cycles node editor type of thing

i.e. a bunch of flexible built-in shaders that can be combined in unique ways with a visual scripting sort of thing

[ancient depot]

I just want to see a new shader language to replace GLSL/HLSL

something a bit more modular

[lament ore]

LOL wouldn't that be nice yeah

[ancient depot]

Like imagine how much nicer it'd be if I could just "override" a shader's function for sampling the lightmap or whatever

and then it'd compile to the equivalent of doing it manually

[lament ore]

would be nice if nvidia stopped being pricks about open source tech they didn't produce themselves. even if AMD or someone else came out with a better way to do shaders, nvidia would just have to do their own and then you'd have to support both

[ancient depot]

Not if it just compiled to SPIR-V or something

The GPU manufacturers wouldn't even be part of the process

[lament ore]

oh interesting never heard of that. I'm not as well versed in shader tech

[ancient depot]

SPIR-V is basically a bytecode format for shaders

It's what Vulkan uses

[lament ore]

ahh I see

[ancient depot]

It replaces the antiquated concept that OpenGL had where you submitted shader source code to the API

[lament ore]

the extent of my graphics programming knowledge pretty much starts and ends with N64 microcode

[ancient depot]

Which required drivers to have their own parsers, which meant you'd have driver-specific bugs from parsing shaders

but now the actual compilation happens in software and you pass the binary along

[lament ore]

nice nice

[ancient depot]

You can also now just use SPIR-V for everything because there are cross compilers for it

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Cross

[lament ore]

I briefly dabbled with Vulkan before getting distracted so I somewhat knew of this but not the name of it

ooo nice

[ancient depot]

Not that SPIR-V is perfect or anything, but it's a MASSIVE improvement over just submitting shader sources

[lament ore]

SPIRV must be pretty extensive if you can produce readable GLSL and etc from it

[ancient depot]

Yeah

[still raptor]

just throw modern gpus out, replace them with massive fpga arrays

submit shaders as bitstreams

[ancient depot]

based

[lament ore]

I was literally thinking that LOL

[still raptor]

highly performant

completely independent

replicatable regardless of mfg

runtime configurable

[lament ore]

but imagine how much worse crypto miners would be if GPUs were just ultra powerful FPGAs

[still raptor]

probably less so?

[ancient depot]

but yeah speaking of SPIR-V, the ubershader idea was to implement SPIR-V in a shader

[still raptor]

thats why they already buy ASICs

[ancient depot]

since a SPIR-V module can actually be sent pretty easily as a texture, since they're just a binary file filled with nothing but 32-bit integers

[still raptor]

god shit like that always reminds me of that one dudes project where he encoded time into textures

[lament ore]

that reminds me of when I was converting various elements of opengl framebuffers into textures so I could composite two separate opengl contexts together in a highly cursed application lmao

[still raptor]

absolutely based

[gritty forge]

how do I remove the only x to go text on counters again?

is it a spawnflag

[honest stag]

i dont think you can

[gritty forge]

I was told you can

before

[honest stag]

check the spawnflags i guess

but i dont rmemeber that being a thing

i hope im wrong

[gritty forge]

Someone said to me that I can remove it for my arena with the enemies

[honest stag]

@gritty forge i've checked the quake wiki and it says spawnflag 1 should do it
but i don't know if it works in dusk

[gritty forge]

will try it

[honest stag]

i swear i tried to do that same thing before and couldnt

but it's neat to know if it works

[ancient depot]

the no message flag is implemented, yeah

[honest stag]

wow i really missed out then

[karmic kestrel]

Are there doom styled mods for dusk?

I’d like to jam out to Andrews other works.

[honest stag]

none that i'm aware of

[karmic kestrel]

Darn.

[honest stag]

good change to be the first

[karmic kestrel]

I like the Brutal Doom music stuff.

[honest stag]

oh wait actually there is a recreating of E1M1 from doom 2

recreation*

but it's old

[karmic kestrel]

interesting

It’ll be short tho.

[honest stag]

yea

[crimson patrol]

There is also doosk

[karmic kestrel]

Isn’t that for doom 2 tho?

[honest stag]

ye

[karmic kestrel]

I forgot

Darn

[crimson patrol]

DOOM IS DOOM

[karmic kestrel]

Dusk is Dusk

Dusk is just quake

[crimson patrol]

I consider doom 2 not all that different from 1

[karmic kestrel]

but you shoot cultists

yeah

Just extra weapons and a couple more monsters

doom 2 is more of an addon than a sequel

[gritty forge]

hohoho booy

I love this new arena

so excited to see people play it

[crimson patrol]

cant wait to see

[lament ore]

Just realized something - in both Quake and HL, mdl props inserted into maps don't have collision, do they?

