Attn Mod Teams: what do you need? suggestions thread.

(ayatollah) #101

So what you are saying that people like Bani, who have put a lot of effort into their mods, probably more than was put into TC:E due to the constant readjustments over a 3 year period. Someone who has gained respect in this community and having gotten his mod as the recognised version on all Clan leagues and tournaments. Someone who has built up a team who work really hard in helping people on their forums, and keeps abreast of all security issues. You are saying someone like this doesn’t deserve the respect of your Total Conversion crew?!

Do us all a favour mate and leave this place, you obviously know nothing about what you speak, and if you were wishing to push this “idea” you would have first checked out W:ET and checked what the modding community was like before spouting your inane waffle.

EDIT: Just read your reply above, and my point still stands. You know nothing about the W:ET modding community and nothing about ET:QW. This game will be like W:ET in the fact that everyone will the support from SD in producing quality mods. Bani I’m sure will receive as much as anyone else, if he is willing to put his effort back into another mod, and he won’t worry about who is getting more support. If anyone is to make it, everyone receives the same support. Thats the why SD became a proper company, and thats the legacy they will want to remain.

(jaybird) #102

I think the point is lost here. Perhaps we should just leave our suggestions and let SD sort through them?

(ayatollah) #103

You are right there was no point from Aratta, except “bigging up” his buddy. This conversation should end here.

NOTE: I apologise to everyone for my vitriol.

(Aratta) #104

I havent said that. Either you are confused or you want to believe that.

No I havent said that. I have checked again and havent found that statement you say that I made.

Well the only one that has problems getting things straight so far is you I’m afraid.

Except that its more like Battlefield meeting quake4 instead of a WW2 arcade shooter :lol:

(ayatollah) #105

Proves my point really…

(Mr.Mxyzptlk) #106

You guys all crack me up :lol:

Lookie here, SD has asked us what mod makers need. This thread is just not the place to hash out, argue, second guess, demoralize or question one modder’s request over another. I just wish folks could have stayed on point in what I consider to be a very important thread/opportunity to be heard by SD at this stage of their release cycle.

NUFF SAID :stuck_out_tongue:

(ayatollah) #107

I agree with you and don’t like the way the thread has been brought off track. I just fail to see how Aratta’s suggestions help anyone other than the TC:E guys. There is no foundation to work off and no helpful insights for SD.

I am leaving it there, now back to the topic.

(Aratta) #108

Proves my point really…[/quote]

:lol: You have not played QW yet you seem to know its exactly like ET even tho its obviously a lot different. Preposterous.
Dude I’m not surprised you have not noticed but QW bears a lot more resemblence to a BF type game than ET. Even COD is closer to ET than QW is.
ET is played on small maps with ww2 foot soldiers using small arms.
QW is a futuristic outdoor game with huge maps, command centers, tons of buildings and construction objects as well as multiple combat vehicles with gargantuan weapons with laser beams and what not.

Another preposterous heap of crap. You might want to learn to read.
Even if that statement was true I might point out as everyone can see that SD also got a lot of special attention from idSoftware back in the day…they still do.

(mortis) #109

Down, boys.

We can all play in the sandbox.

I’m more interested in mod tools than arguments.

(jaybird) #110

I’m more interested in mod tools than arguments.

Indeed.

(escapedturkey) #111

Hrm, can’t delete this post.

(escapedturkey) #112

Please make it so the following isn’t needed for url redirect:

set_serverDlTable “*”

That way it automatically scans for all needed files in a location and the only lines needed are something like:

net_serverdownload “2”
net_serverDlBaseURL “http://q4files.escapedturkey.net/quake4/pk4s/”

We, at TurkeyFiles, plan on supporting ET:QW as soon as it comes out.

http://turkeyfiles.escapedturkey.net/

We hope there will be a Linux server release for the game too.

Thank you. 8)

(kamikazee) #113

Imo this is no question about mod help, but a server function request…

Why isn’t there a thread for just that yet?

(escapedturkey) #114

Sorry, I didn’t know where else to ask. :?

(Pytox) #115

Will there be a render viewer delevired with it? :smiley:

(Mordenkainen) #116

I’ve posted some of these a while ago. Most of these suggestions deal with making life a little easier. I’m primarily a mapper but in these last two Quake 4 maps I’ve worked on, I’ve probably spent as much time working with brushes and patches as I did messing with material entries, writing script, generating mipmaps, etc. Personally, I’m always looking for ways to save me time when doing these peripheral tasks (for a level designer) allowing me to dedicate to actually building structures.

  1. Include plenty of profiling tools. Ever since Raven released the Debug HUDs for Quake 4 I’ve never wanted to go back and build levels for D3. The ability to see where the bottleneck lies (game logic, renderer, etc.) is invaluable and so is the warning indicator whenever poly/batch/shadow counts go over the limit. Another one is the r_showbatchsize CVar which has saved me a huge amount of time hunting for spots where I need to optimise. This is a big one in my book.

  2. PK4 files should be better organised. The retail version of Q4 came with 12 PK4 files (excluding the game.dll and localisation PK4s). After four patches we’re on 20. Since whenever we want to learn to do something we have to hunt down the material entry or map that id/Raven produced it’s a royal pain having to open 20 PK4s to find it (because patches might have replaced the originals). Another point I’d like to make here is to put all assets that are unlikely to be changed in a patch (ROQs, TGAs, DDS, WAVs, OOGs, etc.) in the first PAK files and group all the .DEF/.MTR/etc. in a single PK4 later in the PK4 hierarchy so they’re easier to find. Again in Q4 if I want to check a material guide I have to go to “pak001” but if I want a material proper I have to go to “pak002”. Another thing I’d like to ask is to refrain from adding a new PK4 in every patch. Ideally, the game would ship on 10 PK4s and then the first patch would add a single “patch.pk4” or whatever and subsequent patches would simply replace this file. Whenever this file reached 50 megs or similar only then would a new “patch2.PK4” be introduced. In Q4, what I end up doing is having a separate install where all the \base\PK4 files are extracted because it’s simply maddening to scan 20 pk4s looking for one specific entry in one specific file.

  3. Speaking of which, it’s highly frustrating looking for a decal material entry in “decals.mtr” only to find it in “nexus.mtr”. :expressionless: Since the engine doesn’t enforce entry names simply looking it up in the surface inspector doesn’t help much.

  4. Please remove/comment out any invalid or deprecated materials/defs/tables, etc. I’d be happy with this but if you have the time I think an audit tool would be of great help to modders which often don’t have a guy whose sole responsibility is asset management. This tool would parse material files, sound shaders, entity definitions, etc. and scan the directory structure to see if any referenced TGAs, DDS, WAVs, LWO, etc. are missing; and comment these out if so. It could then parse the world file to see if material entries are even used by the game’s assets at all or if the game is using any of the invalid materials. I know you guys talked about cleaning up the material entries after the game ships but doing so will only exarcebate the above PK4 problem and this auditing tool would really help out modders.

  5. Whenever I have to write a map script I use Notepad. The engine’s built-in “script editor” is basically Notepad with a curly bracket checker. You guys use Visual Studio for building the game so it’s a bit daunting having to start a brand new script in Notepad. Other engines provide syntax highlighting and a proper offline compiler (at least). What I’d really like to see is a script editor built-into Worldedit and after we hit “compile” it would scan the map to see if every entity we reference in the script is actually present in the map, for instance. You wouldn’t believe the number of times I save a script, have to launch the game (and map) and only to be kicked out because “entity doesn’t not exist” when it’s a trivial check to add to a compiler. Since I use Visual Studio and Eclipse for my main programming tasks perhaps I’m a bit spoilt by them but I don’t think it’s too much to ask that IDEs nowadays have at least the above features; if you want to add autocomplete even better! :wink:

  6. Worldedit with particle preview. In Q4 we can only place FuncFX entities but we have to go in the game and select the actual particle which makes it clear the Raven guys use dual monitors. This isn’t always possible for modders and personally I’d rather do all my editing from the level editor and only polish in game. Similarly, if you still have the Reverb Editor, could you please make it available from inside Worldedit? I’d prefer to edit an “AreaInfo” entity with a reverb key/val than having to fly through the map switching reverb types on the other monitor/resizing game window and all that nuisance.