If that's the case then my utility inserting mdls with collisions could actually have utility for quake and hl as well

for more advanced mesh-based maps

hell this could even be a really janky way to have mesh-based terrains in HL1 lmao

[gritty forge]

kinda lost motivation for my 2nd map before but now it's completely back

I was planning to just do some small finalizing touches and now I'm like rebalancing and fixing a bunch of errors and adding more cool stuff

is fun

[ancient depot]

Man, d1_trainstation_01 looks so messed up without all of the trains and entities around

[honest stag]

cursed image

this is giving me some liminal space shit vibes

[gritty forge]

does func_detail actually improve performance

[honest stag]

i don't think so

well

considering we don't have VIS support

but hey that's just a guess

[ancient depot]

I believe it should help in some form

[gritty forge]

aight

why is it that my level appears a bit jittery when I move my mouse even though it says ~100fps

[ancient depot]

before the update I might throw out a little BSP viewer or something for testing the expected performance of the patch

simple answer is that the public build has a lot of missing optimizations

[gritty forge]

so its the SDK?

[ancient depot]

chances are the issue isn't your map or your pc, it's the sdk

yeah

[gritty forge]

anything I can do to improve it a bit for now?

I dont use candles

lol

(by the way)

[honest stag]

fucking candles god

[ancient depot]

Probably not, the bottlenecks aren't really solvable from the user end

[honest stag]

look so good but chug so bad

[gritty forge]

agreed

yeah personally I can't imagine how awesome it would be to have particles and fog

[honest stag]

too awesome to explain

[gritty forge]

whole new dimension of immersion

[honest stag]

yup

[gritty forge]

though I will say, for being a huge map with 125 enemies my level has really good performance lol

80-140fps on my pc

though I have a good gpu

[honest stag]

so correct me if im wrong here
but i THINK enemies with particle effects affect performance more than those without them

like mages

[gritty forge]

yes

It does

[ancient depot]

they do, yeah

[gritty forge]

I reduced the amount of mages for that reason

[honest stag]

but also

[gritty forge]

in favour of soldiers mostly

[honest stag]

the low spec mode should turn them off anyway right?

[ancient depot]

it should, but for all we know custom maps might not work with it somehow

[honest stag]

pretty sure it does considering i use it all the time

crappy laptop and all

[ancient depot]

With the new SDK update you might not even need to use it

It's on track to running better than the base game

[honest stag]

what a blessing that would be wow

[gritty forge]

oh wowie

thats awesome

[ancient depot]

I've been thinking about testing vis support for the update after it, too

the new codebase makes it WAY easier to do

I mean, the fact that ad_sepulcher loads in like 2 seconds now should say it all lol

[tepid python]

will maps be broken after said update

[ancient depot]

Some will, but there's an automatic mod updater tool in the works

So you can just run your mod through that and release a new version

[tepid python]

dope

[gritty forge]

what will be broken in terms of old maps? Or is that case by case

[ancient depot]

For the most part just some entities

Properties being renamed etc

[gritty forge]

cause if there are specific things I'd like to avoid doing those things for the sake of futureproofing

[ancient depot]

The biggest break will be texture, model, etc mods

Since all the assets have been reorganized

[gritty forge]

ah

Guess I will avoid using textures and entities from now on

[ancient depot]

lmao

[ancient depot]

lmao

hey you can't leave out finally fixing the fucking model/sound/etc replacements

[honest stag]

god i can't wait

rip the bandaid off

[gritty forge]

the what

[honest stag]

the new

[gritty forge]

you mean that some models only make sounds the first time you start the map when booting the SDK?

[ancient depot]

That too

[gritty forge]

once particles come out someone is going to have to physically restrain me otherwise I might just overuse them and create a black hole somehow

[honest stag]

hl2 spark effect x10000

[gritty forge]

I just want to add flies and electricity for substations and shit

gosh

flies on gore textures

and STINK CLOUDS IN BATHROOMS

[honest stag]

cigarette smoke

fugggg

[ancient depot]

exposing the campaign's particle effects is pretty easy

but custom particle effects will be annoying

mostly because I don't even know how I want that to work

[gritty forge]

I mean, couldn't you theoretically make some kind of "node" like the light nodes for example, then link a texture like you would link music to a changemusic trigger for it and then set things like particle count, width, height etc manually inside said node

you wouldn't see particles in the editor but it would be a pretty good way to do it I think

[ancient depot]

Yeah but that wouldn't allow for the level of customization that we could provide with Unity particles

[gritty forge]

that is probably very true

it would be images appearing

[ancient depot]

I was thinking maybe having a json file that defines a particle effect, and then making a separate particle editor program

could be something generic enough for other games to use too

[gritty forge]

idk how unity operates but can't you like make the particles and get a particle file via unity and then use it?

instead of making a dedicated editor I mean

[ancient depot]

Unfortunately it isn't that simple, and even then I wouldn't want to require people to install Unity just to make particles

[gritty forge]

fair enough

will the sdk update be out by this year?

[ancient depot]

That's the plan

[gritty forge]

pog

[ancient depot]

It was meant to be out a while ago but some personal stuff happened which slowed things down a bit

[gritty forge]

Ah, I see

Well the current one works well enough for now

[karmic kestrel]

Melee is shit in Dusk

[ancient depot]

I dunno if I'd go that far

[karmic kestrel]

Besides the sword

[gritty forge]

why

[karmic kestrel]

The sickles aren’t good in later missions lol

[gritty forge]

well it is your "last resort" weapon

[karmic kestrel]

Its pointless to use on duskmare

[ancient depot]

The sickles are extremely useful because they can deflect projectiles

[gritty forge]

so I guess it is just for when you're out of ammo

you can deflect projectiles

[karmic kestrel]

Oh yeah

[ancient depot]

The sword can deflect projectiles but it requires armor

[karmic kestrel]

Forgot about that

but it aint good for attacking enemies

[ancient depot]

Yeah it's more of a defensive weapon

[karmic kestrel]

i love the sword charge

[gritty forge]

you know... A meathook for the SSG would be insane for dusk

as an avid doom eternal enjoyer

[karmic kestrel]

oh yes

Would fit in it’s combat style.

[gritty forge]

maybe throw off some balancing but like it would be fun as hell

[karmic kestrel]

I’m tired of using the jump pads

[gritty forge]

I like jump pad

jump pad go boing

[karmic kestrel]

Bounce

[gritty forge]

Can't wait for Dusk ™️ The Zombie Rewrite ™️ Version 16.3.4

[gritty forge]

no

the way func_detail & it's variants works is that it improves on compiling time, not performance

in most situations

plus its dusk not quake so i doubt there's any way it'd improve performance

if you wanna go insane use func_detail on everything that isn't necessary for sealing, the Hammer way

it'll cause overdraw on lighting but it'll give the compiler a little break

LETS FUCKING GO

see yall in 6 months

well I mean we're not even half way thru the year yet

[sour hollow]

we're gettin there

[gritty forge]

whats another half of a year

[lament ore]

Per my understanding the point of func_detail is to stop the func_detail entity from splitting the BSP tree around it, meaning potentially less faces to render and a more efficient BSP tree. Obviously the latter doesn't matter in Dusk (currently) but the former might help in some cases. It's also just good practice.

https://i.imgur.com/lOFqQNN.png

https://i.imgur.com/il5W6IM.png

the bottom case is, as you may imagine, relatively unideal for the BSP tree

this is also why func_detail helps with compile times

again just good practice to do and probably worth it if only for the compile times

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/w/images/8/81/World-vs-detail.png

func_detail on the right, world brush on the left

[frigid cypress]

Is that a different level editor?

than trenchbroom?

[honest stag]

And now imagine making a very intricate detail onject like a small gun from a dozen brushes and not making it a func detail

Throughout the entire map

I did that and bitched about the compile times

[gritty forge]

i think it's hammer

func_detail is used liberally there

also, found some very good stuff on level design

https://book.leveldesignbook.com/introduction

first words has "starcraft" and "halo" so you know its worth a read

now i go back to recording blocking out that otex map

[lament ore]

semi-related it WOULD be nice if bsp generation was multithreaded

I think you could do it where each time the tree is split you could have the main thread continue down the left branch and optionally a new thread continue down the right branch

and just do that for an arbitrary number of splits to start an arbitrary number of threads to handle bsp tree generation

[gritty forge]

ahhh feels gud to actually be able to place objects & props correctly in dusk maps

feels real good

[lament ore]

I can't believe all this time we just had to ask the right person for the models

[honest stag]

Porting them wasnt easy though

Well it was easy but super tedious

[lament ore]

what tools were you using?

[honest stag]

Blender .obj exporter, noesis to adjust scale and port into .mdl

[lament ore]

oh jeez

yeah no I see why it took you a while

[honest stag]

And rotations were fucked 80% of the time

Like blender would export and turn thd model 90 degrees

[lament ore]

My workflow would've mostly just been export smd from blender -> use a generate qc to compile -> mdl done

[honest stag]

And noesis would flip it

[lament ore]

yeah that's fixed with the proper blender SMD exporter

I remember you mentioned using an MDL exporter which is not what ya wanna use generally

[honest stag]

It was fucked but i dont remember why

[lament ore]

did noesis generate compiled MDLs for you or SMDs?

[honest stag]

Mdls

[lament ore]

yeah, so how MDLs work is they're not like OBJs or FBX files or whatever

the equivalent to obj/fbx/whatever in this workflow is the smd file

which is the actual mesh and animations and whatever

[honest stag]

Noesis loads smds?