  7. Polycount and texture memory usage on asset viewer. Sometimes I’m looking for a model to add to my map but I have no clear idea if this particular chair is more complex than that other one and often have to go inside the game and profile it. It would help quite a bit to make these decisions earlier on when we’re selecting assets to add.

  8. Separate editor settings from game settings. Having to set r_brightness to 0 every time I want to start the editor and back to the default 1.2 (in Q4) whenever I want to test a map is messy. Right now I’m forced to use two shortcuts for every mod folder when this could be halved by doing this separation.

  9. If I’m not mistaken you guys don’t have any terrain creation tools and modders have to produce the terrain model somewhere else and import it. I’d really like to see at least a heightmap to model importer in Worldedit because that way we could create a simple heightmap, in Paint if need be, just for testing and once the map is well underway we could model the final terrain. This heightmap importer would just need to know x,y dimensions of the final terrain, height scale and perhaps subdivision complexity. Other game engines like UE3 come with actual terrain editors so I think even a heightmap importer would go a long way.

Thank you.

(jRAD) #117
  1. Include plenty of profiling tools.

We have plenty of useful profiling cvars, though they’re not integrated with a debug GUI. Some draw their own graphs, etc on-screen.

  1. PK4 files should be better organised.

I’m not familiar with how pk4 organization is carried out.

  1. Speaking of which, it’s highly frustrating looking for a decal material entry in “decals.mtr” only to find it in “nexus.mtr”.

In editWorld you can right click on a material and choose “view” or “view file.” “View” opens the material in a small built-in text viewer. “View file” opens the file that contains the material in your associated editor (assuming you’ve extracted the file, of course.)

  1. Please remove/comment out any invalid or deprecated materials/defs/tables, etc.

Materials/soundshaders that reference missing images/sounds will be defaulted, and spew a warning to the console (ie, we shouldn’t be shipping with any broken materials, but it’s possible we’ll be shipping with some unused defs, etc.)

  1. Whenever I have to write a map script I use Notepad.

We don’t have a built-in script editor; designers use whatever text editor tickles their fancy.

  1. Worldedit with particle preview.

This is supported.

  1. Polycount and texture memory usage on asset viewer.

Good idea!

8 ) Separate editor settings from game settings.

Way ahead of you. :slight_smile:

  1. I’d really like to see at least a heightmap to model importer in Worldedit…

That could be useful, agreed. :tapir:

(kamikazee) #118

Syntax highlighting is possible if you use an editor supporting it. Free editors like Crimsoneditor exist, it’s only a matter of making the highlight files.

The compiler… You ARE right that it’s a hassle to load, get kicked out, change the script and reload.
Now, there is one thing: in W:ET you could minimize the game, change the script, switch back and then run the map again. (All in unpure mode) So a game minimizer could at least ease this process, if possible from the game. (Eg. only in testmode.)

Back to the compiler: writing such a program is not so easy as it may seem… but it may work out using yacc and bison. (Both handle a few required steps for a compiler.)

(RR2DO2) #119

Run in windowed mode, reloadScript (works in D3 too afaik).

(airon) #120

Sound playback in the editor, if this isn’t already done.

A few months back, a friend who creates Unreal maps, showed me the Unreal editor. This thing probably shaves days from the time blown on edit/compile/test/edit/ cycles. Hearing sound entities play when in the map editor just saves boatloads of time. WhatYouHearIsWhatYouGet kind of thing please.

This should go for scripts able to trigger sounds with timecode and all. Sequences built with scripts are so much more interesting than having to toss flexibility out the door. Perhaps a tracker-style sequence editor even.(Protracker kind of enviroment would be enough).