[lament ore]

probably but I wouldn't use noesis here, no point

you compile the MDL by having the SMDs and textures and then using a qc file to tell the mdl compiler how to make an mdl from the smds

so all the issues you had with the models would've been fixed basically automatically by exporting proper SMDs from Blender then using a proper qc file

if you decompile an mdl you can check out the smds and a generated qc to recompile it

what you were doing basically was letting blender or noesis generated a compiled MDL for you, and they were malformed because it didn't know how to handle what you were giving it properly. that would be something you define in a qc file

traditionally this is done with the classic command line tools but there's a great all-in-one tool someone made for HL1 and HL2 MDLs (maybe quake too?)

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/CrowbarTool

OOOO there was a crowbar update as recently as december 2020 hell yeah

[honest stag]

Fuck

[lament ore]

Yeah I hate to say it but that process could've been mostly automated sorry bud

[gritty forge]

GOD DAMN

F

[honest stag]

Oh well i knew that it could be kibda automated but

[lament ore]

That's why I was so eager to get my hands on the models I could've pumped out the MDLs in like a day or two cuz I already have a whole workflow for Blender -> Half-Life MDLs set up

[honest stag]

A lot of objects were of different size and rotation from tge start, adjusted afterwards in unity

Some were .obj from tge start, some were .blend that zom gave me, some i had to rip from the game and had tgeir own problems

[lament ore]

So here's an example of a really simple qc file to compile an mdl with a single "body" (i.e. smd file). It's just a soda can

You can define things like rotation, scale, position, etc from it

so you would've only had to open the model in blender then export it to smd once

and then all the adjustments could've been done in the qc

then you just click "compile" in crowbar or what have you and then you have an MDL with the adjustments

[honest stag]

Considering my non existent knowledge of qc - that was way beyond me

And i was quick enough with my way anyway

[lament ore]

yea tru but it's probably worth learning for when custom model support is a thing

[honest stag]

Eh i already port them witgout much trouble with the .iqm exporter

Still should learn thus stuff

This*

[lament ore]

for simple models it's p trivial. you could just adjust that can qc to pretty much any static model really. MDL decompilation through crowbar is really good so it's super helpful for referencing qc files

highly recommend crowbar

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/QC_Commands

you can adjust origin of the model and whatnot too

Given all my knowledge is based on Half-Life MDLs but Quake MDLs should be mostly the same apart from animation stuff

once you start wanting to do animated stuff or stuff with different skins and etc etc you can't rely on noesis or blender or what have you to automatically export a working MDL for ya

[honest stag]

So uh forgive me if this is a dumb thing to say but

Would any of this mdl stuff be useful to me considering we use iqm

[lament ore]

OH WAIT iqm!

[honest stag]

For dusk models

[lament ore]

We have iqm support now?

that's pretty pog

[honest stag]

Its the only format dusk suppoerted for custon models yea

[lament ore]

For anything mapping related both Trenchbroom and JACK do not yet support iqm so MDLs are preferred there

otherwise you won't be able to preview the model in the editor

[honest stag]

Yea i figured as much bu

[lament ore]

yeah that's up to you whether or not it's worth pursuing learning lul

[honest stag]

Zom said hell make a custom fgd tool that just ports them

The custom models into the editor

[lament ore]

huh interesting

[honest stag]

Basically automate the process ll

So uh phew no learning for me today

[lament ore]

At one point I considered forking Sledge to just add iqm support but I never went through with it, partially because I prefer JACK to sledge anyway

JACK is closed source and doesn't get updates anymore unfortunately

[honest stag]

Thank fuck the j.a.c.k "enthusiast" got muted lmao

[lament ore]

oh god was someone being annoying about it lmao

[honest stag]

Uhhhhhhh well

He was here for like a week, amd posted "J.A.C.K > trenchbroom" over 20 times while shitting all over tb because he spemt 10 minutes on it, refused to look up how to use it and uh yeah

[lament ore]

lmfao nice

yeah I'll fully admit I did exactly that and that's why I don't use TB but like I don't care if other people use TB lmao

I use JACK because I'm used to Hammer and JACK is just better Hammer

[honest stag]

Thats fine by me, at least you dont smear modders for trying to learn something

[lament ore]

yea nah people should use what they want

and I'll fully admit TB is probably better for beginners

Hammer paradigms are etched into my brain stem so I can never leave

I really want to give Source 2 Hammer a try I hear it's a treat

wonder if we'll get Source 2 BSP support

half the reason I bought Half-Life Alyx was just for the sdk

[gritty forge]

good

[ancient depot]

IQM is great except for its animation support which is disappointingly lackluster